military
gregladen | July 26, 2017Donald Trump has consulted with his generals and military experts ...
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890193981585444864
and declared that Transgender individuals will not be allowed to serve in the US Military in any capacity because the Military has other things to do
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890196164313833472
which apparently includes world domination will will be disrupted by the burden of transgenderness.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/890197095151546369
We'll see.
kkrisberg | July 14, 2015At The Nation, leaders in the domestic workers movement write about what’s next in their efforts to improve conditions for the thousands who work in people’s homes, often with no rights or recourse.
Authored by Ai-jen Poo and Andrea Cristina Mercado, both with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the article chronicles the “legacy of exclusion” that domestic workers have experienced, such as their exemption from federal labor protections, as well as the day-to-day conditions they often face in people’s homes — conditions that can result in serious and long-term injuries. The authors write…
dr. dolittle | August 18, 2014Researchers at DARPA are using geckos to create biologically inspired methods of scaling vertical walls.
Check out this video demonstration of "Geckskin":
lborkowski | March 18, 2014Three years after Japan's earthquake and tsunami led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, concerns persist about health effects while the cleanup poses ongoing health and safety challenges.
Living on Earth reports on a lawsuit filed by several US Navy sailors against the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco). The sailors were part of a relief operation, and their ship sailed into a plume of radioactive dust. Their attorney, Charles Bonner, told Living on Earth that many sailors are now suffering from “leukemias, ulcers, brain tumors, testicular cancers, dysfunctional uterine bleeding,…
dr. dolittle | November 11, 2013In honor of Veteran's Day, we must not forget to thank the dolphins (and more recently sea lions) that have been active members of the US Military. The US military used dolphins trained to find and disarm underwater mines in the Iraq War. Eight dolphins served as the first marine mammals in active combat as part of the "Special Clearance Team One." The dolphins worked alongside drones equipped with sonar, Navy SEALS, reconnaissance swimmers from the Marine Corps, and divers trained to disarm explosives. When the drones detected something suspicious, the dolphins were able to discern whether…
oracknows | October 17, 2012As much as I write about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia, there is one particular area that is being increasingly invaded by such quackery. It's an area that you wouldn't necessarily expect, although anyone who's read The Men Who Stare at Goats might not be so shocked. Yes, I'm referring to the military, and, as I've documented time and time again, increasingly our men and women in uniform are being subjected to abject quackery. What they need and deserve is the very best science-based medicine that we as a nation have to offer. Instead, what more and more of…
mikethemadbiologist | May 30, 2011Boston Common, Massachusetts Veterans Memorial (temporary display):
mikethemadbiologist | May 5, 2011Part of the discussion surrounding the elimination of Osama bin Laden has taken a somewhat ghoulish turn: what does it mean for Obama's re-election chances? While I'm more of a zombies-eat-brains! type of guy, I'm certainly willing to be ghoulish, especially when it gives me the chance to discuss some interesting political science.
A couple of years ago, political scientist Douglas Hibbs published a model that describes the percentage of the vote an incumbent party will receive in a presidential election based on only two factors: disposable income and U.S. military causalities. By his…
mikethemadbiologist | May 2, 2011Last night and this morning in the U.S., people no doubt are wrapping their heads around the announcement that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces yesterday. The question now becomes--will that change anything?
If we still are occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, if U.S. lives and treasure are still being squandered there, what did this accomplish?
Now do we bring our fellow citizens home, or does the war against Oceania Eastasia continue?
Will we still look upon torture as a good thing?
My entire adult life, with the possible exception of the Clinton era (then, no ground troops…
mikethemadbiologist | April 14, 2011Sadly, too many Americans are probably unaware that the anniversary surrender of the Confederate rebels at Appomattox happened a few days ago. I've found three posts I highly recommend. First, Tony Wikrent:
One thing I really would like you to take away from this diary is a basic sense of how the United States, as a self-governing democratic republic, cannot long tolerate oligarchic and aristocratic ideas in its body politic. This is becoming an increasingly urgent issue for us today, because the American conservative movement today is basically a replica of the slavery-defending, anti-free…
mikethemadbiologist | April 8, 2011Tom Hayden reminds us of two costs of the Libyan war*:
If the US gets lucky this time, Power will be vindicated. It's possible that US airpower can protect opposition ground forces on the road to Tripoli until Qaddafi's regime collapses from within. Even then, the US will have to take part in an unpredictable occupation of Libya until a new set of governing institutions are created, a process that might take months or years. The cost will climb into the billions in deficit spending while the budget crisis worsens at home. Any triumphant new US allies, like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group,…
mikethemadbiologist | March 28, 2011Because that's not been his MO so far. A long-time reader emailed and asked me why I haven't commented on Libya. Well, it's simple: as far as I can tell, the U.S. government has a long-standing policy of doing the opposite of what I want when it comes to matters of war and peace. Nonetheless, I really do hope our aimless Libyan 'kinetic military action' works out well--I really would like Juan Cole to be right.
