11.01.06
Toxic effects—including cancer—of depleted uranium
This story is consistent with many other reports:
UK and US forces have continued to use depleted uranium weapons despite warnings they pose a cancer risk, a BBC investigation has found.
Scientists have pointed to health statistics in Iraq, where the weapons were used in the 1991 and 2003 wars.
A report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2001 said they posed only a small contamination risk.
But a senior UN scientist said research showing how depleted uranium could cause cancer was withheld.
The UK Ministry of Defence said that there was no evidence linking depleted uranium use to ill health.
Depleted uranium is extremely dense and hard, and is used for armour-piercing bullets or shells.
Fears over health implications led to a study by the WHO in 2001.
Dr Mike Repacholi, who oversaw work on the report, told Angus Stickler of BBC Radio Four’s Today programme that depleted uranium was “basically safe”.
“You would have to ingest a huge amount of depleted uranium dust to cause any adverse health effect,” he said.
But Dr Keith Baverstock, who worked on the project, said research conducted by the US Department of Defense suggested otherwise.
He described a process known as genotoxicity, which begins when depleted uranium dust is inhaled.
“The particles that dissolve pose a risk – part radioactive – and part from the chemical toxicity in the lung,” he said.
Later, he said, the material enters the body and the blood stream, potentially affecting bone marrow, the lymphatic system and the kidneys.
The research was not included in the WHO report, and Dr Baverstock believes it was blocked. Read the rest of this entry »
Hard to read
This story from Iraq is hard to read. And when you do read it, you wonder why the sacrifice was made. Was this to stop Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction related program activities? Was it to make the Iraqi people safer and improve their standard of living? Was it to bring democracy to Iraq? The US has failed at all of those, and yet our troops remain there, dying and killing, because we have a stubborn President—stupid and stubborn. And all the failures? Not his fault, he believes. And not Rumsfeld’s fault. No, it’s the fault of the soldiers—the generals (to whom Rumsfeld would not listen and who were immediately punished if they spoke up with any disagreement) and their officers. Except for the torture. That was strictly the fault of enlisted troops—no officers were guilty. Indeed, the accused in their courts-martial were not allowed to talk about their orders, or to get officers under oath to testify, or to defend themselves in any way that might implicate an officer—maybe even a high-ranking officer. That cannot be allowed.
Cheney can say that dunking a suspect is fine, but what he means by that he will not say. He won’t say if we use waterboarding, only that we do not torture, and he will not define what he means by torture. Nor will Bush, nor Tony Snow, nor Dan Bartlett, nor Rumsfeld. None of them will say what we do and will not say what is beyond the pale. Because, for this crowd, nothing is. And when Congress roused itself long enough to pass legislation forbidding torture—and waterboarding—Bush immediately wrote a signing statement that, he said, allows him to ignore the legislation. And Congress says nothing, does nothing. Where is McCain now? He’s doing whatever it takes to run for President, including backing off on all his principles and proud statements.
The story: Read the rest of this entry »
An intelligence community version of Wikipedia
Very interesting development—and, I would say, a very positive one. Nice to get some good news for a change:
The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have created a new computer system that uses software from a popular Internet encyclopedia site to gather input on sensitive topics from analysts across the spy community, part of an effort to fix problems that plagued prewar estimates on Iraq.
The new system, called “Intellipedia” because it is built on open-source software from the Wikipedia Web site, was launched earlier this year. It is already being used to assemble intelligence reports on Nigeria and other subjects, according to U.S. intelligence officials who discussed the initiative in detail for the first time Tuesday.
After being criticized for downplaying dissenting views on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs, “we’re trying to transform the way we do business,” said Michele Weslander, a senior official overseeing the initiative for the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte.
The system allows analysts from all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to weigh in on debates on North Korea’s nuclear program and other sensitive topics, creating internal Web sites that are constantly updated with new information and analysis, officials said.
The system, which is not accessible to the public, is divided into three classification categories ranging from “sensitive but unclassified” to “top secret.” Officials said the program is still being developed and has not replaced existing procedures used to create intelligence reports delivered to President Bush and other policymakers. But it is being used to assemble preliminary judgments for a forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Nigeria and could someday supplant the more cumbersome mechanisms used to create such reports. Read the rest of this entry »
Another Republican Rip van Winkle wakes up
John Cole, of Balloon Juice, after some shocks along the way, has finally woken up to what has become of the GOP. I went through the same process on a personal level years ago, long before I moved out here, and it is disconcerting. You see the world a certain way, and then you discover that the very basis for the view is wrong. So you become very confused as you try to sort through what you know and thought you knew and what is real and what was part of the deception and gradually—very gradually—reality starts to emerge, as if seeing things through a thick fog that’s starting to lift. It’s a hard experience, because you have to reorganize and rearrange and reconsider so much of your world view. Meanwhile, those still caught in the spell are angry at you—very angry, because you’re bringing their own doubts and denied perceptions to the surface, threatening their own certainty.
UPDATE: Just to be clear, my waking up was regarding a personal relationship, not politics. I’ve always been on the left, politically.
Map summary of polls
Very cool, via MetaFilter:
I’m not sure how up-to-date the polls are. Gibbons is still shown as leading in Nevada, but the multiple scandals he’s enduring now surely are cutting his support.
It will be nice to look at these over the next few days.
