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PhoTos<br />
lifesTyle<br />
Brandon Showers | tpburl.com/b5cr3p<br />
John parli | tpburl.com/v27zkb<br />
ORGAn DOnOR DOlls ARe MORe<br />
GORY THAn CuTe<br />
By simon Crisp | 4/27/09 | newslite tpburl.com/06g2rp<br />
An artist has created a set of vinyl figures which he hopes will encourage more people to<br />
donate their organs.<br />
David Foox came up with the idea for his ‘Organ Donors’ collection - dolls which<br />
have hearts, lungs, eyeballs and brains for heads - after a family member had a double lung<br />
transplant.<br />
While ‘Uncle Ken’ survived the op, David wanted to use his art to draw attention to organ<br />
donation and started work on the 24 doll collection.<br />
The £10 figures come in ‘blind boxes’ meaning the buyer does not know what they have<br />
got until they open it ... and their gory nature could leave surprised heart attack victims needing<br />
a transplant.<br />
“Human body parts are interchangeable and as much as we know about the body, there is<br />
so much more to learn,” said Foox from Denver.<br />
“It is a conceptual way of dealing with our humanity - whether physical or spiritual. It is<br />
also supposed to be a lighthearted approach to a serious, bloody, and gory issue.”<br />
He says most people have reacted positively to seeing the figures though sometimes people<br />
think they are “spooky” or “freaky.”<br />
The collection can be ordered online.<br />
PoliTiCs<br />
THe TORTuRe PATH<br />
By hunter | 4/21/09 | The daily kos tpburl.com/1yz8n6<br />
I can only fathom that we are supposed to beg.<br />
I think we are supposed to get down on our knees, even grovel for it, and beg that our<br />
nation act in accordance with its own laws, with international laws, and with basic decency.<br />
We among the more expendable classes are supposed to write passionate editorials; we are<br />
supposed to form grass roots movements; we are supposed to make the usual dozens of phone<br />
calls, and be ashamed, and debase ourselves - and then, perhaps, if we are very lucky, and if<br />
we beg enough and with the right arguments and place enough pressure in the right, most<br />
uncomfortable spots, then our own government will relent, and our laws will be followed, and<br />
investigations conducted, and if warranted, those responsible will be prosecuted. And we will<br />
finally as a nation, at long last, reject torture in practice as well as in words.<br />
But they will not do it, unless they are bowed to it by the collective weight of their own<br />
citizens. That seems to be, still, the message: they will not acquiesce unless bludgeoned into<br />
doing it. It is ceded to us to decide if America will have the smallest shard of conscience, and<br />
once again the voices of basic decency will be cast as the unreasonable ones, the foolish ones,<br />
the troublemaking rabble pestering those that know better, and we shall have to rise above it yet<br />
another time.<br />
That is the only conclusion I can come to. It seems transparently obvious to Washington,<br />
to the Obama administration and its allies, to the Republicans and the Democrats of Congress,<br />
to all the very important people working very serious jobs, that while we can with great fanfare<br />
and self-satisfaction no longer torture prisoners in our care -- a war crime, in any context not<br />
involving ourselves -- it is far more challenging a proposition to think that we would actually<br />
take steps to enforce the myriad laws and conventions against it.<br />
And in that sense, torture by the United States of America is as good as legalized, because<br />
we have all but declared that it will never be that illegal, the kind of illegal that leads to<br />
investigations and punishment. It will merely remain a deplorable act -- a war crime, in any<br />
context not involving us doing the torture -- that we will never, ever use, except when we<br />
do, and without consequence. We will not condone it but, like in Serbia, or Guatemala, or<br />
Cambodia, or the thugs of any one of a hundred pissant groups and countries that used the<br />
practice to vicious effect, when to their advantage, we will ignore the laws, the treaties and<br />
conventions, and we will not prosecute our torturers. Or, God forbid, those that specifically<br />
ordered the practice. Or those that sought to legalize it, on pen and paper, with arguments<br />
comprehensible only to sociopaths or monsters.<br />
It apparently needs to be stated, yet again, that this is not a case of seeking vengeance.<br />
When powerful people are caught in illegal acts, it is nearly always the case that they claim<br />
prosecuting them would be “vengeance:” it never enters the minds of our leaders, whether<br />
they be in government or in business, that perhaps the law should be applied to them simply<br />
