Rock radio, a followup

Less than a month after the radio focus group study I reported about back on April 1, I started listening to a new White Plains station, WXPK, "The Peak 107.1". It bills itself as "world class rock", and its format does seem to be somewhat different from other traditional rock radio formats. It's probably closest to what AOR was like when I first started listening to AOR in the late 1970s--a good, somewhat but not aggressively eclectic assortment of rock from the 1960s until the present.

It's a huge improvement over "classic rock". In the last fifteen minutes, I've heard "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes", "Shelter from the Storm", and "Invisible Sun", all of which are played only rarely on "classic rock" stations. Ah, REM's "Stand" just began.
It's not perfect; New Wave is definitely less represented than I would like. The station itself is very mechanical--there are no DJs, no local news except for traffic reports, no promotions. And it's still hits-oriented--I really doubt I'll ever hear, say, Dylans "Blind Willie McTell" or even "Idiot Wind", let alone The Dead Kennedys or Mojo Nixon. In short, this isn't the station I would design if I were designing a radio station from scratch. But it's something I can listen to for long stretches of time and hear good familiar-but-not-threadbare music interspersed with some new material.

Ah, Cars, "Just What I Needed" just came on. Pure New Wave satisfaction. And I've been listening for weeks without hearing any of the Unholy Trinity--REO Speedwagon, .38 Special, and Journey. So I'm content.

Testing my predictions

I went back to check my pre- and early-war posts to rec.arts.sf.fandom to see if I'd made any predictions about US forces torturing Iraqi prisoners.

Well, I didn't, exactly. However, on April 1, 2003, someone made a post which concluded with this paragraph:

Realistically, the only proof that will be generally accepted by is when the actual WMD stuff -- shells, chemicals, labs, documents, etc. -- are found, and/or when the Iraqi officials/officers in charge of them are captured and interrogated. That said, when that happens, some folks will insist that those were fabricated by the US, and that the Iraqi admissions were the product of torture.

I replied thusly:

Given that the current administration has been peddling fabrications (e.g., the "Saddam sought to buy fissionable material in Niger" lie in the State of the Union address) and openly discussing torture techniques (e.g., the use of sleep deprivation and beatings in Baghram and Camp X-Ray), those would be reasonable claims--not necessarily accurate, but reasonable.

That's one of the dangers to the administration of setting out on a policy of wholesale lie-mongering: even on those occasions when it
suits their purposes to tell the truth, their credibility is shot.

Sucks to be them, I guess.

Thus, I didn't "predict" that the US would be using torture; I said outright that it already was. The strength of that statement has been repeatedly confirmed over the last year.

Looking back, I'm far less amazed that the US used torture than that they used torture and still haven't credibily demonstrated any "actual WMD stuff". It must really suck to be the type of American who believes that torture is a bad thing which only dictators do.

Dave "Orcinus" Neiwert says this:

the hollowness of George W. Bush's disclaimers regarding the use of torture -- and indeed, his current claims of being "outraged" --[they] not only ring insincere, they are silly:

"Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America."

No, it's just the way we do things in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.