The Senate report on CIA torture techniques may only be the beginning. Soon there may be pictures.

Courtesy of The Daily Beast:

The Obama administration is withholding hundreds, perhaps even thousands of photographs showing the U.S. government’s brutal treatment of detainees, meaning that revelations about detainee abuse could well continue, possibly compounding the outrage generated by the Senate “torture report” now in the public eye. 

Some photos show American troops posing with corpses; others depict U.S. forces holding guns to people’s heads or simulating forced sodomization. All of them could be released to the public, depending on how a federal judge in New York rules—and how hard the government fights to appeal. The government has a Friday deadline to submit to that judge its evidence for why it thinks each individual photograph should continue to be kept hidden away. 

The photographs are part of a collection of thousands of images from 203 investigations into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan and represent one of the last known secret troves of evidence of detainee abuse. While the photos show disturbing images from the Bush administration’s watch, it is the Obama administration that has allowed them to remain buried—all with the help of a willing Congress. 

The president may have entered office promising a new era of transparency—and was even prepared to release at least 21 of the photos in 2009. But Obama pulled back at the last minute at the urging of his top commander in Iraq, who worried the graphic images could generate a backlash against U.S. troops.

The possibility that terrorists might get angry enough to launch an attack on American troops of embassies overseas in response to anything released to the public concerning our torture of detainees is bullshit.

As others have said we are actively bombing the crap out of ISIL. If THAT has not convinced them to attack us it is hard to believe that a couple of reports or photos will push them over the edge.

However it just might cause the conservatives defending CIA torture to suddenly go quiet.

One of the reasons that the incident in Abu Ghraib grabbed the public's attention was that the American people were able to see what we were doing and they were disgusted.

I think the same thing will happen this time.

Which in my opinion would be a good thing, and would do much to ensure that we never revisited this type of inhuman treatment again.

In other words, bring-em on.

Just a reminder that you can pause a video to make anybody look stupid.

I sometimes get angry feedback due to my propensity for finding really terrible pictures of Sarah Palin and using them on this blog. Many of them are ones I create myself by taking screenshots and posting them here.

You know like this one.

And this one.

And this one.

Okay fair enough.

However in my defense I would like to point out that when you hear Professor Tyson speak it immediately dissuades you from believing that he is intellectually impaired in any way.

Yet when you hear Sarah Palin speak people instead think, "That screen capture really failed to fully grasp the stupidity of this woman."

And the defense rests.

New study claims it has discovered how to determine who is liberal and who is conservative. Surprisingly it is not through an IQ test.

Courtesy of New Scientist: 

The way your brain reacts to a single disgusting image can be used to predict whether you lean to the left or the right politically. 

A number of studies have probed the emotions of people along the political spectrum, and found that disgust in particular is tightly linked to political orientation. People who are highly sensitive to disgusting images – of bodily waste, gore or animal remains – are more likely to sit on the political right and show concern for what they see as bodily and spiritual purity, so tend to oppose abortion and gay marriage, for example. 

A team led by Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Virginia Tech in Roanoke, recruited 83 volunteers and performed fMRI brain scans on them as they looked at a series of 80 images that were either pleasant, disgusting, threatening or neutral. Participants then rated the images for their emotional impact and completed a series of questionnaires that assessed whether they were liberal, moderate or conservative. 

The brain-imaging results were then fed to a learning algorithm which compared the whole-brain responses of liberals and conservatives when looking at disgusting images versus neutral ones. 

For both political groups, the algorithm was able to pick out distinct patterns of brain activity triggered by the disgusting images. And even though liberals and conservatives consciously reported similar emotional reactions to the images, the specific brain regions involved and their patterns of activation differed consistently between the two groups – so much so that they represented a neural signature of political leaning, the team concludes.

Well now, that explains a lot. 

Possibly including how the conservatives can see this picture...

...and think future President, while most Liberals see it and think where are the Vice cops when you need them?

Personally I am fine with  gross images, but of course I have had a lot of exposure to them over the years.

Oh God, I may have spoken too soon.

What gun ownership looks like in America.

Courtesy of Slate:

 In early 2013, on a five-day assignment for the German magazine Stern, photographer Charles Ommanney traveled around the United States photographing Americans with their guns. Ommanney has built a career working as a political and documentary photographer and felt a responsibility to make a story that wasn’t just another “predictable NRA-bashing” type of series. He wanted to see “real” people to find out why they wanted to have guns in their homes. 

He also decided to shoot the project in a more engaged manner with his subjects instead of simply being a fly on the wall. Ommanney said the project took him to six states in the Southern and Western United States, where he met people who owned guns for protection, as preparation for when things go “horribly wrong,” or simply because they like the beauty of weaponry. Instead of photographing the gun owners at a firing range or at a National Rifle Association conference, Ommanney wanted to capture them in their homes to create a sense of “normalcy.”

Yeah I am not sure that I would use the word "normalcy" to describe that picture above.

There are some others that have less of a "Deliverance" vibe to them, but not by as much as I think this guy was, if you will pardon the pun, shooting for.

This one in particular really bothers me.

I cannot imagine the scenario where a father would think that an exchange of gunfire was reasonable while he had his child strapped to the same area where police officers usually strap their bullet prove vests.

Maybe it's just me.