Davison Online

Worth your time:

He’s also got a book, The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life.

Daniel Larison of The American Conservative shares my “sheer amazement” at the defenders of torture in Torture And War.

…the GOP and the right-wing Christianists have endorsed the methods of the Nazis, the Communist Chinese, and the Stalin-era Soviet Union. That there is some bedfellows, and it tells the rest of us all we need to know when it comes time to vote.

After years of lies, it is now incontrovertible that the US employed torture in it’s so-called “war on terror.” I am stunned that there would be defenders of this coverup, and I am frankly appalled that many who I otherwise respect are so blasé about the situation.

Let me be clear: Watergate is NOTHING compared to this. NOTHING. We tortured–hundreds of times–individuals who had no more information to give. We did this to individuals who were held without charges, without legal representation or without judicial oversight. This was both illegal and immoral. It is a stain on American honor, and it greatly increases the risk and odds of torture to American hostages, military and civilian, going forward.

I am appalled further that there is anyone in America who would defend these actions, yet such is the state of the Republican Party, Fox News and right-wing punditry.

Sadly, the Obama Administration’s refusal to investigate (let alone prosecute) these serious allegations highlights how President Obama’s pragmatism is both a great strength and, now, a horrible weakness. That a great many Democrats would undoubtedly be indicted, particularly those on intelligence committees and in leadership positions, along with scores of GOP members from the executive and legislative branches, only solidifies my opinion that we will never see justice in this case.

So let’s dispense with the notion we are a peace-loving, law-abiding, justice-seeking nation and people right now. We are, as pundit Andrew Sullivan says, a banana republic.

Although you can argue about the overall justice of the verdicts, the Nuremberg Nazi trials established this legal principle for Western Civilization:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

President Obama, while he deserves credit for releasing the documents surrounding the torture of those prisoners in US control during the Bush Administration, is utterly wrong to shield from legal prosecution those CIA operatives and (God forbid) contractors who carried out these heinous acts.

This case highlights what is the fundamental characteristic, and in this case flaw, of the Obama temperament: He balances his decisions. Unfortunately, sometimes situations cry out for justice, and in the face of this evil there is very little balancing that needs to be done.

Those who committed crimes should be tried for them.

The University of Portland’s newspaper, The Beacon, published an article last week about the death of a student at the school. Their choice of headlines: “Suicide claims UP senior” got the newspaper pulled by university administrators.

By all accounts, it was the headline not the article that got the newspaper pulled. Indeed, the article itself describes the senior as well-liked and upbeat and quoted a number of his friends describing him in a positive manner.

While no one disputes the right of the university president — who is after all the publisher — to remove the paper from the newsstands, it was an unfortunate choice based on an aged Catholic theology that no longer applies to today’s Church and that no longer resonates with those unfamiliar with pre-Vatican II thinking.

Historically, suicide was considered by the Church to be a sin. Someone taking his own life was thought to be throwing away God’s greatest gift, and therefore ineligible for entrance into heaven. The Church believes now that anyone committing suicide is not of their right mind because no sane person would choose that course of action. In other words, without free will there is no sin, and in suicide we find a person who is exhibiting some manifestation of a mental illness which bars full freedom of choice. (Euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide are a related but separate matter.)

Today’s university students do not have the historical or theological memory of pre-Vatican II teaching. In fact so much of American society is a society of death and moral relativism that one could almost understand who some could view suicide is just one more choice. I am not saying that that is the position of most university students and I am certainly not saying that was the mindset of the editors who wrote the headline to this story. But it is true that suicide does not carry the same stigma that it once did and what we’re left with is unfortunate censorship.

Censorship in this context is doubly unfortunate because of the long-standing problems with the Catholic hierarchy and secrecy and because it is in this case a direct denial of the truth. The university would do well in the future to remember its own motto.

In short, go ahead–as long as you picked them and they didn’t pick you. Bruce Schneier on The Kindness of Strangers:

When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: “don’t talk to strangers.” Strangers might be bad, we were told, so it’s prudent to steer clear of them.

And yet most people are honest, kind, and generous, especially when someone asks them for help. If a small child is in trouble, the smartest thing he can do is find a nice-looking stranger and talk to him.

These two pieces of advice may seem to contradict each other, but they don’t. The difference is that in the second instance, the child is choosing which stranger to talk to. Given that the overwhelming majority of people will help, the child is likely to get help if he chooses a random stranger. But if a stranger comes up to a child and talks to him or her, it’s not a random choice. It’s more likely, although still unlikely, that the stranger is up to no good.

As a species, we tend help each other, and a surprising amount of our security and safety comes from the kindness of strangers. During disasters: floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, bridge collapses. In times of personal tragedy. And even in normal times.