because it is the law. There always needs to be additional motive attributed; it goes nearly<br />
without saying that, without the additional motives of vengeance, or revenge, or punishment<br />
then naturally those in power are not held to the laws required of the rest of us. You know you<br />
have arrived, in America, when you can break a law at will and have the government itself argue<br />
against your prosecution on the grounds that doing so would be controversial or divisive.<br />
Whether or not any of the parties involved are actually convicted, whether even a single<br />
one of them see a day of jail time is not the question. Whether we preclude that possibility, as<br />
policy of government, is the more damaging question. For in precluding even the possibility<br />
of justice, we immunize the act, and if we immunize the act then it is not, in any meaningful<br />
sense, actually illegal.<br />
It is not about revenge: it is about demonstrating that even for the most powerful among<br />
us, even for our own government, there are laws, and they are not optional. It is about<br />
demonstrating that we are a country in which law has a substance that overrides the credentials<br />
of the person breaking it. It is the brightest shining example of what we as a nation are or are<br />
not: it is our moral measure.<br />
Knowing that torture was condoned in our names is an abominable thing. This parlor<br />
game of moving forward, not backward, of letting bygones be bygones, admitting error, and just<br />
getting the hell on with our days is just as dismal, because this, finally, internalizes the message<br />
that we citizens, our government, and other nations will take from this sorry affair, which is<br />
that while we begrudgingly acquiesce to stopping, we will, even now, refuse to recognize the act<br />
itself as truly criminal.<br />
There is absolutely no pride to be gained in no longer torturing, but blocking justice in<br />
those instances in which we have. It is no act of courage; it is no enlightened position. It is<br />
merely the easiest path, and the one followed in nearly every instance by nations proven to<br />
have committed foul acts. Sorry, but we’re not about to do anything about it. We’ll stop, but in<br />
exchange for stopping we expect the episode to be forgotten. What would count as a war crime<br />
for you other countries counts for us as an internal matter, and we consider it closed.<br />
I do not feel like begging. After years of railing against the practice (to be largely ignored,<br />
because in those days the majority of voices presumed torture to have positive effects, and<br />
therefore be justified), after years of government denial that any such thing was happening (in<br />
spite of clear and demonstrable evidence that it did), the last thing in the world that I feel like<br />
doing is once again begging, at long last, and to the supposed reasonable people that replaced<br />
the last reasonable people, that we actually follow our own goddamn laws, or treat crimes by<br />
our powerful with the same grave manner as we do crimes by anyone else in the nation.<br />
I am fucking sick of it, and I am fucking sick of hearing how we have entered a new age of<br />
enlightenment merely because we have stopped a transparently abominable practice, one that<br />
we condemn with vigor when undertaken by any other nation. I am fucking sick of myself,<br />
my compatriots and the rest of the public having to act as collective conscience for all those in<br />
power that, apparently, have long since evolved past even common sense, much less common<br />
shame.<br />
I know by tomorrow or next week I will relent, and I will start the cause anew, and I will<br />
join all the others in penning yet another fervent message explaining why, at long last -- at long<br />
fucking last -- we cannot simultaneously condemn torture and yet declare a casual, dismissive<br />
amnesty for all those that ordered it, and planned it, and justified it, and executed it, under the<br />
usual theory of the powerful that crimes by the powerful simply cannot be prosecuted lest chaos<br />
or embarrassment ensue.<br />
But for today, I can only say damn you all to hell. Damn you all for making us -- us, of all<br />
people, average citizens with no positions of power, with no power at all save whatever we can<br />
wring out of the thin air, and with nothing at stake but a sense of shared, basic, foundational<br />
morality -- yet again rail for our own country to exercise a shred of the morality, the justice,<br />
the national greatness that it professes for all to hear. I was once outraged; I was, after that,<br />
ashamed; now I am only incredulous. With every passing day my nation acts less like a guiding<br />
beacon, and more like a crook.<br />
PhoTos<br />
Johnny daigneault | tpburl.com/mhqcp2<br />
VieWS expReSSed in Content do not neCeSSaRily ReFleCt the VieWS oF the puBliSheR oR the pRinted Blog inC. 7