Calls from The Wife
The Wife calls toward the end of the day (early afternoon here) to tell me what she’s doing in Paris. Today was the big Chocolate Show—which turned out to be a popular idea, with roughly one million Parisians crowding the dining hall, hoping to score some free chocolate. Not much free—anything put out for free quickly vanished in a feeding frenzy. But you could buy all sorts of little samples for €1. Some things are free—e.g., the (as it turned out) ill-advised chocolate using olive oil.
At one corner of the hall were the educational exhibits: photos of cocoa beans, graphs of production, and the like. Good place to rest: it was totally empty.
As she left the hall she had to maneuver among exhausted and queasy adult bodies sitting or lying on the floor while scores of little kids, burning off their sugar high, ran around shrieking.
She’s using my Pocket PC for its wireless connections, and she now likes the Fitaly keyboard a lot. She couldn’t find the semicolon, so I emailed her a link to the page of all symbols. The semicolon is the shifted colon.
Last.FM: another music solution
I’ve used Pandora with great satisfaction, but today Lifehacker pointed out Last.FM, and before you could say “download,” I had it installed. Another free music channel, this one with overtones of MySpace: sharing of playlists, recommendations to friends, insider jargon (“scrobbling” music). Still, not bad. One can’t have too many music toys. It’s free… but Windows-only. I’m sure, though, that there are much better programs for the Mac.
NaNoWriMo progress note
1400 words so far today. 600 more and I reach the day’s goal, but will take the advice sent to me and continue on, to pile up as many words as possible in the first week. Blogging may slow down a tad.
Did the military once have honor?
From Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher:
USA Today revealed in a front page story on Monday that a study of several hundred American deaths in Iraq turned up at least seven cases where families were given the wrong information about how their loved ones died (most of them, it turned out, were killed by friendly fire). Now, on Tuesday, The Washington Post reveals that a U.S. soldier was ambushed and murdered by our friends in the Iraqi police.
My additional digging now shows that the military willfuly covered up this significant detail in releasing the news of his death to his family and to the press.
The Post story by Amit Paley visits the Sholeh police station in Baghdad, where posters “celebrating Moqtada al-Sadr, head of the Mahdi Army militia, dot the building’s walls.” One rainy night this month, it seems, the Sholeh police set up an ambush and killed Army Cpl. Kenny F. Stanton Jr., 20, said to be a “budding journalist.” At the time, Paley writes, Stanton and other members of the unit “had been trailing a group of Sholeh police” escorting known Mahdi Army members.
“How can we expect ordinary Iraqis to trust the police when we don’t even trust them not to kill our own men?” asked Capt. Alexander Shaw, head of the police transition team of the 372nd Military Police Battalion. Read the rest of this entry »
Model Mugging: a self-defense course for women
Model Mugging is an interesting and effective (in practice—that is, in actual real-life attack situations) self-defense technique for women.
I attended a graduation exercise in a Model Mugging course in Santa Cruz some years back, and I was impressed. The (male) instructors are suited in full defensive regalia—not just a cup, but thick padding on arms and legs and a full padded helmet. The reason: so that the students can learn to hit with the actual force they will use should they be attacked. Even with all the protection, an instructor can expect to be knocked unconscious once or twice every course.
The students during the course move through a variety of attack scenarios, from direct frontal attacks through walk-by attacks (the assailant approaches and then passes the victim to attack from behind), attacks made on a seated victim, and even attacks on victims lying down covered with bedclothes (as an attack by an intruder on a sleeping victim). Students learn how to use their legs—their strongest muscles—in fighting back, how to fight back should they be knocked to the ground, and so on.
It’s a demanding course in emotional terms. Some of the students came to learn defensive techniques after having been attacked, and during the graduation exercise, some students fought back successfully and then burst into tears. The other students crowded around to comfort them, and it is the clear that the course also has a therapeutic component.
One interesting statistic: We were told that the average assailant has done 17 attacks, so that the victim is totally outclassed just on the basis of experience. The victim is going through something for the first time, trying to work out a response on the fly, while the attacker has the advantage of experience and knows what to expect and how to deal with it.
But during the 12-week course, the students go through 54 very realistic simulated attacks, with full force. So if a student later faces an assailant, the experience tables are turned. The assailant just doesn’t have the depth of experience in dealing with physical assault that this particular victim does, and he finds himself out of his depth.
One graduate was attacked when she was alone on a Boston subway platform late at night. She successfully resisted the attack and in the process broke the assailant’s arm and a couple of his ribs. He tried to sue, but the disparity in their sizes made his contention that she had attacked him ridiculous.
It’s a course well worth Googling. You can usually find it in major cities, though it started on the West Coast. There’s some evidence that people who truly know how to defend themselves carry themselves differently, and that attackers shy away from such people, preferring those who carry themselves like victims: fearful, tentative, etc.
Sound-activated switch
For some mysterious reason, the wall switch no longer controls the one outlet into which I had plugged the bedroom lamp. Thus I cannot turn the lamp on/off as I enter/leave the room—a major pain since the lamp is located across the room.
I suddenly recalled the old sound-activated switch. A quick search found this one, which even has two switches: one controlled with two claps, one with three. Roughly $20. It’s on the way.
NaNoWriMo for me
Okay, I signed up. 2000 words due today. I can’t count the blog posts—words have to be toward novel. Since I signed up only yesterday, I have only the fuzziest of ideas where I’m going, but I do have a starting point. We’ll see. The advice is to start strong and pile up as many words as possible in week one.
In signing up, they offered a genre check list to determine what sort of novel I was writing. As if I knew.
