This is an Open Thread:

A crowd has gathered in black and white

Arms entwined, the chosen few

The newspaper says, says

Say it’s true, it’s true…

And we can break through

Monday’s Headlines: For Black Superdelegates, Pressure to Back Obama: Oil exploration sought in Calif. national monument: Nato fears over Dutch Islam film: Israeli army pulls back from Gaza: Four kisses, then the band played: the day former foes became friends: Hugo Chavez moves his tanks to border as regional war looms: Gunmen in uniform kill 8 at pool hall: Asian Stocks and Dollar Fall Sharply: North Korea winter threatens food supply: In South Africa, a racist video’s fallout

Vienna Meeting on Arms Data Reignites Iran Nuclear Debate

Last Monday, the chief United Nations nuclear inspector gathered ambassadors and experts from dozens of nations in a boardroom high above the Danube in Vienna and laid out a trove of evidence that he said raised new questions about whether Iran had tried to design an atom bomb.

For more than two hours, representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency were riveted by documents, sketches and even a video that appeared to have come from Iran’s own military laboratories. The inspector said they showed work “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon,” according to notes taken by diplomats.

USA

For Black Superdelegates, Pressure to Back Obama

CLEVELAND — Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones doesn’t care to be lectured about her choice in the Democratic presidential race.

The 58-year-old congresswoman from Ohio has emerged as one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most outspoken black supporters, the rare African American politician willing to publicly question Sen. Barack Obama’s Russia’s president-elect, Dmitry Medvedev, last night hinted at the formidable power his patron and predecessor, Vladimir Putin, would continue to wield, indicating that the outgoing leader would help to shape a new government and Kremlin line-up, and promising a “direct continuation” of his mentor’s policies.

Tubbs Jones has picked apart his record in campaign conference calls and lambasted the “Harvard arrogance” of Obama backers who have demanded that African American leaders fall in behind the senator from Illinois in his quest to become the nation’s first black president.

Oil exploration sought in Calif. national monument

WASHINGTON _ A subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum has notified the Bureau of Land Management that it would like to explore for oil in a central California national monument.

John Dearing, a BLM spokesman, said the agency can do nothing to stop Vintage Production from testing for oil under the Carrizo Plain National Monument in eastern San Luis Obispo County because the company has owned the mineral rights there since before President Bill Clinton created the monument in 2001.

“Because this is a national monument, there will be environmental concerns that will have to be strongly looked at,” Dearing said. “But they have a right to access.”

The monument’s 250,000 acres are not virgin territory for drilling rigs. The monument is just over a hill from the oil fields of Kern County. There is a small amount of production already occurring in remote canyons of the monument.

Europe

Nato fears over Dutch Islam film

Nato’s secretary general says he fears the airing of a Dutch film criticising Islam will have repercussions for troops in Afghanistan.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s comments came after Afghans protested on Sunday against the film being made by far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders.

The Dutch government has warned Mr Wilders that the film will damage Dutch political and economic interests.

Mr Wilders says the film is about the Koran but has given few details.

In the past, he has called for the Koran to be banned and likened it to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Red Square concert crowd hails double act that will hold reins of power in Russia

· President-elect Medvedev to continue Putin policies

· Communist leader takes poll grievances to court

Russia’s president-elect, Dmitry Medvedev, last night hinted at the formidable power his patron and predecessor, Vladimir Putin, would continue to wield, indicating that the outgoing leader would help to shape a new government and Kremlin line-up, and promising a “direct continuation” of his mentor’s policies.

Giving the country a glimpse of the double act that will now hold the reins of power, the two men appeared last night at a triumphal Red Square pop concert, milking Medvedev’s easy election victory in front of a crowd of thousands of cheering supporters, and heralding a seamless transition from Putin’s eight years in office.

At 42, Medvedev will become the youngest Kremlin head since Stalin. Last night he looked it, appearing on stage in leather jacket and jeans to thank the voters who gave him the same endorsement that Putin won in 2004 – around 70% of the votes.

Middle East

Israeli army pulls back from Gaza

Israeli forces today withdrew from Gaza after the heaviest fighting for decades left more than 100 people dead, a day before the arrival of the US secretary of state in the region.

The Israeli government declared it had achieved its objective of deterring Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israeli border towns. A spokesman for the Hamas armed wing declared victory and vowed it would continue the attacks.

At dawn, Gaza residents streamed out of homes after days sheltering from intense fighting. “The enemy has been defeated,” said the Hamas spokesman. A senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, said: “Gaza will always be a graveyard for the occupation forces.”

Four kisses, then the band played: the day former foes became friends

The Times was the only British newspaper to see Iraq roll out the red carpet for President Ahmadinejad of Iran

The young Iraqi girl in a white dress clutched a bouquet of flowers as she waited with a small boy in a smart suit to greet President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who began an historic visit to Iraq yesterday.

Around them the sense of occasion at the Baghdad residence of Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi President, was markedly different to any visit to the country by a British or American leader since the invasion.

A red-coated military band held final rehearsals outside the palace, once owned by one of Saddam Hussein’s sons, while a guard of honour stood to attention, rifles poised, and senior ministers assembled along a rarely seen red carpet.

Latin America

Hugo Chavez moves his tanks to border as regional war looms

President Hugo Chávez yesterday placed Venezuela on a war footing, sending thousands of troops and tanks to the border with Colombia after its neighbour killed a top rebel leader inside Ecuadorean territory.

“Mr. Defense Minister, move me 10 battalions to the border with Colombia immediately – tank battalions,” Mr Chávez boomed on his weekly television programme, Aló Presidente. He also placed the Venezuelan Air Force on standby for action.

