More of the same

President Obama commissioned a report on what was going on down in Guantanamo the second day he took office. Said report was finalized and released last Friday. 

Have you heard about it? The NYT reported on it Friday and the Washington Post covered it Saturday, but since then, has been only one follow-up from the Times.

Why is this? Well, read for yourself:

A Pentagon review of conditions at the Guantanamo Bay military prison has concluded that the treatment of detainees meets the requirements of the Geneva Conventions but that prisoners in the highest-security camps should be allowed more religious and social interaction, according to a government official who has read the 85-page document.

And here:

Admiral Walsh, appointed by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates to conduct a review of Guantánamo conditions that was ordered by the president, conceded that there had been widespread accusations of violence against detainees, humiliating treatment and other abuses. 

But “we found no such evidence,” he said at a Pentagon news conference. 

Rather, he said, after random visits and interviews with detainees, guards, interrogators and commanders, his team concluded that Guantánamo complied with the Geneva Conventions, which among other things bar “humiliating and degrading treatment.” 

The report addressed 27 categories of treatment, including health care and disciplinary rules.

This is one of the things that bothers me most about the media. They'll harp on Gitmo for years, decrying it as a place of illegal acts and torture, a place that needs to be shut down, on and on and on. 

So when it is discovered that none of that is actually true, do they admit their mistake? Heck no. They pretend it never happened and find something else to attack.

Same for Iraq. When solider casualties were high in the Middle East, the newspapers took great delight in writing how the war effort was a failure and how President Bush had hoodwinked the country into an "unwinnable" war. 

But now that things have settled down in Iraq, and casualties (both military and civilian) are almost non-existent, we hear nothing. Nothing. It's like we aren't even over there anymore.

If these news organizations had any decency or morals whatsoever, they'd admit their opinions were incorrect and earn the trust of people like me. And maybe next time they'd be less quick to judge. 

[/rant]

When will I learn?

I have got to stop making sports predictions. I famously decried the 2008 NBA draft as being "exceptionally weak" last summer, and it turns out I was way off.

This exhaustively researched article on draftexpress.com thoroughly proves that not only is the 2008 class better than the 2007 class, but that it is "perhaps the most astonishing first-year class in the last three decades."

And I'd have to agree, at least so far. Players like Derrick Rose, Russell Westbrook and OJ Mayo are doing much better than I expected. Brook Lopez is light-years ahead of where I placed him after watching his performances in the Rocky Mountain Revue last summer. The draft features real contributors far down into the second round.

However, I believe Kevin Durant is and will end up being far better than anyone in the 2008 class. The kid has been absolutely tearing it up lately, and he's only 20 years old.

Bookmark this post for when Durant is out of the league and Kevin Love wins his third championship in five years.

I was right!

So the wife and I are planning on buying a home sometime in the next five years. I've been dreading the day, because house prices over the past few years have been higher than I thought they should be. My parents bought a two-story , six-bedroom, 3 1/2 bath house with a finished basement in Utah for around $100,000 in 1990. Admittedly they got a screaming deal thanks to some extenuating circumstances, but this was the the baseline I expected to see (more or less) when it came time for me to buy my first house.

I expressed this idea to Mandi a few months ago, and she said no way was that realistic. Current home prices are what they are, and there's nothing weird or irregular about them. We'd just have to bite the bullet and buy some overpriced collection of drywall, wood and stone and call it good.

But! today I found this graph that tracks home prices in America over the last 120 years (larger version here).

So here we have evidence that the boom in housing prices that started in the late 90's is completely out of whack with the historical data. Note the chart accounts for inflation, which just makes the spike look even more insane. 

If President Obama's current plan to bail out homeowners doesn't keep these artificially-high home values where they are, things are looking good for first-time buyers like me.  

James Quinn:

Barney (Frank) thinks he can reverse the law of supply and demand by throwing your money at the problem. He will succeed in wasting billions of tax dollars and home prices will still fall 20% to 30%. Unsustainably high home prices can not be sustained.

Here's hoping.

New revolutionary

Silent majority it is. I like the online polling idea, but there'd have to be some way of preventing hacking. Something that high-profile would attract major attention; every 1337 4x0r would want to prove his skillz.

In short, Bush won the 2004 election by 2% of the popular vote. Obama won by 6%. Neither margin is large enough to interpret as a mandate to execute a complete course change of any kind in America.

And to all those Obama supporters who got mad at me for using the word "socialist" when discussing the then-Senator, what do you have to say now?

Free speech vs. controlling hate speech

Those of you in Utah are probably well-aware of the many controversies involving Senator Chris Buttars. He nicely illustrates the inherent fight between free speech and stopping hate speech.

His latest escapade came in an interview that aired earlier this week. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Buttars

...called the gay-rights movement "probably the greatest threat to America," likened gay activists to Muslim radicals and dubbed same-sex relationships "abominations."

Furthermore, speaking about the gay-rights movement he said "It's the beginning of the end... Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide."

Making this even more embarrassing for me is that Buttars lives in and represents the city of West Jordan, where I grew up.

The bottom line here is that Buttars is a bigot. He's somewhat rare in that he's a very vocal and outspoken bigot, while most racists and other undesirables mainly keep to themselves in this day and age.

BUT this is not a reason for him to be forcibly removed from his seat or otherwise punished by the State.

Legally, as long as he's not inciting violence, he's doing nothing wrong. This is a sticky issue that has been reviewed by the Supreme Court more than once, and so far, the Court has decided to come down on the side of free speech.

I'm a fan of the idea of a "marketplace of ideas." Allow everyone their own voice, and if you hear someone who offends you or is otherwise a moron, use your voice to prove him wrong and show him for what he really is. I think the KKK is a horrible organization that has morally wrong ideals. But I won't fight to imprison a KKK member for speaking his thoughts.

In the case of Senator Buttars, allow the people to speak. If he is truly offensive to his own constituency, he will be voted out in the next election. He barely squeaked by in the 2008 election as it is.

But for a government authority to force him down would be wrong, in my opinion.

It is a difficult issue, but I believe in erring on the side of free speech above protecting people from the vaguely-defined and irregularly-applied "hate speech."

Hey look, I care about the NBA again

I have to make a confession. For a couple weeks there, I didn't care much about the goings-on in the NBA. Lakers and Celtics still favorites to get to the Finals? Meh. The "LeBron gets some actual help" angle was interesting, as was the "Kevin Durant starts killing it" story, but overall I haven't felt compelled to post about anything lately.

And I must admit that part of that was due to the entire Jazz team being injured for parts of the season and subsequently playing kind of horrible. I am nothing if not a ridiculous homer.

But as of yesterday, the Jazz (still minus Carlos Boozer) have beaten the Lakers (at the tail end of a 13-game road trip for L.A.) and the Celtics (minus Garnett). I'm starting to think that if Utah can get healthy, they'll be dangerous in the playoffs. Harpring is playing some of the best ball of his career, AK is back and looking good, Deron appears to be at or near 100%, Okur is doing well, Millsap is still Millsap, and C.J. is starting to come into his own. If Korver could figure out why he stinks from deep in a Jazz uniform and correct it, we might be looking at a team that can get to the Western Conference Finals again this year. Oh right, and then there's Boozer, who is a great force offensively (except in the playoffs).

Also the trade deadline was yesterday. To steal from the Basketbawful blog, "when Rafer Alston is The Face of the NBA's trade deadline, well, you know not much of anything went down."

Shoot, even Portland decided to sit on Raef LaFrentz's Giant Expiring Contract to use themselves instead of trading it for a star player.

But seriously, good trade for Alston, Orlando. You needed a point guard to replace Jameer, and Skip 2 My Lou will do fine.

And finally, here's a good story involving Shaq and Twitter.

We went in, and to my surprise the MDE(Most Dominant Ever) was sitting in the corner booth by himself. We gave the man a nod and "Hey" as we walked to our table and were soon whispering back and forth like 12 year old girls at the 7th grade dance.

"You go talk to him" I said, while tugging nervously on my dress.
"No, you go talk to him" Sean replied while flipping his hair.

Excellent. And Shaq's final Twitter update in the story is awesome.

To all twitterers , if u c me n public come say hi, we r not the same we r from twitteronia, we connect

This is why people love Shaq and dislike Kobe. The Black Mamba will never be featured in a tale like this one.

Only 40-something more games to go in the 2008-2009 season. Here's to an exciting finish.

Either utter incompetence or evil, take your pick

The above photo is from October, 1968 issue of Time magazine. The caption is a bit hard to read, so here it is:

"The North Koreans are having a hard time proving to the world that the captive crewmen of the U.S.S. Pueblo are a contrite and cooperative lot. Last week Pyongyang's flacks tried again - and lost to the U.S. Navy. In this class-reunion picture, three of the crewmen have managed to use the medium for a message, furtively getting off the U.S. hand signal of obscene derisiveness and contempt."

One account of the results:

"I guess that's why the crew never cooperates with Time magazine to this day," 63-year-old Alvin Plucker explained last week from his Fort Lupton home. "I know the reporters who call from Time probably weren't even born when we were captured, but we went through Hell Week because of that magazine."

I cannot fathom the depths of idiocy a writer would have to sink to while writing that caption. And the fact that it passed through at least one editor (and probably several) before going to print...

It was either evil or incompetence. I'd like to think news reporting organizations would have the sense or morality to avoid repeating this event, but somehow I doubt it.

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