Since he is probably spinning in his grave after seeing the pure right-wing propaganda his grandson is putting out these days.
Note to right-wingers who have no arguments for torture from the real world. There are a few things you need to realize about your hero Jack Bauer and about torture in general:
As an intelligence gathering tool, torture almost always is a complete waste of time for a few reasons. The largest being that a person will say anything to stop the pain under duress including falsehoods and outright lies. In fact, a well trained operative will purposefully lie as much as possible in order to suck up military and government resources by having them chase false leads. Ie. if a terrorist was planning on attacking location A and was being tortured, it would be in his interest to talk about fake attacks that would be happening at locations B, C, D, etc. all of these “torture-induced tidbits” will need to be followed up and generally suck up the resources of an intelligence team for a significant period of time per lie. Now, similarly, if you are looking for operatives who are working together, a person under duress will confess that his own grandmother is a terrorist if it will stop the pain, even momentarily. So either way, torture is simply a complete waste of time, resources and morality. People who generally are given carte blanche to have authority over a person to the point of being able to torture them without fearing the consequences will generally devolve into a state where they will torture and harm the person without any real reason. The Stanford Experiment is a good example of how ordinary people put into an artificial position of authority over another group of people (especially if that authority is brought to an extreme) can devolve to a primitive non-moral state. If anyone wants an example of a real world wartime situation where allowing torture led to incredible immoral acts, and destroyed any possible sympathy for the judicial force involved, all you have to do is simply observe Abu Gharaib.
Jack Bauer is a fictional character, 24 is a fictional television show. To use it as a reason to support what are obviously immoral legal perspectives is pure stupidity and insanity. There is a reason things always work out in a fictional story, it is simply because the writers of the story are essentially Gods. They can decide if any action is effective or not. As soon as fictional stories are viewed as legitimate reasons to support immoral activities, all logic and reason breaks down in the political and judicial process. When a person is reduced to using fiction as a judicial precedent, that person should rightly be ignored as by using fiction they can set the terms of any argument in their favour without using any logic or reason. A good example that the right would understand regarding this would be for a Marxist to use Marxist fiction to support random violent acts against middle and upper-class members of society. Especially since in some of their fiction, these violent acts are presented as if they would instantly force a revolution and lead to a system which (to them) is more moral than the current system.
So to recap: Jack Bauer = Keifer Sutherland, a NDP-supporting, grandson of Tommy Douglas; Torture simply doesn’t work as an intelligence gathering tool and anyone who has looked at this in detail knows this. It does, however, work very well as a tool of suppression; Most importantly, 24 is fiction, pure fiction, everything in it is purely from the minds of a bunch of writers, and not from any experience in real life. As such, if they want to make torture work in their fiction, they can. That does not miraculously make it work in the real world.
The Canadian dollar broke through the $1.10 US mark in overseas trading early Wednesday.
Analysts say the high-flying loonie, which hit the 110.02 cents US mark, shows no sign of landing anytime soon.
The currency set a modern-era record last Friday when it rose to 1.07 cents US, the highest it’s been since 1950.
Analysts say the latest surge is credited to an impressive run-up in the price of crude oil, which is now flirting with the $98 US a barrel mark Wednesday.
What are my next predictions… Well, with oil and other commodity prices as high as they are, and the fact that it doesn’t look like the Bank of Canada is going to do any interest rate changes, I’m unsure.
So, I say that psychologically this should stabilize or go down for a bit. So, By the end of this year I say: 40-50% chance that the dollar will continue this insane climb and surpass 1.15 or even 1.20 (With the current craziness over the price of oil, this is highly likely imesho.)
Sadly, though, this is all insane, because I consider my estimates to highly liberal and yet looking at the current trends I have been wrong in the conservative direction.