“We do not want war”, said Mr Chávez, before adding that the slaying of rebel commander Raúl Reyes and Colombia’s incursion into Ecuadorean territory could not go unanswered. “I am putting Venezuela on alert and we will support Ecuador in any situation,” Mr Chávez said.

Gunmen in uniform kill 8 at pool hall

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – Eight people were shot dead at a billiards hall in northern Honduras on Sunday by gunmen disguised as policemen, Honduran police said.

Wearing police uniforms, six assailants fired Kalashnikov rifles and handguns from a truck parked outside a pool hall in San Pedro Sula, a city plagued by violent gangs and drug traffickers, deputy police chief Edgardo Villeda said.

Seven people were killed on the spot and an eighth died on the way to the hospital, Villeda said.

“It was cold blooded murder, the victims had no way out,” he said. “We don’t believe this was perpetrated by police, but by men who had taken our uniform.”

Asia

Asian Stocks and Dollar Fall Sharply

TOKYO – Asian stocks fell sharply and the U.S. dollar fell to levels not seen for three years against the Japanese yen on Monday, on speculation the Federal Reserve board may lower rates further to soften a possible recession. At the start of trading in Europe, most stocks were showing moderate losses.

The Nikkei 225 Stock Average slumped 610.84, or 4.49 percent to end trade at 12,992.18, the lowest close since Jan. 23. Japanese stocks have fallen approximately 15 percent since the start of the year. The Hang Seng Index was down about 3 percent in late trading; it has also declined 15 percent this year, while the CSI 300 Index has fallen 11 percent.

North Korea winter threatens food supply

SEOUL, South Korea – An abnormally dry and mild winter has hampered the growth of some crops in North Korea, state media reported Monday in a development that could exacerbate the impoverished country’s chronic food shortages.

Temperatures rarely dropped below minus 5 degrees, Kim Mun Uk, an official at the North’s Hydro-Meterological Service told the official Korean Central News Agency.

There was also scant snow or rain in the capital, Pyongyang, or in western and eastern coastal regions between mid-December and Feb. 21, the report said.

“This abnormal climate phenomenon has seriously affected the growth of autumn wheat and barley,” KCNA reported.

Africa

In South Africa, a racist video’s fallout

White students’ film degrading black employees has dredged up unresolved postapartheid problems.



JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – The video depicts white college students forcing elderly black housekeepers to crawl, drink beer, and eat food that – apparently – had been tainted with urine. Small wonder, then, that the video has caused an uproar in a society that thought it had left the harsher cruelties of racism behind.

As disciplinary hearings and even criminal investigations probe into the video and its makers, students and professors at the University of the Free State and throughout South Africa are struggling for answers on how to rebuild racial relations in an atmosphere that many describe as “poisoned.”

(bumped – promoted by buhdydharma )

You know the thing about people who rail against “political correctness” is what they really desire is the ability to be as sexist, racist, and bigoted in public as they want without having to suffer your scorn and derision making them feel like the small shabby mean spirited twits that they are.

How else do you explain this?

Why Is Obama’s Middle Name Taboo?

By NATHAN THORNBURGH, Time Magazine

Fri Feb 29, 1:50 PM ET

…

So who gets to say Hussein? At the Oscars, host Jon Stewart took innuendo about as far as it can go, saying that Barack Hussein Obama running today is like a 1940’s candidate named Gaydolph Titler. But that reference, served up to a crowd that presumably swoons for Obama, got laughs. So maybe the H-word is more like the N-word: you can say it, but only if you are an initiate. Blacks can use the N-word; Obama supporters can use the H-word.

We Scream, We Swoon.  How Dumb Can We Get?

By Charlotte Allen, The Washington Post

Sunday, March 2, 2008; Page B01

…

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

For Hillary’s Campaign, It’s Been a Class Struggle

By Linda Hirshman, The Washington Post

Sunday, March 2, 2008; Page B01

…

For the Clinton campaign, this is devastating. A year ago, chief strategist Mark Penn proclaimed that the double-X factor was going to catapult his candidate all the way to the White House. Instead, the women’s vote has fragmented. The only conclusion: American women still aren’t strategic enough to form a meaningful political movement directed at taking power. Will they ever be?

Penn was right about the importance of the women’s vote. About 57 percent of the voters in the Democratic primaries so far have been women. As of Feb. 12, Clinton had a lead of about seven percentage points over Obama among them (24 points among white women). But the Obama campaign reached out to the fair sex, following Clinton’s announcement of women-oriented programs with similar ones within a matter of weeks. I can imagine the strategists for the senator from Illinois thinking, “What’s that song in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’?” Women are fickle.

Turns out it’s true.

…

Ominously for Clinton, the feminist movement split, generating a large number of “scribbling women” all over the blogosphere describing the gender-trumping call of the Obama candidacy. …

…

Or maybe it has to do with what Pollitt expressed in a recent blog posting: “On foreign policy Obama seems more enlightened, as in less bellicose.” Educated women focusing more on foreign policy fits with what we know about women and politics. Although at every class level, women know less than men do about politics in general, they know more as their education level goes up. So it may be that foreign policy issues are more salient to women with a college degree.

Update–

Hat tip Atrios who first brought this to my attention (well, I think the Time Magazine link is unique).

• Resolved: Women Are Stupid
• I Was Wrong

He has a link later on to Laura Rosen’s assessment-

Can the Post Outlook editor promote the slurring of women (in the name of “voice”) but not other groups as something that generates lots of discussion?

Or can he commission articles to denigrate the intelligence of other racial groups as well in the same spirit of a lively and provocative debate?

What’s the Post standard on which groups can be legitimately denigrated on which page?  Let’s watch and find out.

