![thedailywhat: OH SH- of the Day: Sarah Palin and her doppelganger divide by zero at a November 19 Going Rogue book signing in Noblesville, IN.
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I think I’m going to be sick.](http://18.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ktjre5kWXn1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
thedailywhat: OH SH- of the Day: Sarah Palin and her doppelganger divide by zero at a November 19 Going Rogue book signing in Noblesville, IN.
[via.]
I think I’m going to be sick.
At 2:00 p.m. that day, Arar was taken back to his cell, chained and shackled, and provided a cold McDonald’s meal - his first food in nearly two days.
It would be funny if it weren’t so horrifying.
A court decision that reflects what type of country the U.S. is
spaceships:
It’s not often that an appellate court decision reflects so vividly what a country has become, but such is the case with yesterday’s ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Arar v. Ashcroft (.pdf). Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” — despite his pleas that he would be tortured — to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing. I’ve appended to the end of this post the graphic description from a dissenting judge of what was done to Arar while in American custody and then in Syria.In January, 2007, the Canadian Prime Minister publicly apologized to Arar for the role Canada played in these events, and the Canadian government paid him $9 million in compensation. That was preceded by a full investigation by Canadian authorities and the public disclosure of a detailed report which concluded “categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada.” By stark and very revealing contrast, the U.S. Government has never admitted any wrongdoing or even spoken publicly about what it did; to the contrary, it repeatedly insisted that courts were barred from examining the conduct of government officials because what we did to Arar involves “state secrets” and because courts should not interfere in the actions of the Executive where national security is involved. What does that behavioral disparity between the two nations say about how “democratic,” ”accountable,” and “open” the United States is?
Yesterday, the Second Circuit — by a vote of 7-4 — agreed with the government and dismissed Arar’s case in its entirety. It held that even if the government violated Arar’s Constitutional rights as well as statutes banning participation in torture, he still has no right to sue for what was done to him. Why? Because “providing a damages remedy against senior officials who implement an extraordinary rendition policy would enmesh the courts ineluctably in an assessment of the validity of the rationale of that policy and its implementation in this particular case, matters that directly affect significant diplomatic and national security concerns” (p. 39). In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context — even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured — and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.
Reflecting the type of people who fill our judiciary, the judges in the majority also invented the most morally depraved bureaucratic requirements for Arar to proceed with his case and then claimed he had failed to meet them. Arar did not, for instance, have the names of the individuals who detained and abused him at JFK, which the majority said he must have. As Judge Sack in dissent said of that requirement: it “means government miscreants may avoid [] liability altogether through the simple expedient of wearing hoods while inflicting injury“ (p. 27; emphasis added).
The commentary about this case from Harper’s Scott Horton perfectly captures the depravity of what our Government has done — and continues to do — to Arar. His analysis should be read in its entirety, and he concludes with this:
When the history of the Second Circuit is written, the Arar decision will have a prominent place. It offers all the historical foresight of Dred Scott, in which the Court rallied to the cause of slavery, and all the commitment to constitutional principle of the Slaughter-House Cases, in which the Fourteenth Amendment was eviscerated. The Court that once affirmed that those who torture are the “enemies of all mankind” now tells us that U.S. government officials can torture without worry, because the security of our state might some day depend upon it.
I want to add one principal point to all of this. This is precisely how the character of a country becomes fundamentally degraded when it becomes a state in permanent war. So continuous are the inhumane and brutal acts of government leaders that the citizens completely lose the capacity for moral outrage and horror. The permanent claims of existential threats from an endless array of enemies means that secrecy is paramount, accountability is deemed a luxury, and National Security trumps every other consideration — even including basic liberties and the rule of law. Worst of all, the President takes on the attributes of a protector-deity who can and must never be questioned lest we prevent him from keeping us safe.
— Glenn Greenwald (via unburyingthelead)
This makes me want to vomit.
Dear Cracked.com
travors: If you must be one of those irritating sites that insists I have to set up yet another account in order to comment, at least have enough respect for the people who visit and support your site, to warn them BEFORE they write the comment.
I think you might appreciate the Lazarus Firefox extension. Life saver.
fivefifteen: Window Design by Karl Lagerfeld for Printemps, Winter 2008
ienjoysweets: guhhhhh future job? yes please.
HELLO this is what we’re supposed to be learning in this ridiculous exhibition design class. Instead, we are designing park benches and not even having class half the time. (Today was the seventh time he’s canceled class. SEVEN. With NO makeup dates. Tuition breaks down to about $138 per class session… that means he has thrown nearly $1000 - ONE THOUSAND - of my dollars out the window. Not to mention the fact that we’ve never met for an entire class period… we always get out at least an hour early if not more. The school policy is that if a student misses four classes, including being 15 minutes late to a class, they automatically fail the course. What happens when it’s not the student, but the professor??)
The McDonald’s would represent the “American” segment ” of a new “food court”, and would be situated “among (other) world cuisines and coffee shops,” it wrote.
