war
stoat | March 19, 2011 Omar Khayaam, sorry I can't do the bold around "distant" in a title. I gave Hugo the popcorn on friday, but it didn't really apply until today. It looks like the Frogs win the first strike award whilst Gaddafi gets the lying scumbag award. The end result of the Gaddafi-vs-the-West military fight is in no doubt; quite where that leaves the ground war is less clear. Probably in an Afghanistan-type situation, where we (well, the US in that case) bombed the Taliban so the Northern Alliance could take over. Only lets hope this time we don't collude with the drug-dealers; as far as I can tell the…
lborkowski | March 2, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Deborah Blum at Slate: Bring Back the Poison Squad ("If we look back to a similar crisis of food safety in the last century, we see that federal regulators were willing to risk their lives to protect the rest of us.")
Jenny Gold of Kaiser Health News on NPR: In Pa., Low-income Adults Soon May Be Uninsured (and check out Steve Inskeep's interview with Julie Rovner, which followed this story when it aired)
Jim Morris, Chris Hamby, and M.B. Pell at the Center for Public Integrity: Regulatory Flaws, Repeated Violations Put Oil Refinery Workers at Risk
The…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
grrlscientist | January 24, 2010tags: We Like War, social commentary, cultural observation, George Carlin, humor, comedy, fucking hilarious, streaming video
George Carlin, a comedic genius, makes a few priceless (and disturbing) observations about America's fondness for war.
tsmith | June 1, 2009"I always think someone is following me and wants to rape me. It is better to die." --Darfuri refugee
Sometimes there comes a public health issue that's so big, so overwhelming, so heinous, that you just don't know where to begin discussing it. Nevertheless, the conversation should, and must, happen just the same. Silence may be easier, but speaking out is the only way to demystify the taboos and bring attention to what's going on for those who can't bring attention to it themselves. And maybe, just maybe, bring about some change.
It's no secret that rape happens during wartime.…
bioephemera | June 1, 2009
A sexual violence victim recovers in Goma, Congo
photo by Endre Vestvik
A few weeks ago, the NYT published a horrifying account by Nicholas Kristof of the pervasive sexual violence left over from Liberia's civil war. A major survey in Liberia found that 75% of Liberian women had been raped - most gang-raped. And many of the victims are children:
Of course, children are raped everywhere, but what is happening in Liberia is different. The war seems to have shattered norms and trained some men to think that when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl. Or at school, girls sometimes…
thusspakezuska | May 27, 2009Welcome to our discussion of The Gender Knot by Allan Johnson. This is the first post in the discussion series. We will be discussing Chapter 1 "Where Are We?" You can find all posts connected to this discussion here.
I just noted a potential problem. There is an updated edition of the book now available. Right now I am working with a 1997 edition. I haven't decided if I will purchase the new edition; for now, I am going to keep going with my old one. But, if you are working with a new edition, you may encounter something in the book that I have left out. If so, please feel free to…
ddobbs | April 22, 2009
As the comments and correspondence about my PTSD story and posts accrue, I've been pondering ways to pull out some of the most interesting, powerful, and affecting. I finally decided to just start posting some, sometimes with commentary, sometimes without. This is a story of many different colors and textures.
I'll start with this excerpt from a long, eloquent blog response to my story about PTSD at Scientific American by Kayla Williams, a vet of the Iraq War who blogs at VetVoice. Williams is accumulating quite a strong run of posts there, including posts on torture, being a woman veteran…