I bet the reaction will lean towards “tsk-tsk” in next week’s ombudsman column and a hearty self congratulation from the Post to itself about generating such an important discussion about whether women are in fact dumb.

At the very least, we can hope a few of the fine Post reporters who actually do journalism will professionally humiliate Outlook editor John Pomfret and whoever else in the chain of command is responsible for this piece internally at the Post in the way they deserve.  That there is not already an apology on the Post site is pretty surprising.

If he can quote her maybe I can get away with it.  I don’t feel constrained by the author’s formatting and this was all originally one half of one paragraph.

Over at MyDD you have a very funny and snarky piece-

Misogyny 101 For Women

by Natasha Chart, Sun Mar 02, 2008 at 06:22:28 PM EST

…

First, and most importantly, remember that rape is the woman’s fault. Always. And it isn’t really a problem. No, sirree. (Ahem. I meant, no Sir! Sorry if any of my male natural superiors took offense at my playful taking of their title in vain.)

…

Second, make sure and use the word “hysterical” in reference, however subtle or sidewise you need to make it, to positions and arguments likely to be advanced by other women.

…

Third, stereotypes are your friends.

…

Fourth, as often as possible, it’s women and children.

…

Fifth, pull the ‘catfight’ card.

…

Well armed with these talking points, you’ll quickly achieve dizzying heights (dizzy! hah!) of woman-bashing prowess. You can go ahead and simper to your conservative male cohorts as if it were no big, but your feminist counterparts will know the truth of your achievements.

Over on Fire Dog Lake you have Jane Hamsher hitting racism-

• Tim Russert: Obama Responsible For Harry Belafonte, Too
  
  By: Jane Hamsher Sunday March 2, 2008 9:30 am

And sexism-

• An Open Letter to Anyone At the Washington Post/WPNI
  
  By: Jane Hamsher Sunday March 2, 2008 11:15 am

More Updates-

At MyDD again, you have Natasha Chart again-

• Over The Night
  
  by Natasha Chart, Mon Mar 03, 2008 at 04:30:55 AM EST

picking up on 2 posts referencing an odious article by Joel Stein in the L.A. Times that is unfortunately hidden behind a registration-

• Joel Stein really, really hates women
  
  Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon, March 2, 2008
• Joel Stein Knows What Women Want
  
  posted by Jeff Fecke, Shakesville, Saturday, March 01, 2008

Several people have pointed out this piece in Politico–

Wash Post editor says controversial piece was ‘tongue-in-cheek’

Michael Calderone

March 03, 2008

“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.”

Pomfret said that Allen pitched the idea to him as a riff on women fainting at Obama rallies, and similarities with the Beatles.

including Laura Rozen at War and Piece–

• John Pomfret: I’m a Failed Satirist
• Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell Not Buying Pomfret’s Explanation

Laura is not buying it.

Also Atrios who brought it to my attention.

Jane Hamsher is back on the case at Fire Dog Lake with-

"Tongue In Cheek?" Nice Try.

By: Jane Hamsher Monday March 3, 2008 10:12 am

It’s no coincidence that Allen has been writing anti-women pieces for the Independent Women’s Forum (standard garden variety Title IX, feminist bashing stuff). The IWF is a wingnut welfare shop whose “directors emeritae” include Lynn Cheney and Kate O’Beirne. Basically they get a lot of money to to pretend to speak for women while working to undermine their rights. A real Frank Luntz doublespeak racket.

So she ain’t buying it either.

HuffPo contributor Rachel Sklar chimes in-

WaPo Writer Proves Own Thesis With Inane Op-Ed

Huffington Post   |  Rachel Sklar   |   March 3, 2008 10:16 AM

For smarter responses to this article – by boys! – Matt Yglesias, Jason Linkins, Jay Rosen, Glenn Reynolds, Shaun Mullen, Jay Newton-Small*, Steve Benen and PhD candidate Jake Young. Here are some other responses, but take them with a grain of salt because they were written by silly Botox-injecting, Obama-swooning, “Grey’s Anatomy”-watching, “The Friday Night Knitting Club”-reading, eat-pray-loving women: Jane Hamsher, Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti, Michelle Malkin, Jill Filipovic and Susan Reisman.

She’s done some link collecting too.

Fire Dog Lake commenter MademoiselleJ did some Charlotte Allen link collecting that Jane Hamsher reports in More Comedy Gold From Charlotte Allen and kos notes the controversy in Midday open thread.

Oh and Atrios and Laura are still not buying it.

To give us a break on the hard line which politics is giving us right now, here’re some vids of classic music:

Petula Clark:

Dusty Springfield:

Tammy Wynette:

George Jones with perhaps the greatest country song ever!

Johnny Cash showing that a great song is great no matter how it’s interpreted:

Queen (I had to pick one out of so many):

Jefferson Airplane:

The Mamas and the Papas:

Gackt:

The Rolling Stones:

Bob Dylan:

Elton John:

Wham!  🙂

Abba:

The KLF:

And finally Tom Jones:

On top of the 12 1/2 inches of snow last week another 7 1/2 inches arrived Friday night. I’m running out of room to put the snow but it was warm today and supposed to be warmer tomorrow. After putting the tractor away yesterday in the barn that was built by a steel building construction firm in my yard, I realized I had tweaked my knee somehow so I took some time off to rest it and to do some research.

I’ve decided to keep the main house pretty much as is on the exterior with the exception of a glass sun room on the south side and a glass silo on the southwest corner. The silo will house a spiral staircase that leads to a small loft. This may have to get tempered down from a silo to a glass atrium but either way it should look pretty cool and be functional. After all this research I’m eventually going to start looking at extra shed space from the likes of EasyShed Rural Sheds, you can never really get enough storage space.

