Hunger of Memory: “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo”–A Poem by Wislawa Szymborska

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Poet Wislawa Szymborska

Poet Wislawa Szymborska

By Elaine Magliaro

Stanley Kunitz, the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States, once said, “Memory is everybody’s poet-in-residence.”

Wislawa Szymborska, a Nobel Prize-winning poet from Poland, was born in 1923. Jaroslav Anders (Los Angeles Times) said that during her young adulthood, she “witnessed some of the worst atrocities of the century, which left a lasting impression” on her terse, restrained language and “dark, disenchanted world view.” He added that it was “not surprising, therefore, that a subtle, intelligent, often ironic meditation on mortality seems to be the main unifying theme of her poetry.” He noted that “the theme of perpetual, universal fading and departing–not only of people, nations, living organisms but also memories, images, shadows and reflections–was present in her poetry from the very beginning”.

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Open Thread on the Subject of Torture: Does An Eye for an Eye Make the Whole World Blind?

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

StreckbettBy Elaine Magliaro

I’ve come across some articles on the subject of torture that I thought readers of this blog would find interesting and/or informative.

CIA on the Couch: Why there would have been no torture without the psychologists. (Slate)
This article was written by Steven Reisner. He is a psychoanalyst and founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and adviser on ethics and psychology for Physicians for Human Rights. In his article, Reisner writes of how the American Psychological Association appears to have colluded with the CIA to bend the profession’s rules of ethics to permit torture.

Excerpt:

Recent revelations in James Risen’s new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, add an additional dimension to this story—it appears that senior staff members of the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest association of psychologists, colluded with national security psychologists from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House to adapt APA ethics policy to suit the needs of the psychologist-interrogators. Now, the APA, under enormous pressure because of the allegations reported by Risen, has agreed to an independent investigation to be conducted by David Hoffman, a former inspector general and federal prosecutor. It will in all likelihood provide a rare opportunity to look inside the secret world of APA-counterintelligence collusion.

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Posted in American History, CIA, George W. Bush, Government, Hypocrisy, Media, Politics, Psychology, United States | Tagged , , , | 109 Comments

A Sunday Morning Video: A Mother Golden Retriever Playing with Her Puppies in the Snow

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

Posted by Elaine Magliaro

 

 

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“Do No Harm”: Dr. Steven Miles on the Subject of Doctors and Torture

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

StreckbettBy Elaine Magliaro

Julie Beck has an interesting interview with Dr. Steven Miles on the subject of doctors being involved with the torture of people over at The Atlantic. Dr. Miles is a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a board member of the Center for Victims of Torture. He is the author of Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors. Beck said that Dr. Miles has been studying the involvement of doctors in torture programs since 2003–when the “photos of the human rights violations at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to light…” He maintains Doctorswhotorture.com–a website that “tracks physician standards of conduct and punishments for doctors who aid torture around the world.”

Beck wrote about the release of the Senate’s report on the CIA’s interrogation program, which revealed “horrendous details of the torture tactics used on prisoners, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and ‘rectal feeding.’” She said, “Complicit in this treatment were several ‘medical officers’ (it’s not explicitly stated whether they hold M.D.s), who enabled, oversaw, and designed many of the techniques.” Beck noted that “medical officers and physicians’ assistants are cited throughout the report as consultants who advised on things like forcing detainees to stand on broken limbs and “rehydrating” via a rectal tube rather than a standard IV infusion.” She made mention of Dr. James Mitchell and Dr. Bruce Jessen–two psychologists who worked as “interrogation” advisers for the CIA. Mitchell and Jessen designed the CIA interrogation program. They received $81 million for their services.

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Posted in American History, Government, Imperialism, Society, United States | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

The Death of Twelve-Year-Old Tamir Rice Has Been Declared a Homicide

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

By Elaine Magliaro

The death of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who was fatally shot by a police officer in November, has been ruled a homicide. According to a Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s autopsy report that was released on Friday, Rice was struck once in the abdomen. The report said that “Rice sustained a single wound to the left side of his abdomen that traveled from front to back and lodged in his pelvis.”

On November 22nd, police responded “to a call of a suspect waving a handgun around in a Cleveland park.” Two officers arrived on the scene. “Within two seconds of exiting the car, Officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir…” Authorities said that the officer who shot the youngster mistook the child’s air gun for a real firearm. “The weapon turned out to be a replica that typically fires plastic pellets.” Rice died the following day.

