Fact: John Walker Lindh never attacked or planned to attack US citizens or US soldiers. Fact: Lindh never provided assistance to Al Qaeda. Fact: though Lindh was involved the Taliban, he primarily did so before the United States had any dispute with them, i.e., before September 11th. Fact: Lindh had nothing to do with the uprising at the prison in Mazar-i-Sharif, nor the death of CIA officer Mike Spann. Fact: Lindh was tortured and otherwise deprived of the rights due a US citizen. Fact: the worst offense Lindh pled guilty to (he was convicted of nothing) was carrying weapons for the Taliban.

Due to all of that, Lindh is now serving a 20-year sentence in the ADX SuperMax facility in Colorado, where he is kept in solitary confinement 24 hours a day, with only 1 hour outside his cell in the prison yard. Consider the other guests in residence there, and their crimes. Lindh may have broken the law 1, but there is no way that what he did justifies his treatment. He didn't kill anyone. He didn't injure anyone (that I'm aware of). He didn't kidnap anyone. He didn't steal anything. He didn't commit treason 2. As far as we know, he never fired his weapon or even raised his voice in anger. For this he gets 20 years. If there was anything remotely like justice in his case, he would be a free man today 3, but if justice could be relied on, this never would have happened. I just wanted to make sure you didn't forget he existed.

¶ 1610 Posted at 05.37 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues | terrorism | politics )

I have a big backlog of books that I've read, but I don't have the motivation to give them a more thorough treatment.

• Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch: the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora lacks something of the charm of the first book, perhaps because of an imbalance in tone. The smaller ensemble of characters may also be to blame; it's easier to keep the action rolling with more primary characters. It's still decent, but I hope the next story of the Gentleman Bastards resembles the first more than the last. 0553804685 978-0553804683
• The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson: monuments usually exist to tell the future about an event in the past. What if it went the other way? Monuments appearing to tell us, in the past, about events in the future? Events involving the gradual conquest of the world by a mysterious figure. How would we react? Is this impending doom, or impending salvation? Is the future fixed? Wilson appears to have penchant for character-based semi-apocalyptic narratives featuring characters close to but not at the center of events. He's a very good writer who deserves to be more famous. 0812545249 978-0812545241
• Exit A by Anthony Swofford: Swofford is better known for "Jarhead," which I have not read. He switches to fiction with "Exit A," an uneven novel about teenage love, rebellion, the weird fusion of cultures around military bases in Japan, mistakes, and forgiveness. It's OK. 074327038X 978-0743270380
• Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker by James McManus: Poet 1 and journalist McManus goes to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker. Plans change. Instead of a simple magazine piece, what comes out is "Positively Fifth Street," a tangled narrative interleaving McManus's unexpected success in the tournament, the simultaeous trial of the murder of Las Vegas scion Ted Binion 2, and biographical vignettes of the author. This story about greed, vice, and gambling makes for entertaining reading, but occasionally difficult reading where McManus's weaving of the disparate story lines gets clumsy. If you like poker, true crime stories, and/or sleaze, though, it's a must-read. 0374236488
• The Forever War by Joe Haldeman : Private Mandella gets stuck in an interstellar war, where every battle takes him decades or centuries from the Earth of his youth. Adjusting gets harder every time, and Mandella struggles both with conflicted feelings about the war and a rootlessness in which the world has completely changed in his absence. I'm sure the book was very exciting and ground-breaking in the 1970s, but reading it now, it's just kind of a "meh." 0060510862 978-0060510862
• A&R by Bill Flanagan: after reading Flanagan's entertaining send-up of the TV business in New Bedlam, I picked up his first book. As with many first novels, this one is a little closer to the author's own experience, in music in this case. A&R tracks a tumultuous period in a couple of years at a record label. We see events from the perspective of former indie A&R man Jim Cantone, now a "senior vice president" at a the record label subsidiary of a multinational conglomerate. Flanagan takes some clever shots at the industry's general scumminess, while charting a somewhat unlikely course. The ending is a little too nice for such a cynical book, and Flanagan took a few unnecessary detours along the way (the character of Zoey Pavlov is incomplete, for instance), but neverthless produced a successful and enjoyable satire. 0375758305 978-0375758300
• New Ideas From Dead Economists by Todd Buchholz: a good survey of the history and evolution of economic thought from its nascence in the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century. It makes for an accessible and readable starter for anyone interested in economics or economists. 0452288444 978-0452288447
• Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-1943 by Anthony Beevor: Stalingrad was the linchpin of the war between the stubborn megalomania of Adolf Hitler and the impulsive paranoia of Josef Stalin. Their clash resulted in unimaginable suffering on both sides in the frozen wasteland of the Don steppe in the winter of 1942-1943 as two armies fought over the rubble of what is now Volgograd. Beevor covers not just the battle for the city itself, but also sets the stage for everything leading up to it, bringing you into the action with individual stories of heroism and villainy. It's an excellent look at what was quite possibly the pivotal battle of the war with Nazi Germany, giving us perspective on how truly close a thing it was. Highly recommended. 0140284583 978-0140284584
• The White Lioness by Henning Mankell: this mystery takes place as the end of South Africa's apartheid system neared. There are those who don't want it to end, and they're willing to kill Nelson Mandela to spark a race war to do it. An unlikely mistake connects this conspiracy to Sweden, where we come back to our hero Kurt Wallander. While the series is focused on Sweden, and much of this particular book takes place in Sweden, the strongest parts are actually those taking place in South Africa or from the perspective of the South African characters. The feelings and politics around apartheid were surprisingly interesting to me. Beyond that it's a serviceable mystery, exceeding the previous novel in the series. 0099464691 978-0099464693
• The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell: dark, grisly tales of human exploitation may be normal for the jaded readers of American mystery novels, but they're a lot more jarring when they happen in small-town Sweden. Once again Kurt Wallander is on the case. Early on, the identity of the villain is clearly telegraphed, which makes the mystery at the core somewhat less thrilling. This is more a story of whydunit and howtoprovehedunit than the standard whodunit. Mankell still manages to produce a serviceable novel, but it's not what I'd hoped for. 1565849930 978-1565849938
• Sidetracked by Henning Mankell: serial killers aren't really a Swedish phenomenon, which makes the crimes in "Sidetracked" all the more bewildering to the small-town Swedish police force. Kurt Wallander takes the lead again, but may have found his match against a murderer whose scalped victims appear to have little in common. The high point is the killer: the identity is an unlikely one on the surface, but Mankell writes it to fit, and the viewpoint is a scarily convincing one. There was one sour note that Mankell can't be blamed for, and that's that I had very recently read Malcolm Gladwell's debunking of criminal profiles; it made it hard to swallow the parts featuring the profiler. Aside from that, however, "Sidetracked" is an excellent mystery which stands enough on its own that you can read it without having read the previous 4 books in the series. 1400031567 978-1400031566
• Hinterland by James Clemens: an underwhelming sequel to his previous "Shadowfall." The creative elements Clemens brought to the epic fantasy genre are no longer novel, and some of the areas where he was uncreative are even more annoying. The story is also less epic; it doesn't feel as grand as the previous book. The settings are limited and the plot of the book too skimpy for the time devoted to it. Not enough happens to move the story forward for 480 pages it uses. Clemens's writing style feels like what I expect he produces for his action-adventure novels (written as "James Rollins"). Not an inspiring effort. 0451461134 978-0451461131

¶ 1612 Posted at 02.05 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

I found Stephen Baxter's Evolution to be rather annoying at first. Baxter traces the evolution of mankind from the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event to the death of Earth in the far future, by way of vignettes of various members of species in the ancestral line. Many of the early ones were rather cutesy, hence the annoyance. Either they got better or I got used to it, as my annoyance diminished as I proceeded. Most of the book should more properly be considered pre-historical fiction rather than science fiction; it's only once Baxter reaches the modern human era that he gets into truly speculative territory. One thing is clear once again: Baxter ain't no optimist. Given the story involves characters separated by millions of years, there isn't much continuity in the traditional sense. The overall arc seeks to make a point about the significance of the environment in human history, and a warning about our future should we fail to heed the point. That characterization makes it sound far more preachy than it actually is; the point is made with relative subtlety. Overall, I'd rate it a fair effort. Baxter's stories are less than compelling, but his imagination and attention to detail warrant respect. 0345457838 978-0345457837.

¶ 1613 Posted at 02.29 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

How good are you at guessing? I got 5 clearly right, 2 clearly wrong, and 3 just barely wrong. I am among the 99% of people who are over-confident. Ironically or appropriately, depending on how you look at it, I read the comment about over-confidence and was confident that I was not over-confident.

¶ 1615 Posted at 05.35 PM ⇒ No Comments ( tests )

Extra time in debates is one way the "front-runners" get preferential treatment from the media. "Front-runner" status becomes self-reinforcing. I'd like to steal an idea from the chess world. The candidates are each allotted the same amount of time at the beginning of the debate. From the moment the moderator finishes the question until the candidate finishes answering, the candidate is on the clock. If a candidate runs out of time, that's it; they can't talk anymore throughout the debate. If you want to spend your whole time budget talking about fishing, you can do that. If you want to allocate the same amount of time to each topic, you can do that too. I figure for a 90 minute debate with 8 participants (the current Democratic field), you'd give each candidate a 10-minute clock, with 10 more minutes for the moderator to ask questions 1. For the 9 Republican candidates, it would be 9 minutes each, plus 9 minutes for the moderator. This would also nerf the biased tactic of questions directed at particular candidates. Of course, since this would take power away from the political machines at the center and distribute it more towards the fringes, it would never happen, but it's nice to dream.

¶ 1616 Posted at 05.46 PM ⇒ No Comments ( politics )

Use a wire whisk instead of a fork for mashing avocadoes.

¶ 1621 Posted at 10.17 PM ⇒ No Comments ( tips | food )

I have invented a term for a design pattern I have found frequently in my house: load-bearing trim.

¶ 1622 Posted at 10.47 PM ⇒ No Comments ( words | house )