Since there wont be much space added to the existing structure I’ll need an outbuilding to store my wood working tools that is away from the barn but close to the studio sheds. So I started researching barns and outbuildings(below the fold):

1. Prefabbed Amish Sheds from Lancaster Barns. Their Barn Style Shed caught my eye. I like that it’s all on one level and expandable to 40 feet.

2. Florian Products offers a wooden solarium that is simple and elegant.

3. Sand Creek Post and Beam of Texas offers a great selection of barn kits. Check out the Progressive Farmers Barn on this page. It’s a little small for my needs but could work well for your property.

4. ShelterKit appears to be the top dog in pre-cut kits. Their barn/garage/workshops have character and warmth.

5. Carino’s Garden Supply is a highly recommended nursery with great deals.

6. Butterfly Farm is giving away free milkweed seeds in hopes of giving habitat area to the monarch butterfly.

7. The New Farm is an interesting group of farmers helping farmers.

8. Better Greenhouses offers a great design for your expanding garden, an expandable greenhouse!

No I’m not an anal shopper but setting up the property in a logical manner with as little wasted motion and time as possible is very important, the links above represent about 10 hours of reading and clicking. Perhaps the links will be of some use to you.

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?

Hamlet: Between who?

Sometimes it seems as if it is raining news and analysis. A number of good articles have appeared lately on the subject of U.S. torture. David Goodman’s “The Enablers” over at Mother Jones is one of a number of articles in a special MJ series on torture. Goodman’s article focuses on the fight within the American Psychological Association (APA) over psychologist participation in military and CIA interrogations of “enemy combatants.” It’s very good, fairly up-to-date, and puts the controversy into some historical context.

Another article, by Stephen Soldz and Brad Olson — both psychologists and both active in the APA opposition organization, Psychologists for an Ethical APA — has been published online over at ZNet. Its long title, “A Reaction to the APA Vote on Sealing Up Key Loopholes in the 2007 Resolution on Interrogations,” tips you off that there has been some recent activity in the struggle to change APA policy on psychologists and interrogation. Indeed there has been, as last week APA Council voted to approve a substantial change in their previous language on prohibited interrogation techniques. But will it make a difference in the long run?

Soldz and Olson do a good job explaining what the loopholes were in the earlier APA position. The latter is a subject I’ve covered earlier myself:

The APA is touting how the new 2007 resolution prohibits “specific techniques sometimes used in interrogations and calling on the U.S. government to ban their use”….

Looking back at APA’s long list of prohibited techniques we see something strange in the wording. The first part of the list are odious forms of obvious torture. “Techniques” that are “unequivocally condemned” include rape, mock executions, waterboarding, etc. Note, however, that use of “psychotropic drugs or mind-altering substances” are prohibited in instances where they are “used for the purpose of eliciting information”. If they are used to sedate or “soften up” a detainee prior to the questioning, drugs are apparently not prohibited.

Even worse is what comes next: a subset of other techniques are also singled out as prohibited when they are “used for the purposes of eliciting information in an interrogation process”. These are “hooding, forced nakedness, stress positions, the use of dogs to threaten or intimidate, physical assault including slapping or shaking, exposure to extreme heat or cold, threats of harm or death”.

A third subset of “prohibited” techniques concerns sensory deprivation and overstimulation, and sleep deprivation. Here, the APA goes completely off the rails. They define these techniques to be prohibited only if “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm”. (Emphasis mine)

Soldz and Olson described their reaction at the 2007 convention when APA Council brought forth their “substitute” resolution, written precisely to replace a bureaucratically-blocked resolution proposed months earlier calling for a moratorium against any psychologist participation at interrogation sites. They read the language around “definitions” of torture and cruel, abusive and inhuman behavior:

We remember clearly our shock at first observing this careful parsing of allowed degrees of suffering. We remember such insertions mysteriously occurring overnight before the Council vote. We recall how upset we were with this new language that was in such brazen contrast to the APA Ethics Code’s injunction to “do no harm.” We also remember our group of APA critics not being able to keep ourselves from wondering “Who pulled strings to get these phrases inserted?”

Opponents of APA collaboration with U.S. torture jumped on the wording of the disputed paragraph. Yet, introduced by representatives of APA’s military psychology division, the Council resolution, with its weak and misleading language, passed easily. And that’s where things sat for a number of months, as revelations mounted in the press about abusive conditions of confinement at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, about CIA use of waterboarding, and the participation of foreign countries in the U.S. “extraordinary rendition” program. Capping it all off, there was the circus of Attorney General Mukasey’s testimony before Congress, with Bush’s number one legal officer unable to make up his mind about whether waterboarding represented torture or not.

Meanwhile, the backlash grew against APA’s sneaky maneuvers and parsing of language, allowing for the continuation of psychological forms of torture and abusive treatment. Goodman’s article nicely summarizes what happened next:

In the wake of these revelations, a growing number of APA members have protested by withholding dues. In August [2007], Mary Pipher, author of the best-selling Reviving Ophelia, returned her APA Presidential Citation. And a stream of prominent APA members are resigning, including Kenneth Pope, the former chair of the organization’s ethics committee, who quit in February. In addition, at least six college psychology departments — Earlham, Guilford, Smith, University of Rhode Island, California State University at Long Beach, and York College of the City University of New York — have gone on record saying it was a violation of professional ethics for psychologists to participate in interrogations in any prison outside the U.S. where prisoners are not afforded due process. And in January, the California State Senate Committee on Business, Professions, and Economic Development passed a resolution discouraging California licensed health professionals from participating in detainee interrogations.

(As a gesture demonstrating my wish to be open about any bias I may have, I should add that I resigned from the APA myself earlier this year.)

