Just when you think it couldn't get any worse.

Dahlia Lithwick on the "compromise" bill that now makes torture official US policy.

For the five years since 9/11, we have been in the dark in this country. This president has held detainees in secret prisons and had them secretly tortured using secret legal justifications. Those held in secret at Guantanamo Bay include innocent men, as do those who have been secretly shipped off to foreign countries and brutally tortured there. That was a shame on this president.

But passage of the new detainee legislation will be a different sort of watershed. Now we are affirmatively asking to be left in the dark. Instead of torture we were unaware of, we are sanctioning torture we'll never hear about. Instead of detainees we didn't care about, we are authorizing detentions we'll never know about. Instead of being misled by the president, we will be blind and powerless by our own choice. And that is a shame on us all.

The US now operates secret prisons in Eastern Europe, sends people off to countries where they're tortured, believes that it's ok to strip persons "accused" of terrorism or abbeting terrorism to be stripped of Haebeus Corpus (or knowing what they're charged with), and wants to protect people who commited torture in the past.

How can you be a US citizen and not be outraged and disgusted by this? I'm just amazed at how many people a) don't know about this b) don't care and c) think it is perfectly OK.

Brad De Long is clearly disgusted:

This is bad. Very bad. I can't underscore how bad this is. This is our Fugitive Slave Act, our Sedition Act, our Korematsu. This is a danger to our domestic liberties and a terrifying threat to our national security--for its impact on our international standing and on our alliances may be terrible indeed.

Correlation is NOT causation

Greg Mankiw has a nice post on the topic:

It really pisses me off when people confuse correlation with causation. Here is what I just read in the Harvard University Gazette:

Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine tracked 1,055 medical students for 36 years. Compared with cooler heads, the hotheads were six times more likely to suffer heart attacks by age 55 and three times more likely to develop any form of heart or blood vessel disease.

The conclusion is clear: Anger is bad for you at any age.

No, the conclusion from the fact given is not at all clear. People who get mad more easily do so for a reason--a more stressful job, bad genes, or some other mysterious factor X. Maybe it is the X factor, rather than the anger itself, that is bad for you. Maybe reducing anger without changing X won't change health outcomes at all.

I am going to call the author and give him a piece of my mind. Just as soon as this pain in my chest goes away.

It pisses me off as well. My feeling is that human beings NEED to ascribe a cause to an effect (preferably one that validates their personal beliefs) -- however unlikely/not-exactly-correct that may be.

Setting a monkey in intellectual combat with its banana.

Brad Delong quotes "Ezra" on the debate between Sebastian Mallaby and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)