|
|
|
worse-than-random
Tuesday, April 21 2009
After a day of work in the prison, Gretchen called me from the High Falls Café to invite me to a little drinking and non-gourmet food with her, Jed (with whom I'd done much recent prison work) and Jed's girlfriend. It sounded like fun, and I like the High Falls Café (mostly for reasons related to ambience, I find it about three times more appealing than the Egg's Nest, Gretchen's usual High Falls destination).
With Gretchen in our booth, everyone kept to strictly vegan menu items and there were none of the plates of chicken wings like that time it was just me, Jed, and his girlfriend. At some point Gretchen launched into one of her anti-animal product monologues, and, unusually, I backed her up with a few points about factory farm runoff I'd learned from a recent broadcast of Fresh Air (an interview with Hedrick Smith, who was pimping a new Frontlineepisode he'd created entitled "Poisoned Waters").
Later Jed made an interesting comment about the memos the Obama administration recently released concerning torture policy under the George W. Bush administration. Jed said that he couldn't believe, in these advanced technological times, that the way we in America torture our prisoners is to slam them against walls. I chimed in that even the Soviets were using drugs to get their confessions (dubious though they might have been) back during the Brezhnev era, and that was more than thirty years ago. With torture as with everything else in the Bush administration, things were pursued in the most boneheaded, cruelly primitive, and ahistorical way possible. And why? Partly to provide non-existence evidence supporting the invasion of Iraq. That we survived that period of worse-than-random decisionmaking is owed entirely to inertia.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090421 feedback
previous | next |