The APA brass certainly noticed something was happening. Ethics Director Stephen Behnke began sending out emails, trying to smooth the waters with critics. He assured the doubting Thomases that there was no attempt to create any loopholes, and that the confusion would all be cleared up by the long-promised casebook on ethics and interrogation due out in about a year. Of course, not a word was said about the now-forgotten moratorium proposal. It was dead in the water, relegated to the maximum program of radicals and little-read bloggers (ahem).

New APA Ban on Torture Techniques: Victory or Clever Cover-up?

According to Goodman’s article, the Senate Armed Services Committee is still investigating the role of psychologists in the reverse-engineering of Pentagon anti-torture training for the interrogators of Bush’s “war on terror.” I had given up on any real hearings ever happening, but perhaps APA headquarters knows more than me. Or perhaps, as Soldz and Olson suggest, and I’ve made explicit in the past, the dawning realization that a Democratic administration is probably going to take over Washington, D.C. next January has signaled to APA that a change in approach is necessary. The Democrats have offered a reform of interrogation policy that includes a similar ban on abusive techniques, and offers the current Army Field Manual as an authority of allowable interrogation techniques.

Then again, maybe the resignations of prominent and non-prominent members, the dues boycott, and the muffled drumbeat in the press on the subject has played a role in APA’s turnabout on torture definitions. In any case, all of a sudden, APA Council moved with due speed to make some purportedly dramatic changes in their previous position.

More than one critic of APA’s past policy has noted the participation of Bill Strickland from APA’s Division 19, Society for Military Psychology, on the small group redrafting the controversial paragraph. Not only has Strickland been a major opponent of a psychologist moratorium, wherein psychologists would follow the policies of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatrist Association forbidding their membership from participation in the interrogation of detainees, he is also Vice President of Human Research Resources Organization, or HumRRO.

Goodman notes in his article that HumRRO is a major recipient of defense funding, and staffed at high levels by APA honchos past and present. But HumRRO was a major research center in the 1950s-1960s on sensory deprivation, using U.S. soldiers as guinea pigs, and thus a center of MKULTRA research. As reported in J.P. Zubek’s 1969 compendium, Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen Years of Research (Appleton-Century-Crofts, publishers), HumRRO, located in Monterey, California, reportedly had the best laboratory of all the sensory research centers:

…they made significant contributions to the study of the effects of sensory deprivation on hallucinations, attitude change, emotions, motor behavior, and cognition. Perhaps their most important work has been in the area of the measurement of affect and subjective stress… (p. 10)

I presume Strickland and his military/CIA partners are counting on the fact that sensory deprivation can be banned in name only, but still be practiced in the field. How do they do this? By simply claiming, as is done in the new Army Field Manual, that what they are doing is not sensory deprivation, even when they are applying special goggles and mittens to detainees, taking a page right out of the Donald Hebb SD playbook. The famous picture of then-defendant Jose Padilla being taken from his cell in goggles illustrates the technique quite well.

As we shall see, the supposed closing of the loopholes (and they likely aren’t all completely closed) belies the fact that the military and APA leadership have shifted the terms of the debate away from psychologist participation in unethical and likely illegal governmental detention of prisoners, and away from other, more arcane loopholes that promise no major change in U.S. torture practice. For brevity’s sake, the reedited 2007 paragraph defining proscribed interrogation techniques is not reproduced here, but can be accessed at this link. Let me allow that it is quite encyclopedic in proscribing most torture techniques known or that can be imagined. It’s reliance on the UN Convention Against Torture, which was ratified in the U.S. with a number of “reservations” that weakened its definitional structure, remains a possible difficulty in implementation. (See discussion on this point here.)

But the other difficulties are more obvious. Hence it is not in the resolution’s language that we find the problems (at present), but in the politics that got us to where we now are. These are enumerated below:

1) Despite all protestations of good faith by APA, psychologists still staff the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams at Guantanamo, and other interrogation sites, including, presumably, secret “black site” prisons run by the CIA. Psychologists at these sites are under the military chain of command, not APA ethics codes and committees. These sites are known to be in violation of Geneva Conventions and other national and international laws and agreements concerning prisoners, including the holding of detainees in indefinite detention, hiding detainees from the Red Cross, subjecting detainees to abusive conditions of detention, transferring via secret rendition some detainees to foreign prisons to be tortured, and subjecting prisoners to secret courts where hearsay evidence and evidence supplied via tortured confession is allowed.

Scandalously, a promised resolution to be brought before APA Council calling for the closure of Guantanamo’s prison facility failed to make an appearance yet again at February’s meeting, putting off any action for some months. The Council member who promised to do this explained to an inquiring member that the Gitmo closure resolution wasn’t presented at the Council meeting for the following reasons: it was being vetted by APA’s Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest (BAPPI), emails got lost, a busy work schedule intervened, and various other dog-ate-my-homework excuses. When APA wants to bureaucratically bury something, they don’t fool around.

2) APA’s Ethics Code 1.02, which allows psychologists to obey commands and “governing legal authority,” even when an action is at variance with professional ethics, remains a virtual get-out-of-jail card for military psychologists engaged in abusive interrogations. The code, rewritten after 9/11, places into APA’s ethics code the Nazis’ Nuremberg defense: “I was only following orders” (“Befehl ist Befehl“). The APA promised to insert a qualifying phrase about human rights into 1.02 back in 2006. No action has been taken to date. Contrast this with the six month time frame that brought about the recent word change in last summer’s resolution.

