Tortured Logic

While we may feel safer knowing the authorities will do the unspeakable to protect us from "the terrorists", what shell of a society are we left with?

Defense Secretary Charge with Torture

News broke this week that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was charged with war crimes for ordering torture, during his visit to France. He apparently fled the country to to avoid being arrested as a war criminal.

President Has Legal Power to Torture Children
Bush advisor John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody.Click here to here him say it.

An Account of Child Torture in Iraq

"He was very afraid, very alone, And he had the skinniest arms I had ever seen on a kid. And he was literally shaking from head to toe. His wrists were so small we couldn’t even put handcuffs on him. And I took pity on him. From the moment I saw him and was escorting him, I felt, you know, sorry for him. They threw water on him and they threw him in the back of a Humvee. Then they drove him around in the middle of the night, and it was very, very cold. And then, afterwards, they covered him with mud and showed him his arrested father whom they had also questioned using other methods. But he wouldn’t talk. The questioning specialists told me that to see his son in this state, that that’s what broke him, you know, it broke his heart to see his son like that. The father started to cry and promised to tell them whatever they wanted to know after that". Sergeant Samuel Provance of the US Army

Woman & Child Rape at U.S. run Iraqi Prison

"Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. OK? Videos. There are women there....The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what’s happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been [video] recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has, and they’re in total terror it’s going to come out. It’s impossible to say to yourself, how did we get there, who are we, who are these people that sent us there." Seymour Hersh's ACLU Keynote Speech

US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan
Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said. Forbes Story

Bush Says the U.S. Doesn't Torture



Torture's History Hypocrisy

Soldiers in Vietnam use the waterboarding technique on an uncooperative enemy suspect near Da Nang in 1968. After WWII a Japanese soldier, Yukio Asano, was charged with a war crime and sentence to 15 years hard labor for the same activity.

U.S. lawmakers apologize to Canadian torture victim

U.S. lawmakers on Thursday offered apologies to a Canadian citizen who was deported by U.S. counterterrorism officials to Syria, where he says he was imprisoned and tortured. Lawmakers from both parties also called on the Bush administration to apologize to Maher Arar, a Syrian-born software engineer still barred from entering the United States even though the Canadian government has cleared him of any links to terrorist groups. An administration official said she was not aware of any plans for the White House to issue an apology to Arar. "The America I see and hear about today is not the same America I admired when I lived there from 1999 to 2001," he said. (Reuters)

Dr. Ron Paul

Facts about Ron Paul:

• won 5 of the 7 Republican debates held according to polls
  
• is the most popular candidate by far on sites such as YouTube
  
• is consistently ignored by the mainstream media
• is for limited government and personal liberties
• currently has a 100% rating from The Conservative Index
• is the only Republican against the Iraq war
• has received the most donations from members of the military of all candidates!

Too bad the U.S. Presidential Primaries are a rigged process to make people think they have a choice about who their candidates will be (see McCain in 2000, Dean in 2004).

Currencies - A World Of Change

Here are some charts that put the recent Foreign Exchange fluctuations in perspective: As the above graph shows, the Canadian dollar has been on an absolute terror lately, outperforming all of the major currencies relative to the $US. Below is the inverse chart showing other major world currencies against relative to the Canadian Dollar. Where will it end? The IMF has recently declared the $US to be still OVERVALUED, so expect the greenback to continue its devaluation. Students of history will recognize similarities between the current US$ and the English Pound (GBP) immediately after WWII when it lost it's reserve currency status and was devalued.

How to Download Any Media You Want

I have grown incredibly frustrated with content providers stuck in the past, continuing to deliver content through old media methods like cable TV, movie rental stores, and music stores. Their refusal to embrace the internet has cost them millions of customers and dollars. With widespread broadband access the Web has become a viable method for delivering ANY media you want. For example, the site Stage 6 delivers HD-quality video via divx compresion, in manner similar to the low resolution YouTube. But where is the content? When on earth will companies like Time Warner and Sony wake up and start pay sites that allow users to legally access their libraries online?

To force their hand, I will show you how to access virtually any media you want for free. I have been using bit torrents for the past 2-3 years and they are continuing to grow in popularity. Most people who are not tech-savy don't know how to access this world of free media so I will show you the simple steps required. The way I look at it, media companies need to be forced to wake up and embrace the internet and it appears they will only do this if their revenue stream disappears. It happened with music (Napster led to I-tunes) so it will also happen with other forms of content. So without further delay, here is how to get any media you want for free:

1) Download a bit-torrent client program. I have found Utorrent to be the best program to use. There are other bit torrent programs you can use if you want. Follow the simple installation instructions.

2) Visit Utorrent's Beginners guide to BitTorrents to learn how bit torrents work, and how to set up your internet router for maximum download speed (port forwarding).

3) Visit any number of Torrent Tracker websites to find stuff to download. Some of the most popular ones are Mininova, Isohunt, and Torrentz.com. My personal favorite, as you might expect is Conspiracy Central which carries weird stuff from "The Unconventional Nature of Water to "Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers." Plus, it removes items that content creators don't want distributed for free.

4) Click on the files you want (try and stick with torrents that have a large swarm of seeders), and then leave your computer on overnight. Depending on the size of the file and the swarm (# of people sharing) you may get the file sooner. I recently took several days getting a 9 GB collection of files. The beauty of torrents is that you can stop the program any time and come back to it later. As long as someone is seeding you are golden.

5) Don't download computer programs (e.g. filename.exe) unless you want a virus. I learned this the hard way.

My computer is slowing becoming my sole source of media. With Shaw cable charging an outrageous $500+ for an HDTV cable box, and with Over-the-Air HDTV not coming to Canada until at least 2011, I see no choice but to force idiotic media companies to embrace the internet.

Please note: File sharing is legal in Canada but may not be in your country. While this may change, I can only hope media companies wake up before it does. I would be happy to pay for content if I could get it easily over the internet.

Leah & Trevor...Finally

Trevor Bousquet who is a close friend of mine from my school days back in Consort, AB. was married last friday to Leah Coid. That just about does it - I am now the only unmarried guy out of my friend group.
While at the wedding I bumped into "Mr. A" and "Mr R" former teachers of mine from Consort School. It was nice to recount old memories.

The old group of three since elementary school, Scott, Delayne and Trevor.

I was able to drive up and be with family for thanksgiving at mom and dad's new place in Red Deer. The food was awesome and it was nice to visit family I hadn't seen for quite a while. I can't wait until Christmas!