Word: manuals
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...initiative system seemed rational when it was launched in 1911 to prevent railroad barons from buying off the legislature. But lots of things seemed smart back then, like having Asians focus on manual labor. Now special interests spend $100 million on advertising and can send out enough troops to control an election, especially since the glut of elections keeps people with jobs and the ability to drive at night from showing up. On May 19, only 25% of voters turned out. Even the heated 2005 mayoral runoff between then mayor James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa moved only...
...line did to trades in the 20th--turning them into repetitive, menial, dissatisfying tasks. "Wherever the separation of thinking from doing has been achieved," he writes, "it has been responsible for the degradation of work." Crawford, a political-philosophy Ph.D. and motorcycle-shop owner, stresses the importance of the manual trades and the cognitive challenge of working with solid things (preferably grimy, metal ones). He packs plenty of intellectual firepower into his polemic, quoting Aristotle in his own translation and sprinkling the text with erudite footnotes. Like Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Crawford...
Ventriloquism? Yes, it's a profession, and Dunham, 47, has been paid for doing it since he was 12, having been given an instruction manual and LP when he was 8. He started performing in Kiwanis clubs and church socials in his hometown, Dallas, and worked his way up to four nights a week, 40 weeks a year, at comedy clubs. "I was making between $600,000 and a million a year," he says. Not bad for a guy and a dummy, but Dunham had bigger plans. "I knew if we could let the masses see it and not just...
...Rules of the Game There is no definitive textbook on interrogation. The U.S. Army field manual, updated in 2006, lists 19 interrogation techniques, ranging from offering "real or emotional reward" for truthful answers to repeating questions again and again "until the source becomes so thoroughly bored with the procedure, he answers questions fully and candidly." (Obama has ordered the CIA to follow the Army manual until a review of its interrogation policies has been completed...
...experienced interrogators don't limit themselves to the 19 prescribed techniques. Matthew Alexander, a military interrogator whose efforts in Iraq led to the location and killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, says old-fashioned criminal-investigation techniques work better than the Army manual. "Often I'll use tricks that are not part of the Army system but that every cop knows," says Alexander. "Like when you bring in two suspects, you take them to separate rooms and offer a deal to the first one who confesses." (Alexander, one of the authors of How to Break a Terrorist...