If you’re sitting in a café working on your laptop and need to get up for a minute, ask the person sitting next to you to watch your stuff. He’s very unlikely to steal anything. Or, if you’re nervous about that, ask the three people sitting around you. Those three people don’t know each other, and will not only watch your stuff, but they’ll also watch each other to make sure no one steals anything.

Again, this works because you’re selecting the people. If three people walk up to you in the café and offer to watch your computer while you go to the bathroom, don’t take them up on that offer. Your odds of getting three honest people are much lower.

I have no evidence to back up Scheier’s contention, but intuitively it seems spot on: I would trust most of the people I meet, and because it only takes one honest person to ensure the honesty of a group, it seems like relying on the trustworthiness of strangers–particularly in situations involving several unrelated ones–might be a bankable proposition.

I fear it speaks to a deficiency in my character that I never considered this as a viable prospect before.

AIG’s clearly excessive bonuses have, I’m afraid, thrown into stark relief the cluelessness of the Obama administration’s economic endeavors. I say this as an Obama supporter and with the understanding that the bailout process began under the previous, totally incompetent administration.

Two wrongs rarely make a right, however, and shoveling even more money onto the economic bonfire continues to be a terrible “solution” (so quoted since it’s unclear what it actually solves) as well as extraordinarily politically unpopular.

In the AIG case one wonders who is in charge. If it is true as claimed that President Obama only became aware of the situation last Thursday, we can hardly hold him fully accountable. Yet this affair may prove the end of the honeymoon. There are way too many folks in really tough times for it to be remotely palatable to give million dollar bonuses to the Wall Street dopes who crested this mess.

Personally, I think a plan for a 100% tax on these bonuses might be a solution to mollify the public for the time being. Beyond that we need to get to the point where we stop throwing taxpayer dollars at every failing company or industry. There are too many.

The conventional wisdom on investing is that dips in the market provide excellent buying opportunities. This is, then, a particularly unconventional time. My list of “winners” right now consists of Piedmont Natural Gas (PNY-NYSE) and Fidelity Low-Priced Stock (FLPSX-NYSE). My list of losers includes, well, everything else.

Not to be overly pessimstic, but that is to say that had I taken all the money I’d saved over the years and stuffed it under my mattress I’d be better off to the tune of thousands of dollars. As a regular investor and a conservative one at that, I’ve nonetheless always been well-aware that when you invest in a stock you should be prepared for the possibility that your investment will lose 25 to 40 percent of its value. Right now I have plenty of cases where I’d love to have lost only 25 to 40 percent. I would hazard a guess that our overall portfolio is down about 45 to 48 percent.

Interestingly, my long-touted foreign diversification strategy has made almost no difference, at least in my case. Approximately 10% of my portfolio was shielded, but as this is a global economic crisis, my foreign investments suffered as much (or in some cases more) than my domestic holdings. I wasn’t wrong about a financial catastrophe coming, but my best guess as to how to avoid falling prey to it–get your money out of the US–proved insufficient. That’s obviously vexing, but in hindsight, I’m not sure what else I could have done short of just selling everything and holding cash.

My present plan, which I’d advocate to anyone, is to concentrate on de-leveraging, which is to say I’m aiming to be debt-free in the next 18 months. We don’t carry credit card balances (and neither should anyone else except in an emergency), so we’re working on eliminating the house and car payments. The house and car carry interest rates of 4.897% and 6.94% respectively. I can’t think of any other way to make that kind of guaranteed return right now.

After the loans are extinguished, I’ll reevaluate the stock market. I’m intrigued by something called TIPS, or Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities. Since I think we’re going to have massive inflation given all the money being pumped into the economy, this seems like a relatively safe play. I’m not crazy about bonds, but until this thing bottoms out I don’t have enough confidence in the market to buy more than one or two stocks.

Given that I’ve been a stock market investor almost the entirety of my adult life, that’s saying something.

News that the CIA destroyed 92 interrogation tapes should hardly prove surprising to anyone who’s paid even an iota of attention to what the Bush-Cheney administration did. While we’re left to ponder why the tapes were destroyed if, as the Bush Administration claimed, no torture was engaged in, let us at least now follow the path of justice wherever it leads:

The details of CIA interrogations, and the existence of tapes documenting those sessions, have become the subject of long fights in a number of different court cases. In the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged after the trial was over that two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.

The Dassin letter, dated March 2 to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, says the CIA is now gathering more details for the lawsuit, including a list of the destroyed records, any secondary accounts that describe the destroyed contents, and the identities of those who may have viewed or possessed the recordings before they were destroyed.

But the lawyers also note that some of that information may be classified, such as the names of CIA personnel that viewed the tapes.

In that vein, I say name ALL CIA personnel involved declassifying individuals as necessary and get the truth out there. Then, as appropriate, send people to jail for crimes against humanity. And let’s not get wobbly if this goes all the way up the governmental ladder.