More and more as I am here and see what life really is, I understand that it is not when or how you die but how and if you truly were ever alive.

Canadians think about the US all the time. They have to. We're ten times their size. Virtually everything we do has the potential to dramatically affect their world.

Meanwhile, most Americans barely think about Canada at all. Can Americans name any two of the five largest cities? The capital? Any province? The name of the prime minister? Right.

As a Caucasian, I didn't think about race much growing up. I had no reason to.

But if I had grown up Hispanic, in a project, in an era when role models for me of my own ethnicity -- at least in popular culture -- were essentially non-existent?

Or if I had grown up African-American and spent many a dinner wondering if I'd be able to flag a taxi to take my date and me home, or if we'd have to walk?

Or if I had grown up Asian-American knowing that less than 20 years before I was born, my ancestors were being held in domestic prison camps on account of the color of their skin?

How could I not look at the world -- at least in part -- in terms of race? How could I not feel that my ethnicity shaped me and gave me a viewpoint distinct from that of people from different backgrounds?

And would my race-influenced viewpoint make me a racist? No, not in the slightest. It would mean that my world view was informed by race, not necessarily governed by it. It would mean that I took note of race, not necessarily that I discriminated on the basis of it.

To suggest otherwise is to lack empathy. Somehow I think the Rush Limbaughs and Newt Gingriches of the world might see this issue differently if they had ever suffered the effects of discrimination, even indirectly, even if only for a day.

And don't get me started on the "Sotomayor isn't bright" meme. Because stupid people are high school valedictorians, graduate summa cum laude from Princeton, and edit the Yale Law Journal. For pete's sake.

RACHEL MADDOW: Joining us now is Malcolm Nance, former master instructor and chief of training at the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school, better known as the SERE school. He's now a U.S. government consultant on terrorism and counterterrorism.

Mr. Nance, thank you so much for joining us.

MALCOLM NANCE, FORMER "SERE" INSTRUCTOR: My pleasure, Rachel.

MADDOW: When you heard Ali Soufan today testify about his interrogation techniques as an FBI experience interrogator versus these force-based techniques that were reverse-engineered from some of the SERE techniques, does that resonate with you in terms of what you understand about the appropriateness of those techniques as interrogation methods?

NANCE: Well, it resonates with me for a very particular reason. One, the SERE program was started in the 1950s exactly because these techniques were being used against American servicemen. The SERE program and all the techniques carried out that we call enhanced interrogation techniques -- these were reverse-engineered from communists, from totalitarian states, and the Nazis.

So, of course, everything that he said about that -- about bringing the prisoner in, interrogating the prisoner and then him becoming recalcitrant and resistant, that's exactly what we want. And, of course, al Qaeda, of course, won by that, because they defeated the purpose of all the interrogations.

MADDOW: In terms of the argument that SERE-based techniques, these techniques, reverse-engineered as you say from what was done by totalitarian regimes, reverse-engineered and figured out in the '50s -- the argument has been made that because we do it to American troops as part of training it can't be torture, because then people like you who were an instructor at SERE could be charged with torture.

NANCE: That's ridiculous on its face. Listen, there's a whole class of people who I call now "torture apologists." And their full-time job is to go out and find spurious arguments in order to justify exactly why they violated, you know, U.S. legal code. And, of course, the standing order from General George Washington to treat prisoners with dignity.

And so, it's ridiculous. What we're doing is we're allowing a service member the opportunity to practice in a controlled environment over a few moments how to behave and how to react in order to act like Abu Zubaydah, in order for them to become resistant and for them to make sure that the techniques that are being applied to them don't work.

MADDOW: On the issue of sleep deprivation, specifically, sleep deprivation is one of those things that I think is at the top of the slippery slope when people start talking about torture. Well, sure, you don't want to get down to things like waterboarding or pulling people's fingernails out, but a little sleep deprivation never really hurt anybody. We've heard testimony that maybe some forms of mild sleep deprivation were used even before there were any new legal justifications ginned up in Washington to explain that.

What do you think about sleep deprivation in terms of its effect on prisoners in custody, whether it should be seen as part of torture?

NANCE: Well, these are softening techniques. All they did was they decide to bring the person up, keep him awake, whether they were going to walk him around, whether they're going to stand him up, whether they're going to give him loud music. And what you're doing is softening that person.

You're making that person, putting him into a state where you think he's going to be susceptible to answer questions. In fact, it's going to be even more difficult to get him to answer questions. And that, of course, you hit them with a harsh interrogation technique right after that, whether it's slapping or walling or some other physical harm or waterboarding, and you think that's going to snap them out of it -- when, in fact, that's the state we want you in. That's where you're going to be least susceptible to answer honestly. You'll answer gibberish.

MADDOW: That's the situation we want you in if you are an American and we want you to...

NANCE: Absolutely. So...

MADDOW: Yes.

Well, in the case, then, so I guess we can sort of get there, we can follow the math problem. In the case of an actual ticking time bomb scenario, which is a faulting premise because things don't work out this way in the real world -- would you do SERE techniques on a prisoner in that scenario?

NANCE: No, of course not.

MADDOW: Any of them?

NANCE: No, of course not. Because one, it defeats the ticking time bomb scenario, in that all the prisoner has to do is not answer the question, or, better yet, the prisoner will lie.

And once the prisoner lies -- especially with al Qaeda members, let me tell you something, their ideology, they have a concept within their ideology called Al-wara wal'bara (ph), and that is absolutely devotion to their god, but absolute disavowal and hatred of anything that's not their god. Therefore, anything that they do to foil you is well within their plan. And they take great pride in that. And I'm sure when he was brought back to his little cage or to his holding cell, he saw every time that he defeated us, every time he didn't get an answer out of us or got some gibberish out of us, he saw that as a victory.

MADDOW: Yes. So, you got to outwit him.

NANCE: Well, what we've done is we've created al Qaeda SERE school for them.

MADDOW: Malcolm Nance, former master instructor and chief of training at Navy SERE schools, talked to you a few times over the years about this, and every time, I'm very grateful to have the chance to ask you these questions. So thank you.

NANCE: My pleasure.

President Obama will have to wait a bit longer to round out his Cabinet. Senate Republicans refused today to allow a confirmation vote on his health secretary nominee Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.)...

At the start of the session today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) proposed taking a vote after five hours of debate. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) objected, arguing that lawmakers needed more time to consider her "fairly contentious" selection.

A handful of Republicans have complained about Sebelius' support for abortion rights and her failure to report the full extent of campaign contributions she received from a physician who performs abortions.

But then comes the next paragraph of the story, which so neatly, so concisely, so perfectly encapsulates what has gone wrong with the Republican party over the last eight years:

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) opposes Sebelius because of the Obama administration's support for research on the comparative effectiveness of disease treatments. He said he fears the evidence-based approach, coupled with information on price, could lead to rationing of care.

I'm an Independent, not a registered Republican or Democrat. I enthusiastically voted for Barack Obama, and am delighted to have him as our President, but I don't agree with everything he has done to date. I want an effective opposition challenging him and the Democrats. But this is more of the same ideology-over-facts approach that has led to such disaster in recent times.

In 1985, Carol married Doug Hofstadter, who had been an IU professor from 1977 to 1983 but who had recently moved to the University of Michigan. In 1988 Doug was hired back by IU and the young couple returned to Bloomington and started a family -- Danny, born in 1988, and Monica, born in 1991. One of Carol and Doug's fondest dreams was to bring up bilingual children, and so they decided to spend Doug's first sabbatical year (1993-94) in Italy. In August of that year, the family moved to Trento, in the Italian Dolomites, with views of beautiful mountains on every side. In early December, Carol had a series of intense headaches and on December 12, she suddenly fell into a coma. Ten days later, never having regained consciousness, she died of a brain tumor. Though devastated, Doug resolved to finish out the year in Italy in the way Carol would have wanted, and Danny and Monica became truly bilingual, thus realizing Carol's dream.

In the book you mention losing your wife quite suddenly in 1993, and I was struck by how that affected your thinking and your work. It's a consoling idea that your wife's personality or point of view might persist somehow. Do you still feel that way?