3) For months, APA activists have been concentrating their fire on the previously weak language of the 2007 resolution and its loopholes regarding certain kinds of torture. With the “victory” of recent days over this disputed language, some activists aren’t wondering if it isn’t time to end the dues boycott, implemented last year as a protest against APA’s torture policy. Others are seeing the language change as a sign of good faith by APA leadership. The days of a strong fight over a moratorium of psychologist participation at Guantanamo and CIA “black site” prisons seems a thing of the past, indicating the success of APA in changing the terms of the torture debate.

Calling the Question

The issue boils down to this: Are psychologists involved in interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo, CIA prisons, and other theater of war prison sites? Yes. Are these sites in violation of basic human rights laws and treaties? Yes. Have psychologists been implicated in torture of prisoners, and training other personnel in such torture? Yes. Does APA have an ethics policy in place that allows military psychologists to follow orders, regardless of ethical demands? Yes. Has anyone in the 50 plus year history of psychologist participation in mind control and interrogation research ever been held responsible for unethical practices? No. Has any military psychologist, or for that matter any health professional, been held responsible for torture-related activities since 9/11? No.

The overwhelming conclusion is that the language change in APA’s 2007 resolution regarding interrogations, while welcome, is a small victory at best, part of a larger campaign where the government and their institutional handmaidens, like APA, have by far the lion’s share of victories. This is the time when all opponents of APA participation in U.S. abusive interrogation must redouble their efforts to push for a moratorium on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations of so-called “enemy combatants.” They must come out strongly against the use of psychological torture techniques in the Army Field Manual. They must call for accountability from those who have promoted torture and other abuse, up to and including criminal prosecutions. They must call for an end to the nation’s policy of “extraordinary rendition.” They must call for the rescission of APA Ethics Code 1.02. And, finally, they should take up Drs. Soldz and Olson’s call for a reckoning with the sordid aspects of the history of the behavioral sciences:

We must, together with other health professions, come together as part of a truth and reconciliation process to publicly clarify the roles of psychologists and other health and mental health professionals in the production of harm. We must publicly admit and apologize for the use of psychological knowledge and expertise in detention and interrogation abuses. Until we clarify and personally accept the extent to which our profession and our professional association has condoned or abetted these and other abuses committed during this so-called “war on terrorism,” we will have done little to learn what went wrong, and little to make the moral and institutional changes necessary to prevent their recurrence.

For further reading, please see this recent article, “The ethics of interrogation and the American Psychological Association: A critique of policy and process”, by Brad Olson, Stephen Soldz, and Martha Davis.

This story also posted at Invictus

( – promoted by undercovercalico)

(from dkos, long ago)

What if kids loved to learn?

What if at the end of class, they wanted it to be longer, and kept the teacher in the hallway answering questions?

What if they learned that coupling their imaginations to their powers of reasoning would give them a tool of awesome power for exploring the cosmos?

What if an 11 year old got so excited by his insights that he yelled out

OH WOW! I get this now!

What if all this happened in math class?

Suppose you wanted to learn to play the piano, and, at the first lesson, all you got to do was repeatedly tap middle C, and that, when you asked the teacher what was going on, she said for the first few months you would learn one note a week, then you’d spend 10 years or so playing scales, and, after that, maybe a song?

Would you go back?  And, if someone MADE you go back, would you learn to love music?  If, five years into this drudgery, someone told you that playing the piano gave them intense joy and satisfaction, and was a tremendous outlet for their creativity and spontaneity, would you believe them?  Or would you think they were crazy?

Suppose you went to a different teacher, and, at the first class, you didn’t even get to touch a piano, but simply to watch video of the fingers of great pianists.  And suppose the curriculum called for doing this for a decade or two before ever sitting down and playing.  Would you learn to play?

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It’s a Tuesday evening in Boston.  The five year olds are figuring out how to find the area of a circle (one of them is doing this sitting on her mother’s lap and occasionally sucking her thumb) . The 7 year olds are exploring different bases. The nine year olds are doing group theory. The big kids (11 year olds) are proving the Bolyai-Gerwien theorem (if two polygons have the same area, can one be cut up with a finite number of straight cuts and reassembled to form the other?).  No one is doing any drills, no one is getting bored, and no one is getting put down for wrong answers or bad guesses.  This is math class, but Bob and Ellen are teaching.  And it’s not like anything I’ve seen before.

Who teaches area to kids who don’t know how to multiply?

Who thinks you can teach bases to 2d graders?

Who thinks that kids who successfully prove the Bolyai-Gerwien theorem should go on to one of the Hilbert ProblemsWho thinks 11 year olds can be guided through great theorems in math?

The same sort of people who know you can sing before you learn a scale (or even what middle C is).  The sort of people who know that math isn’t multiplication and division, or even differentiation and integration, but one of the most beautiful and interesting creations of the human mind.  The sort of people who know that once you turn a kid on, you had better get out of the way, because they move fast.  

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A lot of people hate math; and almost no one does math just for fun.  After a hard day’s work, relax by trying to prove a theorem in a new way; or play around with Goldbach’s conjecture? No.  Not likely.  And, if you’re one of the few people who do that sort of thing, you probably keep quiet about it, lest your friends think you mad.  If you play the piano for fun, you  can tell your friends…..they may envy you, or admire you, but they won’t likely think you crazy.  Not even if they don’t like music.  And even if they know you will never give a recital, much less play Carnegie Hall.   If you play in an after-work basketball league, no one expects you to be Michael Jordan

Why this difference? And what can we do about it?   Bob and Ellen Kaplan have some of the answers.  And those answers are about more than math.  They’re about reasoning, about learning, about joy, and, in a real sense, about being human.  They call their group the Math Circle

They take any kid who comes,  but not everyone who comes loves math at the start.  Some come because they have a friend taking the class – and, so, Bob and Ellen get to light fires.  (Talking with them, I think they’d almost prefer to take ONLY kids who think they hate math).  While there is self-selection in the kids they teach in Boston, they’ve done similar classes in public schools and in other countries, and people are now using similar methods in prisons, and will soon be using them in Cameroon.  

Bob and Ellen didn’t originate the idea of a math circle.  Similar things have been done for a long time in Russia, and, in the United States, similar things were done by Robert Lee Moore, about 100 years ago.  But Moore was a combative, competitive type, and his aggressiveness turned a lot of people off.  The Kaplans marry some of Moore’s ideas to an utter lack of competitiveness and a liberal sensibility about kids.  But the essential idea in the Moore method, and in the Kaplans’, is that people learn by doing, whether it’s piano or math, and that this sort of learning can bring joy to people, even if they will never play Carnegie Hall or win a Fields Medal.

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They’ve been doing this now for 13 years; this year, they have more than 100 students, and they’ve trained several others to follow their methods.    

They’ve detailed how they do it, and why they do it, in a book: Out of the labyrinth: Setting mathematics free, and the Oxford University Press has its own blog, which links to the book here

Some of what they do is, of course, dependent upon their personality.  But some of it, quite a bit of it, is transferable.  Bob and Ellen have had success training people to do what they do; they’ve trained people who are already teachers in math, so that they know enough to teach this way, and they’ve trained graduate students in math in the ways kids think, so that they can teach this way.  Many people who love math want to share that love, and spread the word that math is not a boring, dry subject – some of those people can learn to do this.

Some of you may be saying that the idea of playing scales for ten years is  a straw man.  Of course no one insists that a musician practice scales for ten years!  That’s precisely the point. We DO insist on that, or its equivalent in math.  What do musicians do?  They play music.  What do composers do? They write music.  What do mathematicians do? They prove theorems.  They play math.  But many students of math don’t get to do any of this until college.  They may see a proof, especially in geometry.  That’s like watching Vladimir Horowitz play piano.  It’s not bad, but no one ever learned to play the piano by watching.  You learn to play the piano by playing – and, at first, you play badly.  When a 5 year old guesses (as one did while I was watching) that 9 x 9 is 25, because 25 is ‘big’, he is doing what a first year piano student does when he butchers a basic piece.  Both will get better by practicing, especially if that practicing is guided by a teacher.

How can we change math education?  

Well, when that 9 x 9 problem came up in class, one of the five year olds said

LET’S FIGURE IT OUT!

This is a politicized summary of a project I’ve been doing at the Pomona College Natural Farm, an urban one-acre farm in southern California and the subject of a previous essay here.  The focus of this essay will be mustard, and mustard-growing.  There will be more such essays.

My interest in mustard (the plant, not merely the food) started with a garden I planted in the front yard of a friend of mine.  This was a strategically-placed front yard, near a major intersection of two boulevards, where everyone could see.  One of the things I noticed about this garden was that I could get incredible results out of mustard-growing; tiny seeds which produced huge plants.  (This, indeed, is why mustard is so noted in a New Testament parable (Matthew 13:31-32).)  I could also grow some wild-looking food plants in a really in-your-face location there.  How’s that for the politics of mustard?

At some point, I started to think about producing mustard as an edible, tasty, nutritious weed.  This Spring at the Pomona College Natural Farm, on the east “adjunct” portion of the Farm, there is a preserved field of weeds, and the dominant weed in this field is… that’s right… mustard.  Not the type you put on your hot dog (Brassica nigra or Brassica juncea), nor the type that makes up “mustard greens” (Brassica juncea), nor a special oriental mustard which shares a species with turnips and bok choy (Brassica rapa), but, rather, wild mustard (sometimes labeled Brassica campestris, sometimes Sinapis arvensis).

Now, I remember reading in an article in the journal Plant Breeding (“Hybridizations among Brassica napus, B. Rapa, B. Juncea and their two weedy relatives B. nigra and Sinapis arvensis under open pollination conditions in the field,” Plant Breeding 115, 470-473 (1996)), that suggested that wild mustard and domesticated mustard did not crossbreed.  So I haven’t tried to crosspollinate those mustards.  But I will be trying to do at least one crosspollination exercise this semester at the Farm.

I am so interested in mustard these days for several reasons.  First off, mustard seeds are rather small, thus rather cheap as an eventual source of food if you are buying by weight.  (I can especially recommend Peaceful Valley as a good deal on seed.)  This is an important consideration if you are gardening on a budget.  (NOTE TO GROWERS: there really isn’t supposedly much time left in the growing season this year, as mustards are a cold-season vegetable.  But this depends upon where you live — here in southern California it gets hot plenty.)  Second, mustard grows easily and produces a lot of food, which is high in vitamins A and C.  Third, mustard is a tough plant; it’s frost-resistant, which means that mustard is often the main surviving crop in unusually cold southern California winters.  Fourth, I’d like to see if some of the cultivars of mustard that I’m working with will spread as weeds.  If people are to “live off of the land,” as is one of my goals, then they should be able to eat weeds.

Here is wild mustard, which my friend Brian tells me is growing all over the Chino Hills.  This is indeed edible mustard, but not very tasty and not very filling.

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This winter, the main edible weed to spring up in Los Angeles County is malva, a type of mallow.  Malva is edible, mind you, but it’s bland; and so I think it’s reasonable that we begin to cultivate weeds which have some spicy kick to them; thus mustard.  

Malva grows everywhere; in February there were big fields of it growing everywhere in southern California.  Here is the space just north of the Pomona College Natural Farm, under the oak trees.

