Waterboarding, fun for all

The Whitehouse and Bush continue to maintain that waterboarding (or simulated drowning) is not torture and is instead an "enhanced technique" of interrogation. In the same vein as those brave or foolhardy individuals who have voluntarily submitted to being tasered to show that it's safe (disregard the growing number of fatalities), I respectively suggest that Mr President tries out a little waterboarding himself and reports back to We The People post haste.

There really is no learning going on.

The US has announced an agreement with Poland to site interceptor missiles on their soil. The missiles are part of the tragically flawed Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system. The system is flawed because it doesn't really have an enemy to protect the US from but also that it could easily be overwhelmed if currently friendly countries who do have the capability were to turn enemy. Anyway, that's not really the point of this post, which is actually to point out that history is repeating itself. After the announcement, all the news and political pundits anxiously theorized as to Russia's likely response. Some scenarios are not hard to imagine. In 1961 the US installed 15 Jupiter missiles in Izmir, Turkey, aimed at western Soviet cities, including Moscow. The Soviet response in 1962 was to install missiles in Cuba. This became the infamous "Cuban Missile Crisis" which history has unfairly portrayed as all the Russians doing. So, 47 years later, here we are again. Cuba is probably not likely to play host again, but Venezuela anyone? There really is no learning going on.

James Dyson: A genius or a bee?

Why is James Dyson proudly advertising that it took over 5000 prototypes to get the design of his vacuum cleaners right? One of the greatest geniuses of the modern era, Nikola Tesla once said of Thomas Edison "If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor."