Anti-war
revere | April 27, 2008The more things change the more they get weirder. In my day, the only way you could be a Conscientious Objector was to claim that status on religious grounds. If you were an atheist, tough shit. Now if you are an atheist, they don't want you to fight. This is something for all you young folks to keep in mind when President McSame or President Hilary get us involved in a war with Iran and they have to re-institute conscription:
When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But…
revere | April 24, 2008The art professor is finally cleared but a distinguished biologist was still punished by a ridiculous, mindless, cruel and utterly reckless use of raw power by the Bush administration:
A federal judge dismissed criminal indictments on Monday against an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who was charged four years ago with mail and wire fraud after receiving bacteria through the mail that he said he planned to use in his art projects.
Judge Richard J. Arcara of the U.S. District Court in Buffalo ruled that the indictment against the professor, Steven J. Kurtz, was "…
revere | March 25, 2008Of course the 4000th US combat death in Iraq is an artificial milestone. It's not different than the 10th or the 3999th or what will for certain be the 4010th, a human being in the prime of life who is alive now but won't be by the end of next week. But the number 4000 is a symbol that stands for the shredded lives, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, from a war started on purpose by a handful of American government officials.
We choose not to celebrate the lives of the 4000 soldier victims, or the lives of their enemies, or the lives of the uncounted innocent civilians…
revere | March 24, 2008The other day, as I was bemoaning the tanking of the dollar versus the Euro (yes, my European friends are not crying in their beer over it; I'm glad for them. Now they can visit), I mentioned that it wasn't just the dollar that had taken a bath since GWB but also the US reputation as a force for Good in the world. Now the BBC World Service has put some numbers on this in a survey of 26,000 people from 25 different countries:
As the United States government prepares to send a further 21,500 troops to Iraq, the survey reveals that three in four (73%) disapprove of how the US government has…
revere | March 10, 2008I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you occupy a country you also assume responsibility for its public health. That's both international law and it's the right thing to do. In Iraq we haven't done that. So while I am about to say it once more, after I've said it I have something else to say, too, something that underscores my point in triplicate.
But first the main point:.
It is the kind of news that everybody had been dreading. An outbreak of cholera in Iraq, which started in two Northern provinces, has already reached Baghdad and has become Iraq's biggest cholera outbreak in…
revere | February 24, 2008This is the Final Word, I guess:
TEHRAN, Iran - Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Sunday that God would punish Iranians if they do not support the country's disputed nuclear program, state radio reported.
"The Iranian people openly announce that they will defend their rights... God will reprimand them if they do not do so," state radio quoted Khamenei as saying. (AP via Yahoo News)
Or is this the Final Word?
revere | February 8, 2008The President's budget was announced on Monday (see our post here), and as many people know (including us), it is Dead on Arrival. But it is still a significant for its symbolism. This is what the Bush administration wants. They know they won't get it but they are making a statement. Some statement:
revere | February 4, 2008Most Americans think the Afghanistan mistake was the Right Thing to Do. While we are on record (here and here) as of another opinion, the conventional view is that getting rid of the Taliban was Good (they were Bad, which is true) and anyway it was payback for 9/11 (even though the Afghans didn't actually commit 9/11, only were the geographic location of the planner -- thanks to US aid when bin Laden was fighting the Soviets. Now Pakistan is where the 9/11 leaders live (not to mention that the actual perpetrators, who mostly came from Saudi). You fill in the rest. Still, few agree with us.…
revere | December 24, 2007There are computers on a chip and labs on a chip and now explosives on a chip. Explosives on a chip? WTF?
This wonderful tech breakthrough is brought to us by Georgia Tech Research Institute and reported, straight-faced, by the Press Release service, Science Daily:
Developed by a team of scientists from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, the highly-uniform copper structures will be incorporated into integrated circuits -- then chemically converted to millimeter-diameter explosives. Because they can be integrated into…
revere | December 3, 2007Carnegie-Mellon is a great university and when it comes to robotics and computer science is always on the cutting edge. But does that cutting edge have to be so sharply lethal?
Unmanned aircraft are showing up in the skies more often and today the US Army awarded $14.4 million to Carnegie Mellon to build a remote-controlled unmanned tank.
A certain amount of the award will go toward significantly improving the Crusher, a 6.5-ton unmanned support vehicle Carnegie engineers developed in 2006 in conjunction with DARPA. Since its introduction, the Crusher has demonstrated unparalleled toughness…
revere | December 2, 2007It's been a while since we pressed this particular button but it seems it's time:
Baghdad is facing a 'catastrophe' with cases of cholera rising sharply in the past three weeks to more than 100, strengthening fears that poor sanitation and the imminent rainy season could create an epidemic.
The disease - spread by bacteria in contaminated water, which can result in rapid dehydration and death - threatens to blunt growing optimism in the Iraqi capital after a recent downturn in violence. Two boys in an orphanage have died and six other children were diagnosed with the disease, according to the…
revere | November 26, 2007What's the big deal about putting a few bad guys into "stressful" positions (assuming you know for sure they really are bad guys)? You call that torture? Waterboarding maybe is torture (we aren't sure about that yet; requires some study***), but stressful positions and a love tap or two? Give me a break:
Source: Waiting for the Guards, Amnesty International
So what's the big deal? This was straight out of the CIA interrogation manual. No pretense we don't do it.
This video is also not play acting:
In order to make the film, the directors put the actor into a stress position for six hours…
revere | November 23, 2007Rabia Balkhi Hospital (RBH) is an obstetrical hospital in Afghanistan that is one of the jewels in the crown of the US aid effort after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2002. Here's the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website boast:
HHS activities have had an enormous impact on the quality of care at RBH, have saved the lives of hundreds of women and newborns, and have improved significantly the skills and knowledge of the doctors, nurses and midwives at the hospital. We are continually adding new improvements that dramatically expand the hospital's life-saving capacity, such as…
revere | November 12, 2007Here's a thought for "Veterans" Day: one out of nine people in the US is a veteran but one out of four homeless persons is a veteran. That's something for Americans to be proud of for sure. Support Our Troops is either just a slogan or they stop being worthy of support when they stop being cannon fodder:
And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.
The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans…
revere | November 12, 2007A year ago we posted this on November 11. We can't think of another way to say the same thing, so we'll just say it again the same way we did last year.
Alas:
Today is called Veterans Day in the United States, but everywhere else it is Remembrance Day. When we were young it celebrated the end of shooting and was still Armistice Day. Now it celebrates the melancholy fact that young people have again picked up guns, not that they were at last able to put them down on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month in 1918.
The change came during the Cold War. In 1954 we forgot…
revere | November 2, 2007Medical education in the US is four grueling years on top of four years of undergraduate college education. The spectrum of topics is hugely wide and the depth of coverage hugely uneven. Some things are covered in ridiculous detail and others with breathtaking superficiality. And some things hardly at all:
Medical students are woefully uninformed about military medical ethics and a physician's responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, a situation that could be a problem if they're ever drafted, according to an article by Harvard Medical School researchers.
The researchers surveyed…
revere | October 26, 2007On Monday President Bush asked for another $46 billion dollars to send down the rat hole of his Iraq and Afghanistan debacles. That makes just about $200 billion dollars for this fiscal year. Two hundred billion dollars. Congress has already ponied up almost half a trillion dollars. Half a trillion. Trillion. A dollar bill is a bit more than 0.1 mm thick. This year's 200 billion is 2 times 107 meters, or a stack of dollar bills about 200,000 football fields in height, or about a 120 mile stack. That's just this fiscal year. The estimated total is two and half times this.
For what. Oil. If…
revere | October 8, 2007The US invasion of Iraq has not managed to spread Democracy in the region but it is successfully spreading Cholera:
The number of cholera cases in Iran is on the rise after the outbreak of an epidemic in neighbouring Iraq, an Iranian health official was quoted as saying on Saturday.
"The last count shows 43 people have contracted cholera in Kordestan province," Mohsen Zahrai, who is in charge of water and food-borne diseases, told ISNA news agency.
He said those affected had been commuting across the border with Iraq and warned Iranian citizens to postpone pilgrimages to Iraq until the…
revere | September 23, 2007Before the invasion there was cholera in Iraq but at a fairly low level: 30 cases a year reported or about one in a million population. Cholera is entirely preventable with clean water and easily treatable with oral rehydration therapy. But it can also kill a person in less than a day. The bug's toxin opens the floodgates in the intestines and the victim becomes rapidly and often fatally dehydrated. People alive and apparently well in the morning can be dead by nightfall. It is a frightening disease. There are now a reported 30,000 cases of diarrhea and 1500 confirmed diagnoses of cholera in…
revere | September 17, 2007War's travel companion, Disease, is stalking Baghdad. This disease, cholera, is totally preventable and easily treatable under ordinary circumstances. Of course these aren't ordinary circumstances. Thanks to the invasion and the subsequent US occupation and the resistance to it there has been a total breakdown in civil order. The result is the kind of epidemic disease one associates with Victorian London or mid-19th century America, not a 21st century (once) developed country:
A cholera epidemic in northern Iraq has infected approximately 7,000 people and could reach Baghdad within weeks as…