Did you know that Oliver freakin North has written a book about PRAYER?

It’s called ‘True Freedom.’

No, Ollie, true freedom doesn’t come from prayer, it comes from a Presidential pardon.

I’ve got an idea here that I think should spread across the ‘blogsphere as fast as possible, so if you think it’s worthwhile, pass it on.

Abu Ghraib?

BLOW IT UP.

Put Bush on a podium in front of the place and have him push a big red button that makes the place disintegrate into tiny pieces of cement, none larger than a quarter. I mean, if we’re there to ‘fight evil,’ as Bush and his advisors are fond of saying, then surely HERE IT IS. The most potent single symbol of evil perpetrated against the Iraqi people, and yet it stands there ready to suck the soul out of whoever enters. TURN THAT FUCKER INTO GRAVEL.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Chalabi and the other expats wanted it to stay standing, so that they could use it when they returned, and this is why it wasn’t demolished after the prisoners were released.

I’ve been reading this entry by Billmon and some of the comments, and it occurs to me that this is the time.

Right now is exactly the time and place for the US to a) join the ICC, and b) work towards some kind of acknowledgement of US involvement in torture around the world in decades past. It’s the only way to demonstrate to anyone that our outrage is genuine, and that it’s not our intent to oppress other nations.

It’ll be nice to see some people lose their jobs over this, but that won’t satisfy anyone outside our borders, and shouldn’t satisfy anyone inside, either.

Via WorldChanging:

The Nobel Peace Prize Conflict Map

A timeline of major conflicts between 1901 and 2004. It’s interactive, such that you can set the start and end dates and ‘scrub’ through the history of warfare.

And just when I thought I couldn’t get more nostalgic, I walk out to the mailbox and lo: After my grandma’s funeral, my sister took all her photographs, did a little research on them, scanned them, put them on CD, and mailed them out. And there was one of those CDs in my mailbox. Some examples:

And here’s my sister and one of her two sons:

I’ve written about Devil’s Playground before, but xanga won’t let me search for it, so I won’t link back.

———

The water comes from the bottom of a lake, held upstream by a huge earthen dam. A spillway lets out only the coldest of the lake’s contents, and this is the water I’m floating in.

I’m wearing a life jacket. I’m something like twelve years old. I’m in the Devil’s Playground, which is the overly-dramatic local name for a bend in the river where it goes over a limestone outcropping and forms a rapid.

The water below is cold, alright, and the sun above is beating down heat that evaporates and warms. Over a longer period, the cold would win, of course, but I’m just here for the rapids. After I’m done, I’ll pull myself out, hike back up the bank, and do it again, such is the joy.

Over the first ‘V,’ I’m rolling around a little bit. All that’s really required of me is to keep my feet pointing downstream and my face above water; if things get dicey all I have to do is stand up and I’ll only be waist-deep, and things won’t get dicey anyway. But I’m rolling around a little bit, because this is only fun if you think you’re in danger.

My butt scrapes the limestone outcroppings that have been worn smooth by time and water. They’re smooth, like pavement. Big exposed prehistoric pavement, which is essentially what they are. Cracks and fissures have been exaggerated by erosion from the river, and tiny green plant life is clinging in those cracks. Occasionally my butt scrapes over those, and it’s like there’s a strip of carpeting still attached to that piece of pavement.

The water tosses me around. Actually the life jacket is doing this, because it’s keeping me buoyant. There are some lovely big standing waves; these are where the water ‘bunches up’ against a large rock. They toss me around a little bit. More of the roller-coaster action. Whee!

There’s a song by Poi Dog Pondering where the singer talks about going to the sea and standing in the waves, and enjoying being tossed around by the waves, knowing that this power comes from somewhere, and that it’s nothing personal, but mother ocean could take his life, and yet she doesn’t.

And that’s part of the thrill of riding down a rapids in a life jacket. You get tossed around a little bit, you feel a little bit out of control. A split second of doubt.

Watching some people go down the rapids, you get the impression that very few people are equipped to deal with even that split second of doubt. Women scream, men act extra-special tough. They pull out of the river after the rapids and talk about how intense that was. How macho and insane and stupid they are for riding in inner-tubes down a rapid where hundreds of thousands if not millions of people have done exactly what they just did, without incident. Woo!

The standing wave pushes you around in a way you might not have expected if you’re not familiar with reading a river. It really only represents a chunk of rock about the size of a 10-gallon trash can. The rock ain’t moving; it’s not comin’ ta gitcha. The water is only pushing you aside a little bit. You could just stand up and walk the rest of the rapid if you wanted to.

But where’s the fun and drama in that? Hootin’ and hollerin’ is the proper response.

I love those people. I love that they hoot and holler and get all dramatic, but it’s also something that makes me laugh inside, just thinking about it.

I float through the rapid, and tumble out the bottom end. My dad’s watching me, my mom’s pulling sandwiches out of ziplocks or something. I paddle to the shore, the zig-zag of the cleaved limestone, the live oak roots clinging to the banks.

I want this to be my life, forever. The cold water and hot sun, the shade of hill country flora, dad pulling his canoe to the top of the rapids, my brother and sister tormenting each other, mom watching over everybody. The danger that isn’t dangerous. Endless playing in the river, forever. The Devil’s Playground is really the Garden of Eden.

Supreme Court Justice Souter, one of the most powerful people in American government, got beat up on the street last night.

This is a story to WATCH CLOSELY.

“And you feel like you’re in a whirlpool
And you feel like going home
You feel like talking to someone
Who knows the difference between right and wrong

We’re going boom, boom, boom
And that’s the way we live…”

–David Byrne/Talking Heads ‘What A Day That Was’

Also via Bruce Sterling:

This article about an ethnically-Indian Norwegian female comedian who humiliated a former leader of Ansar Al-Islam at a public debate.

What I love most about this article is that it’s so completely cosmopolitian. Indian immigrant humiliates Islamic fundamentalist, IN NORWAY. After being lifted off the ground by a woman, the former leader, who’s on a book tour of all things, got so pissed off that he spoke Norwegian for the first time the whole evening, so there’s another language/cultural dynamic.

And best of all, after all this talk involving Indian and Islamic and Norwegian culture clashes, right there at the top of the page is a banner ad for Jarlsberg cheese. Some things never change, I suppose.

Via Bruce Sterling:

Ubergeeky digital image reconstruction and tweaking of data sent back by soviet space probes many decades ago, of the surface of Venus.

What I love most about this page is that it contains text like this:

The raw image was converted to optical density according to Russian calibration data, then to linear radiance for image processing. It was interpolated with windowed sinc filter to avoid post-aliasing (a “pixilated” appearance), and the modulation transfer function (“aperture”) of the camera was corrected with a 1 + 0.2*frequency**2 emphasis. This was then written out as 8-bit gamma-corrected values, using the sRGB standard gamma of 2.2. Some of the telemetry bars on the right were replaced with data from the 124° panorama.

The text is almost as mysterious as Venus, with buzzword factor just low enough to maybe make sense, but high enough to be just above actual comprehension.

Cool pictures, too.