Apparently grounds maintenance spread some kind of herbicide over this malva at some later point, because here’s the same field later, mostly dead.  Malva is often regarded as an invasive, non-native species; yet removing this malva could have been done through weeding, or with a “weed-whacker.” Or, hell, they could have just made a big salad out of the stuff, and eaten it.  If the Pomona College Farm really wishes to be an “organic” farm, they can’t be using chemical herbicides being used near the Farm itself.  (I have no idea which herbicide they used, whether chemical or natural.)

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Now, malva has medicinal uses; many of them are listed on the Plants for a Future webpage.  But my real interest here is mustard.  There’s plenty of malva out there; weeded areas need to have a weed which is versatile, and I think of mustard as that weed.  Mustard, especially cultivated mustard, has numerous practical uses; if we are to spread the practical growing of plants to the people of this area (and especially to those who wish to live well on low monetary incomes) we will need to be spreading practical plants such as mustard.

There will be a social agenda to my experiments with mustard.  So many people play so little part in the global money economy because they have so little money.  If we are to create spaces outside of the money economy, spaces in which people can “live off of the land” even in cities, we must (among other things) spread varieties of plant and animal which can enable ordinary people to live cheaply, or to live off of the money economy altogether.  This will mean an aggressive guerrilla gardening program; and it will mean finding and using plants as vehicles for people to “get by.”  I can see a series of articles in this vein: this one is about mustard, but the next one could be about garlic, or peas and beans, or maize, or another plant essential to living.

The word “mustard” comes from Latin: the Romans used to mix unfermented grape juice, or “must,” with mustard seed until it acquired that “burning” flavor, thus the Latin name “mustum ardens” or “burning wine,” which was later shortened to “mustard.”

Now, so far I have been using the mustard I’ve grown at the Farm to cook and eat.  The Giant Southern Curled mustard is quite spicy, so I prefer to cook it.  The tendergreens, which have a spoon-shaped leaf, are also a mustard, and I’ve stashed a bowl, a fork, and a bottle of balsamic vinegar to eat them in impromptu salads.  My most successful tendergreens are pictured below.

I prefer tendergreen mustards to lettuce (and use it for all of the same purposes), but they flower quickly, unlike the Giant Southern Curleds, which have a spicy taste but which flower late.  One of my several successful fields of Giant Southern Curleds is pictured below.

I’ve been eating a lot of these Giant Southern Curleds, as they grow like crazy.  Raw they’re kind of raspy.  You can cook them just a little bit for a full, rich flavor not too much unlike cooked spinach, but much better.  There is also a red mustard, some of which one can find at the Farm, and a Florida broadleaf mustard, which I suspect is the variety of the huge mustard growing just north of the wooden spool at the Farm.

The above photo is a volunteer — at the time of this writing my own personal Florida broadleaf plantings are barely up.  Yeah, you can eat that whole damn thing.

The above photo is of a red mustard embedded in another Brassica plant, looking like a cabbage or collard green.  The red mustard is the one in the middle.  They’re quite spicy when eaten raw.

Mustard is, of course, the name of a condiment made by crushing mustard seeds.  I haven’t grown a crop of seeds yet; the tendergreens have flowered, but tendergreen mustard will not make a spicy mustard seed.  More promising for condiment mustard is the Giant Southern Curled, but at the Farm the current crop hasn’t flowered yet.

There is a flour that can be made from yellow mustard, credited by the Alternative Field Crops Manual as being an “excellent emulsifying agent and stabilizer and, consequently, it is used in sausage preparation.”

There are numerous medicinal uses for mustard.  Drugs.com tells us that “Mustard itself is used as a food flavoring, forage, emetic, diuretic, and as a topical treatment for inflammatory conditions such as arthritis and rheumatism.  Mustard also has antioxidant activity and pharmacological effects on cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes.”

A website selling “mustard rub” tells us: “Mustard seed is an ancient remedy for increasing circulation and oxygen as well as for assisting your body in eliminating acid waste and toxins.”

Mustard produces a mustard oil, which is commonly used as a vegetable oil.  Mustard oil is only 5% saturated fat, making it the lowest in saturated fat of the vegetable oils (Wikipedia).  However, “due to its high content of erucic acid, which is considered noxious, mustard oil is not considered fit for consumption in the United States.”  There is, however, a “Mustard Project” being funded by the Department of Energy, for growing mustard “for the dual purposes of biodiesel and organic pesticide production.”  As one website tells us, its “processes focused on alternating mustard crops with wheat.  Once nice effect of this is that the biomass from the mustard (after harvesting the seed) could be used as the cellulose feedback for producing alcohol for biodiesel production.”

Mustard is also grown as a “green manure” crop.  With “green manure” the crop is plowed into the soil to increase soil fertility.  Researchers at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho have determined that mustard green manure is an effective alternative to pesticide use in growing potatoes.  

There are different varieties of mustard which should attract our interest.  A variety of Brassica juncea (subspecies tatsai) is grown in Szechuan in China for its large stems, and pickled to make “Zha cai”.  I have ordered Zha cai seeds from a Canadian business; if the seeds get to me in time to be planted for this season we will hopefully have Zha cai late this spring or early this summer.

There is a plant called “garlic mustard,” not technically a mustard, but of the mustard family Brassicaciae (Alliaria petiolata).  Garlic mustard was imported from Europe and grows mostly on the East Coast here in the US, where it is commonly regarded as an invasive species.  It is also, however, edible and (ostensibly) tasty; there are garlic mustard recipes for stir-fry and pesto that can be gotten off of the Web.  This indeed represents a political dilemma; invasive species can crowd out native species, but invasive species can also have qualities we like; edible, tastes good.

The mustard project I’ve begun at the Pomona College Natural Farm is an ongoing thing; I would like to encourage the readers of this article to contribute what they can, and take what they need, from it as it continues forward and as I focus upon other plants.