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Posted in Government, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , | 29 Comments

On the Subject of Mass Hysteria: The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and the United States Post 9/11

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
The Execution of Giles Corey

The Execution of Giles Corey

By Elaine Magliaro

The first post that I wrote for Res Ipsa Loquitor as a guest blogger in 2010 was about Giles Corey. Corey, an elderly man, was a victim of the Salem witch hysteria. He was executed–not by hanging…but by being crushed to death. What prompted me to write about Corey at that time was the fact that people in our country were being whipped into frenzies by the following things: the belief that Sharia law could be instituted in the United States, the proposed building of a Muslim cultural center not far from Ground Zero, and stories about Americans being beheaded in the Arizona desert.

After the release of the Senate’s CIA torture report earlier this week, I thought it appropriate to revisit the Salem Witch Hysteria–another shameful period in our country’s history when innocent people were put to death because of fear–the kind of fear that lead our country down the dark tunnel to torturing human beings in the aftermath of 9/11.

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Posted in American History, Government, Propaganda, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

Music Saturday: Tina S, a rising star with a guitar.

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Chuck Stanley

By: Chuck Stanley for Music Saturday

Some folks seem to think child prodigy talent suddenly appears full blown without apparent effort. Unless the talent is an autistic savant, that simply doesn’t happen. It takes work, dedication, and practice. Lots of practice. This is Tina S, a young woman from France. She is now 15-years-old. She started playing the guitar about eight or nine years ago. She appears to have impressed her mentor enough that he started making videos of her early on. This is Tina S. back when she was about seven years old. Her guitar seems bigger than she is.

Watch her grow into a beautiful and talented young woman over the fold.

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Posted in Art, France, Music | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Joins the Torture Debate…Once Again Claiming That Nothing in the Constitution Prohibits It

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia

By Elaine Magliaro

Mark Sherman of the Associated Press reported today that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was “joining the debate over the Senate’s torture report by saying it’s hard to rule out the use of extreme measures to extract information if millions of lives were threatened.” Sherman said that Scalia “told a Swiss broadcast network that American and European liberals who say such tactics may never be used are being self-righteous.” Scalia added that he doesn’t “‘think it’s so clear at all,’ especially if interrogators were trying to find a ticking nuclear bomb.”

During the interview, Scalia said, “Listen, I think it’s very facile for people to say, `Oh, torture is terrible.’ You posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people. You think it’s an easy question? You think it’s clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person?”

Scalia acknowledged that the United States has laws against torture–but noted that there is nothing in the Constitution that “appears to prohibit harsh treatment of suspected terrorists.” He continued, “I don’t know what article of the Constitution that would contravene.”

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Posted in American History, Government, Hypocrisy, Media, Politics, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , | 45 Comments

Nonsense! – The Poetry of Lewis Carroll

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Gene Howington

by Gene Howington

Poetry Friday is usually Elaine’s bailiwick and rightfully so with her being our resident Poet Laureate. Although I appreciate poetry, my personal predilection for the grammatical arts tends toward the novel and its smaller variations. However, that does not make me any less a lover of language. In particular I love skillfully executed nonsense. It is almost communication, but not quite. I first fell in love with the use of nonsense language as a child watching the Marx Brothers. There is a large nonsense component to (especially) Groucho’s comedy.  For example, take this dialog from 1930’s “Animal Crackers”:

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

There is no poem in the English language more associated with nonsense than “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. So much so that the word jabberwocky itself is acceptably used as a synonym for nonsense. I discovered “Jabberwocky” shortly after discovering the Marx Brothers and I was hooked. That was in no small part why I was so pleased to see Carroll’s poem being recited by novelist Neil Gaiman for charity. I’m a big fan of Mr. Gaiman’s work, but who knew he could give such an outstanding reading (by heart no less) of “Jabberwocky”? And without further ado, spackle vibrates like the drops of Jupiter.

Now tell us what you know . . .

Posted in Art, Literature, Poetry, Short Video | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

“TORTURES”–A Poem by Wislawa Szymborska

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Poet Wislawa Szymborska

Poet Wislawa Szymborska

 

By Elaine Magliaro

I selected a poem that I think is most appropriate to post this Poetry Friday after the release of the Senate’s CIA torture report earlier in the week. “Tortures” was written by my favorite poet–Wislawa Szymborska. Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

Tortures
by Wislawa Szymborska
(1923-2012)

Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep;
it has thin skin, and the blood is just beneath it;
an adequate supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.
In tortures, all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just as they were, only the earth has grown smaller,
and what happens sounds as if it’s happening in the next room.

Nothing has changed.
It’s just that there are more people,
and beside the old offences new ones have sprung –
real, make-believe, short-lived, and non-existent…

Click here to read the full text of the poem.

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Posted in Art, Literature, Poetry | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments