U.S. interrogators were taught Commie brainwashing techniques.

“To me it looks like they’ve invented a perfect propaganda machine, one that chews up bodies and churns out justifications for everything the Bush administration desires.” - Me

When I wrote that blog back in February, it was because the little information that I could find about prisoner interrogation in “The War Against Terror” reminded me of the techniques used by repressive regimes like the Soviet Union during the cold war to elicit false confessions from anti-Soviet or anti-communist captives. It just seemed like the purpose of “enhanced interrogation” or torture wasn’t to get information, good or bad. Some seem to think the problem with torture is simply that it doesn’t elicit the truth. But it’s not necessarily a problem if the false confession matches the story the interrogator expects to hear, because that makes for some convenient propaganda. “See? He confessed. He can now be convicted. The war on terror works.” Still, I never really expected that there would be hard evidence of a program to elicit false confessions on purpose.

This morning I hit the good old StumbleUpon button and the first ’stumble’ was a telegraph.co.uk article, entitled “Guantanamo Bay interrogations based on faulty Chinese communist methods.” That’s a misleading title. The methods weren’t necessarily faulty, they were just completely evil, but useful for breaking down a human being. Here’s a short excerpt:

American military trainers gave a class to camp interrogators in 2002 on how to use “sleep deprivation”, “exposure” and other “torture” methods to reduce captives to “animals” and obtain information.

But it has emerged that the techniques presented in the class were copied word-for-word from a 1957 US Air Force study which focused on Chinese techniques – that did not work.

The study by sociologist Alfred Biderman, Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War, commented on methods that led to false confessions and “brainwashing”. - Telegraph

The Telegraph is a pretty right-wing newspaper, so it’s not like this is some wild fringe conspiracy theory. Even the centre-right U.S. Democratic Party has clued in and mentioned this scary tidbit of info. Senator Levin was quoted in the article as saying, “What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

No? I think that perhaps they DO need it. How else can a state justify the curbing of civil liberties, the expansion of military powers, the insidious government propaganda, endless war, the suspension of habeas corpus… etc?

People have to be scared into allowing the authorities to play us like suckers.

One way to do that, apparently, is to take a tip from the Commies and torture some brown folks until they say what the U.S. government wants to hear. I’m a little freaked out by this kind of democracy.

This is why I don’t have much faith in Barack Obama, or really any of the nominees or candidates. Can anyone resist this kind of power? You know, the unlimited kind? Already Obama’s going with the Republicans on telecom immunity (see Glenn Greenwald’s excellent reporting), which legitimizes government spying on law-abiding citizens. He has vague plans to end the Iraq war, which isn’t a good sign. Obama calls himself a “uniter” which I naively used to think meant he’d unite the fractured Democratic Party. But now I think it just means he’ll play ball with whatever lunatic fascist sits across from him. What will he do with a bunch of damaged prisoners who’ve been brainwashed into confessing acts of terrorism? Repair and release them? Or make use of them?

Of course I say that, but if I lived there, I’d vote for him. Forget all that stuff, actually.

Americans, (please) Vote Obama..

heheh.. Barack Obama: Better than Dementia.

Fun at work.

After reading over my last post, I’m starting to think it would be fun to try to use the expression “Little Lord Fauntleroy” when dealing with customer complaints…

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Don’t worry. Little Lord Fauntleroy will get his towels right away.”

“Oh? We forgot to set your wake-up call and now you’re an hour late for work? Little Lord Fauntleroy better get moving, then!”

“Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. Little Lord Fauntleroy wanted double beds? Well, let me bend over and do a somersault for you, so you can kiss my…”

(I would only really find it funny if the complaint was legitimate. There’s no fun in overreacting to an overreactor.)

Can’t use it on my boss though - we already call him Napoleon. “Little Lord Fauntleroy has a Napoleon complex” doesn’t really work.

And yes, I realize it’s possible that this is only funny in my head, but it’s still better than calling customers “dickshits” like I’ve been doing for the past few months.

More Tragic Outrage: Rich Kids have Prom Ruined!!!!

From the homepage of thestar.com:

With promises of arriving at their prom in superstretch Hummers, BMWs, Jaguars and Porsches, students pay anything from a $500 deposit to the entire rate upfront for Tuxedo’s services. Then, students say they get picked up in a limousine or tour bus from another company, get only a one-way trip to their prom and are left to find their own way home by foot or by cab.

…

Everything had been pre-arranged. Ram made the booking in advance at a local mall, handing $2,200 to a woman going by the name of Tanya Krajishnik – the only registered owner of Tuxedo Limousines. When Krajishnik met Ram and accepted payment, Ram said all he got in return was a makeshift receipt, written on a scrap of paper.

…

“Our night was ruined. We were all dressed up, and it was ruined,” recalls Shannel. - Toronto Star

Tragedy unfolds under our very noses sometimes, doesn’t it? To think this happened in Toronto…

Sure! Give someone thousands of dollars - up-front! - get nothing in return, and expect to show up at your prom in a SuperStretchHummerLimo™ with a hot-tub. It’s too bad high school can’t teach common sense. Or some small sense of humility, for that matter. Little Lord Fauntleroy can’t get a SuperStretchHummerLimo™ ride home, awww.

Hmm… why don’t I feel sympathetic? Oh right.. my mom dropped me off at all my school dances & grad parties. And heck, in her day they had to walk 40 miles, uphill both ways, with holes in their shoes (if they were lucky enough to have shoes, or feet, for that matter) to go to the prom. And in those days they all had to dance to Freddie and the Dreamers. The groin injuries…. shudder. Could be worse, kids.. could be worse..

Major Nerdage!

I’ve been fooling around with a USB gadget - the WinTV-HVR-950, to be exact - that lets me run analog video to my computer. I picked it up because I have a huge VHS collection and I wanted to record some of them onto my machine. Plus I might have free access to cable TV in the near future, so I’ll be able to record all my favourite FOX NETWORK reality shows, on the FOX NETWORK channel. Boy I sure do love that FOX NETWORK. It’s almost as if the FOX NETWORK is paying me to say FOX NETWORK. But, unfortunately, the FOX NETWORK is not paying me anything. FOX.

Anyways. It’s generally used for viewing/recording stuff via coaxial cable. Here’s Fantastic Planet:

The recording quality is surprisingly good and space-efficient. I was kind of irritated that my fancy nvidia graphics card couldn’t do this because it has a bunch of other esoteric features I can’t possibly use, though it’s not bad at sending video to a TV set with an RCA jack, as long as I use ffdshow to resize the video. I realized after a day that I could do something pretty cool - send the video OUT through the video card and into a VCR, and then connect the VCR output to the USB gadget. The computer sends video to itself, in full-screen.

It’s kind of a neat trick and a good way to bypass DRM/copy-protection scams. I don’t think I’m ‘breaking’ a digital lock, so Jim Prentice can’t come to my door and kick me in the balls. (Yes, lets discourage “piracy” by making the penalty for ripping a store-bought DVD higher than the penalty for simply downloading a digital copy! Another blog, maybe…). So any kind of digital video, even Tom Green’s hard-to-edit live feeds, can be easily re-recorded and re-encoded:

I used DownloadHelper to ‘catch’ his show when it goes Live. VLC can play that format of video as it downloads and sends it to the VCR in full-screen, which sends back to the computer video recorder. The black window is actually live video, it just didn’t show up in the screenshot for some reason. Tom Green’s live shows are fun, but the “commercial breaks” (sometimes ten minutes or more.. with no commercials, just… darkness…) are worth editing out, which I can now do.

But here’s the ultimate - When I shut off the video, the graphics card just sends a clone of the monitor/desktop image. Which gets looped back through the system, again and again and again. It’s infinite and beyond!

Ok… back to STUDYING.

Ontario School Bows Before All-Knowing Psychic Overlord

This is just weird.

A mother of a student with autism down in Barrie, Ontario, was called into her daughter’s school and told that a child abuse investigation had been launched after a ‘psychic’ claimed that an unnamed young man was molesting her daughter. The ‘psychic’ didn’t even know the girl - an educational assistant (and ESP fan) was told by this ‘psychic’ (the scare quotes mean I don’t believe in ‘psychics,’ btw) that a student with a name starting with the letter “V” was being assaulted. Apparently that’s enough to cause a major freakout.

It’s important to take abuse allegations seriously, even if it comes from kooks. But it’s also important to…. look at the facts?!?!?!?! The student was equipped with a GPS and audio recording device, and there was absolutely no evidence of any kind of abuse!

Now the mother (understandably) won’t send her kid back to school, and the school board won’t foot the bill to get the kid into a more appropriate special education program. She’s a single mom and she can no longer work to support her family and her child can’t go back to school, all because some overzealous twits believed a dumbass EA who put her faith in some sick and twisted charlatan. You couldn’t make this up. You wouldn’t want to.

The frightened mother rushed back to the campus and was stunned by what she heard - the principal, vice-principal and her daughter’s teacher were all waiting for her in the office, telling her they’d received allegations that Victoria had been the victim of sexual abuse - and that the CAS had been notified.

How did they come by such startling knowledge? Leduc was incredulous as they poured out their story.

“The teacher looked and me and said: ‘We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of “V.” And she said ‘yes, I do.’ And she said, ‘well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.’” - CityNews (Found via boingboing)

If people want a “zero-tolerance” policy when it comes to abuse allegations it has to work both ways. If the authorities are obliged to take all allegations seriously, people who make false allegations of abuse for personal gain, like this ‘psychic,’ really should be punished. Harshly. Like maybe tattoo the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” to their forehead.

Romanow in Retrospect

The Toronto Star has a good article on Roy Romanow’s perspective of the health care system five years after his multi-million dollar study came up with a variety of recommendations to make health care more accessible and efficient. He sounds disappointed and disturbed. Emphasis mine:

[W]hen he turns to governments, his mood shifts. Searching for the right words, Romanow talks of how Ottawa and the provinces demonstrated “areas of inconsistency,” how they cherry-picked some of his recommendations while ignoring others and how, in the end, the politicians emphasized “form over substance.”

Even the most concrete reform to come from his report – the decision of governments to focus on reducing wait times in five specific medical areas – has been a mixed blessing, he says. Those who need help in those five areas, which range from cancer care to cataract surgery, may be better off. But the downside, Romanow says, is that wait-time reduction has become a surrogate for real reform.

“This five-guarantees concept was a kind of snazzy way of saying we’re really moving on wait time, but it ignores the more substantive issues where heavy lifting is required,” he says.

During months of hearings, Romanow heard countless pleas to protect the Canada Health Act, the federal statute that lets Ottawa financially penalize provinces that don’t follow medicare standards.

Yet Ottawa still refuses to enforce the rules. In British Columbia, for instance, private clinics that allow wealthier patients to jump the queue operate with impunity.

“The Canada Health Act,” says Romanow, “is almost becoming a dead letter of the law.”

His mood darkening, Romanow ticks off the reforms that have not occurred. He recommended that Ottawa amend the Canada Health Act to specifically include limited home care and diagnostic tests as so-called medically necessary services. It didn’t.

He recommended a limited national pharmacare program, as well as reforms to curb the accelerating cost of drugs. Nothing. He called on governments to tell voters how they spend health dollars. They still don’t. He recommended that Ottawa give the provinces significantly more money for health care (which it did), but also that it insist this money be used for essential structural reforms (which it did not).

He is particularly irked by the failure of governments to deal with the massive health problems of aboriginal communities. “This is a blight on the nation,” he says angrily.

“We are one of the richest nations in the world. Heartbreaking! There has been nothing.”

Time and time and time again, politicians promise to “take action” on issues such as drug costs, the lack of family doctors, the nursing shortage, electronic record keeping, aboriginal health, etc. etc. But nothing gets done. Life and death issues become political footballs for four years. And then around election time, it’s time to “take action” again! Whatever… so sick of it all. The people we vote for tend to be more concerned with more ‘important’ matters, like raising their salaries.

Maybe it’s time we forced politicians to work for the minimum wage - obviously raising their pay is NOT “attracting good people” (Stelmach’s justification for giving himself a $42,000/year raise) if our health care system is spiraling its way down the shitter.

Sad - I seem to remember the days when people used to actually say things like “Canada has the best health care system in the world!” with a straight face - now we’re lucky if we can say “Canada has somewhat better health care than the Americans.” :-/

No explanation required.

Andy: I want people who are gonna talk shit to actually get on camera on Skype because then they wouldn’t be such pussies. [Hello?]

Tom: Yeah. [Hello?] It’s fun to talk to people on air [Hello?!] because it’s just audio, [Hello!] so they can only speak to us. [Tom!] The sound of their voice is the way they’re able to commmunicate with us. And the sound that comes through this phone for however long we push it, and allow their sound to go into the phone and onto the internet - however long we allow that sound to go - is the amount of time we allow them to influence the situation here; to be on the air.

Andy: Amen brotha.

Tom: So call up and make some sounds with your mouth.

Andy: That sounds like some Scientology talk to me.

“We had 45 123 people on our live stream tonight. That was an un announced broadcast. :)” - Tom Green

Bonus content - I captured a ‘Bill O’Reilly’ moment.

Tom Green\’s House 080605 Blooper

Wil Wheaton!

I didn’t know Wil Wheaton had a blog! Oh Wesley!

wilwheaton.typepad.com

Fun stuff, definitely written for geeks of all stripes.

So that’s why Bell’s throttling p2p….

This is rich.. Bell recently caught some heat for ‘throttling’ p2p network traffic. The behemoth argued that it was necessary because a minority of users were using up a lot of bandwidth - according to Bell 5% of users use 30% of bandwidth at peak periods. Michael Geist pointed out that this was actually a lower percentage than in other well-connected countries, and it might even be a bullshit statistic. So anyways, Bell has made it very difficult for people to trade videos online (CBC distributes videos this way, eh?), and the reasons for doing so weren’t clear…

… until now!

Bell Canada Opens Online Video Store

Yep, they sabotaged Canada’s ability to share and access video and media files… and then they opened a service to ‘fill the void!’

Give them a miniature American flag and a few acres of land in Washington, DC?

Here’s yet another example of the Bush administrations talent for foresight and long-term planning; POWs held in Guantanamo Bay who aren’t guilty of anything have to stay there forever:

Mr Gates told a US Senate hearing: “The brutally frank answer is that we’re stuck… We have a serious ‘not in my backyard’ problem.

“Either their home government won’t accept them or we’re concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home,” he said.

“What do you do with that irreducible 70 or 80 who you cannot let loose but will not be charged and will not be sent home?” he asked.

The Pentagon has said 36 former inmates who were released are “confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorism”. - BBC News

It’s a new era in law and justice. What do you do with people too ‘guilty’ to be free but too ‘innocent’ to be brought to trial? I’m guessing execution; we’re just waiting for John Yoo to spring back into action with a crazy legal memo.