Absolutely. I have to emphasize that the sad truth of the matter is, of course, that whatever persists in me is a very feeble copy of her. Whatever persists of her interiority is not her full self. It's reduced, a sort of low-resolution version, coarse-grained. Otherwise it would be a claim that "it's all fine, she didn't die, she lives on in me just as much as she ever did." And of course I don't believe that. I believe that there is a trace of her "I", her interiority, her inner light, however you want to phrase it, that remains inside me and inside some other people, people who really had internalized her viewpoint, people who really had interacted intimately with her over years, and that trace that remains is a valid trace of her self -- her soul, if you wish. But it's diminished; it's very dilute relative to what existed in her own brain. So there are two sides to the coin. It's consoling on the one hand that there's something left, but of course it doesn't remove the sting of death. It doesn't say, "Oh, well, it didn't matter that she died because she lives on just fine in my brain." Would that it were.

Our feel-good movie of the year is “Slumdog Millionaire,” a Dickensian tale in which we root for an impoverished orphan from Mumbai’s slums to hit the jackpot on the Indian edition of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

I thought Slumdog Millionaire was an excellent film, but the feel-good movie of the year? That would be like getting a sugar-free lollipop on your way out after a root canal and calling it the "feel-good dentist visit of the year".

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement [such as journalist Terry Anderson]...

Most hostages survived their ordeal... although relationships, marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as anything less than torture. This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is -- as research and experience have confirmed for decades -- so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

Our first supermax -- our first institution specifically designed for mass solitary confinement -- was not established until 1983, in Marion, Illinois. In 1995, a federal court reviewing California’s first supermax admitted that the conditions "hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable for those with normal resilience." But it did not rule them to be unconstitutionally cruel or unusual, except in cases of mental illness. The prison's supermax conditions, the court stated, did not pose "a sufficiently high risk to all inmates of incurring a serious mental illness." In other words, there could be no legal objection to its routine use, given that the isolation didn't make everyone crazy.

What about other Western countries? Do they follow our practices? In a word, no. Gawande describes a British prison program begun in the 1980s that de-emphasized solitary confinement in favor of techniques designed to prevent prison violence, then writes:

The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in "extreme custody" than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

In this country, in June of 2006, a bipartisan national task force, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, released its recommendations after a yearlong investigation. It called for ending long-term isolation of prisoners. Beyond about ten days, the report noted, practically no benefits can be found and the harm is clear -- not just for inmates but for the public as well. Most prisoners in long-term isolation are returned to society, after all. And evidence from a number of studies has shown that supermax conditions -- in which prisoners have virtually no social interactions and are given no programmatic support -- make it highly likely that they will commit more crimes when they are released. Instead, the report said, we should follow the preventive approaches used in European countries.

The recommendations went nowhere, of course.

Can someone explain to me why we're doing this?

[T]he hog industry alone uses three times the amount of all antibiotics used to treat human illnesses... when we count poultry and cattle, nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock rises to eight times total human usage.

Over the past several years, each of us have toured numerous industrial-style animal operations, and they were not pretty. We saw pigs confined in metal buildings living on hard, slatted floors and fed daily rations that include such unsavory ingredients as bone meal, blood meal, and drugs, including antibiotics. Stepping into these buildings, we were immediately enveloped by the stench of rotting eggs. The pigs spend 24 hours of every day in crowded conditions standing over their own liquefied manure, bathing in the odor of decaying feces and continually breathing its fumes...

[F]eeding farm animals daily drugs began in poultry production in the 1950s, both as a means to speed animal growth and as a way to control diseases -- an increasingly daunting problem in the crowded confinement buildings that were coming into vogue at the time. Today, confinement operations commonly feed antibiotics to pigs, as well as chickens and turkeys.

In the interest of holding down their expenses, many farmers who raise cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys in disease-encouraging conditions give these animals antibiotics to keep them from becoming sick and to induce them to grow faster. This practice, which totals eight times the total usage of antibiotics by humans, is contributing to the spread of antibiotic-resistant illnesses, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which may now be responsible for more deaths in the US than AIDS.

When are we going to put an end to this?

Akoha is the world’s first social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends. Missions might include giving someone your favorite book, inviting a friend for drinks, or buying a friend some chocolate.

This is one of those "why didn't I think of that?" ideas, so good that I instantly bought a set of starter decks -- one for myself and four more to pass out to friends.

I'll report back here on how it goes.

See you shortly.