But the problem is that I'm old enough to remember when the Libyan War was only supposed to be a no-fly zone. Then it morphed into bombing armor. And now we're considering arming…
omnibrain | December 2, 2010It seems that there are some cool pictures/film floating around showing some of the results of the wacky shit that the military did back in the day in order to win wars in some very very unconventional ways. Here's something NPR dug up:
The Army had a few periods of experimenting with LSD and other drugs. While not secret, these tests are not as well-known as some of the similar LSD tests conducted by the CIA, such as MK-ULTRA and Operation Paperclip, where the U.S. government recruited former Nazi scientists.
This test, circa 1958, was conducted at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and was part…
mikethemadbiologist | November 20, 2010Keep in mind that this GE plant primarily makes parts for defense contracts--these jobs are provided by a guaranteed contract:
General Electric Co. has made an unusual offer to the state: Give us $25 million in tax credits, and we won't cut any more than 150 positions at our aircraft engine plant in Lynn.
The conglomerate has already cut the Lynn plant's workforce by 600 jobs and could cut 150 more. But General Electric said that if it receives the state aid to help fund a $75 million retooling of the plant, it would maintain the remaining 3,000 jobs for six years.
If you're thinking this…
lborkowski | November 3, 2010John Perlin has written an interesting Miller-McCune article about how the Pentagon has come to understand some of the problems associated with powering Iraq and Afghanistan operations - and how they're now reducing operations' energy consumption and embracing solar power.
Perlin describes the experience of Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, who assumed command of the coalition forces in Iraq's Al Anbar province in 2006 and soon realized that his command's reliance on trucking in liquid fossil fossil fules was contributing to casualties. In today's conflicts, Marine combat brigade uses half a million…
mikethemadbiologist | October 10, 2010More fun in our military libertarian paradise (italics mine):
Afghan private security forces with ties to the Taliban, criminal networks and Iranian intelligence have been hired to guard American military bases in Afghanistan, exposing United States soldiers to surprise attack and confounding the fight against insurgents, according to a Senate investigation.
The Pentagon's oversight of the Afghan guards is virtually nonexistent, allowing local security deals among American military commanders, Western contracting companies and Afghan warlords who are closely connected to the violent…
mikethemadbiologist | August 24, 2010In the movie Quiz Show, which is about the quiz show scandals of the 1950s (and a wonderful period piece), there is a scene at the end of the movie which has always stuck with me. Van Doren, the disgraced upper-class professor who cheated, gave a teary mea culpa in front of Congress. The gallery applauded, but was shocked into silence when a congressman called him out, and noted that he doesn't get credit for admitting his wrong doing--he still did the wrong thing.
Last week, Matthew Yglesias wrote a post about how he came to support the Iraq War (which he later renounced). Some have…
mikethemadbiologist | July 25, 2010Once again, some are making a big deal out of the second derivative, just as was done with unemployment numbers (Got Green Shoots?), when they shouldn't. Consider this from an NY Times article about defense spending increases:
Mr. Gates is arguing that if the Pentagon budget is allowed to keep growing by 1 percent a year, he can find 2 percent or 3 percent in savings in the department's bureaucracy to reinvest in the military -- and that will be sufficient money to meet national security needs. In one of the paradoxes of Washington budget battles, Mr. Gates, even as he tries to forestall…
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2010Suffice it to say, the average Iraqi citizen has had a crappy deal from Bush's Excellent Adventure (and that's a macabre understatement). Courtney Martin, who unintentionally demonstrates the uselessness of 'progressives' with a piece on the potential withdrawal from Iraq. It starts off well:
Iraqi citizens shouldn't be the only ones infuriated by our military's half-assed effort to rebuild a nation that we so righteously destroyed not so long ago. Americans should also be outraged. We should be fuming. This war was fought in our names, and now shoddy infrastructure and broken promises will…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2010Related to this morning's post about the find of $1 trillion dollars worth of minerals in Afghanistan, even if we were to capture (if the verb fits....) ten percent of the total worth of those resources, it still wouldn't come close to the break-even point for the occupation of Afghanistan (which is somewhere between $200-$300 billion). If this will be the justification for staying even more Friedman units in Afghanistan, we're so stupid we can't even figure out how to make money off the deal.
(This venal argument ignores the "what do you say to the last man to die for a mistake" principle…