McDonald’s restaurants to open at the Louvre - Telegraph
I don’t know which is more disgusting to me - opening a McDonald’s in the Louvre, or the fact that McDonald’s is the best representative of American cuisine.
The other day I went to the store and bought a big tub of yogurt and a bunch of fresh raspberries and blueberries, thinking of France, and how that was virtually all I ate for most of my time there.
I don’t know if French yogurt is different from American yogurt, but whatever I just put nearly an entire pack of raspberries in is not what I survived on in the Loire Valley. It’s runny, and kind of bitter, and has the texture of one part cream to two parts chalk. How do people eat this?
kleinmania: Spreadsheet (prototype)soultrain: I would buy it in an instant.
sickofthesouth: holy shit i want thiseastling: Math 120 nightmares EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.
sickofthesouth: lol i LOVED math 120 until we got to the part where he was all ORIGAMIZ TRIG MATHS ANGLE RAWR. the rest of it was easy sauce.
Yeah, I was failing and dropped it waaaay before we got to the origami part. All I remember are the never-ending spreadsheets of doom.
sexartandpolitics:
Damien Hirst - Pharmacy, 1992
Room installation, Mixed media
Dimensions variable“Yesterday, Cartrain told The Independent: “I went to the Tate Britain and by chance had a golden opportunity to borrow a packet of pencils from the Pharmacy exhibit. That same day I made up a fake police appeal poster advertising that the pencils had been removed from the Tate and that if anyone had any information they should contact the police on the phone number advertised. “A few weeks later I went out and I returned home to find out the art and antiques squad from New Scotland Yard had called round with a warrant for my arrest.” He was told by custody officers that the pencils were valued at £500,000 and that he had damaged “the concept of a public artwork titled Pharmacy … valued at £10,000,000”. Cartrain is on bail and, if convicted, his actions will feature among the highest value modern art thefts in Britain. The box of pencils – a very rare “Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series” – will be put back by Hirst, although the installation is no longer on public display.Really? The pencils are that integral to the piece?
Damien Hirst in vicious feud with teenage artist over a box of pencils - The Independent (via britticisms)standardgrey: MOAR HIRST HAX PLS
sympathyfortheartgallery: HIRSTHAX is a pretty good name for a project; internet get on it.
Does anyone actually take Hirst seriously? I mean aside from seriously wanting to vomit.
This would be great if they hadn’t bastardized it by sticking Hirst in the lineup.
kateoplis: Jan van Toorn, Van Abbemuseum, 1971
Although this poster is a museum exhibition promotion, it’s also a bold critique. It manages to disclose the banalities of both the art market and of accepted visual communication processes. The work represents Van Toorn’s career-long concern with reclaiming the media as a channel of communication, from its modern role of mere distribution, or worse, of obfuscation and deception. (via designobserver)
Duchamp and Klein should never be in an exhibition together. Klein was being completely serious when he sold his Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility to Palazzoli. Duchamp made Fountain to make fun of people like Klein. Ugh.
Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.
I mean, the whole article is so quality. It is rife with gems like, “My mom taught me to believe in my flyness and conquer my shyness,” and “To use is necessary and if you can’t be used, then you are useless.”
Top 10: Subtle Ways To Tell Her She's Getting Fat
The sad part is that this isn’t a joke.
7: “By making her ask for more food, you might succeed in shaming her into an acknowledgment of her recent weight gain, and hopefully to instigate a conversation about what she’s going to do about it.”
3: “You might not be proud of stooping to this level, but nothing says “better lose some weight” like a broken chair. After you loosen a few screws or remove some important slats of a chair in which you know she’ll sit and subsequently break, sit back and watch the guaranteed dietary transformation that ensues.”
Disgusting.
okayjokesover: do you know how hard i laughed when i read about r.pattz apparently playing dali in a new biopic in the paper this morning? yeah, i bet you can guess. the answer is: “SO HARD I NEARLY FELL OFF MY CHAIR/SNORTED COFFEE UP MY NOSE. AND BY NEARLY I MEAN DID. FOR THE SECOND ONE ONLY.”semisetadrift: “Dalí Pattinson, you can razor my eyeballs any day, baby (snort, giggle, moustache twirl-and-groom)”.
This is almost better than Nick Cave’s handlebar ‘stache. No wait, it is better.
unicornology: i just had a good look at that photo of r.pattz’s dali-esque make-over and LOLOLOL.
eastling: HAHAHA SERIOUSLY. Robert Pattinson as Dali has got to be the most ridiculous idea I have ever heard. And that is the most ridiculous stache I have ever seen.
ohmaninternets: Only three men really have what it takes to play Dalí. These are, of course, Christopher Walken, Samuel L. Jackson and Jackie Chan.
That is the undeniable, absolute truth.
“Thanks to Trend de la Creme who recently reported on sticky sunglasses, we can now cover our eyes with what appears to be disposable sunglasses by designers Azumi & David.”
-Trendhunter
Oh man, I love living in a disposable - and apparently fashion devolving? - society.
