Baithak World Jul 03: Another Hitchens' Somersault, China Part I, Tom Wolfe, News & Views, RealNews

Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture! Hitchens announced the news like he'd brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. "Believe me," he told a waiting nation, "it's torture." Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it's "extreme interrogation." I thought everybody over the age of five knew that, but as usual, I misoverestimated the media. Hitchens's tame little torture session is the biggest S&M video on the web since 9 1/2 Weeks. Hitchens's video is totally fake -- there's even soft-rock background music playing on the video, better music than you usually get at the dentist's, and his "interrogators" treat him more like a client getting a mud pack at a spa was than a real suspect in Iraq. That makes it even more disgusting that Hitch caved in after only eleven seconds of having water poured over a towel on his face. Eleven seconds! Think about the timeline here: For five long years he supported this stuff when it was happening to other people. Once it happened to him, he needed exactly eleven seconds to see the light. Hitchens Gets Waterboarded, Withdraws from Iraq in Eleven Seconds

BEIJING - Libraries are filled with thousands of volumes explaining all the problems and intricacies of the momentous passage from agricultural to industrial society, from rural to urban life, from a world marked by huge gaps in time and space to another in which communications and telecommunications immensely narrow time and distance. These changes still puzzle us and seem largely unexplained. Yet the changes, occurring over a span of 200 years, are minimal if compared to what has happened in China in the past 30 years. CHINA'S MASSIVE WRENCH, Part 1 : Change in the face of foreign devils

Wolfe, who calls himself "the social secretary of neuroscience," often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural commentary. His 1996 essay, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," raised questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition. THE TRANSCRIPT: TOM WOLFE + MICHAEL GAZZANIGA

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Doonesbury@SLATE

Paul Jay presents RealNews

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