Category: Fourth Estate

Jeffrey Goldberg discusses Iraq’s Kurds, who in the late 80s were attacked with chemical — and, possibly, biological — weapons by the Baghdad government under Saddam Hussein.

Your account of Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks on Kurdish towns and villages in 1988 is horrifying, both because of what happened and because, fourteen years later, the full story is not well known. Why has the genocide of the Kurds not made a greater impression on the West?
I think the answer is simple: the man who committed the genocide is still in power, fourteen years after the fact, and the world is still dealing with him. It is estimated that as many as two hundred thousand Kurds were killed, including five thousand in a single gas attack on the city of Halabja. Dozens of other towns and villages were also struck by chemical weapons. If the world were to fully acknowledge the crime that took place, wouldn’t it be a moral necessity to remove Saddam Hussein from power? Imagine if Hitler remained in power into the early nineteen-sixties. I doubt we’d have heard as much about the Holocaust.

Here’s an interesting article in the Monitor on a general rethinking in the US about multi-cultural relativism — questioning whether we have simply accept as equally valid all ethical and cultural positions, or whether there are times when it’s okay to judge and criticize others.

It’s a tricky thing. On the one hand, being judgmental and moralizing can blind one to the good things in other cultures, can lead to xenophobia, or at least a jingoistic, knee-jerk “We’re No. 1” sort of attitude. To treat only with cultural stereotypes, not individuals, is a vast over-simplification of reality as well.

On the other hand, to pretend that cultural differences make no difference at all seems contradictory. To pretend that cultural differences don’t exist seems absurd. And to argue that we simply have to let every culture express its own values, without having a judgment as to those values, seems impossible in the modern world, where such cultural values can ultimately clash in a violent, destructive fashion.

No, alas, we’re going to have to find the hardest place of all — the middle ground. Darned inconvenient, reality.

While talking about the Dept. of Defense along side “green” issues would seem oxymoronic, there’s actually quite a bit of environmental sensitivity making its way through the halls of the Pentagon.

Part of that is just a matter of dollars and cents. The DoD has ended up paying tons of money doing environmental clean-up of military bases in the US (at the very least — I have no idea what’s been spent elsewhere in the world). I know, because my company does a lot of that work. Military practices until the 80s and 90s were akin to the worst industrial practices — use whatever chemicals are useful, dump the waste wherever it doesn’t stink up the Officer’s Club, and don’t worry — the press can’t get on the base.

But the base closure acts passed by Congress require the DoD to remediate environmental problems before the lands can be turned over to the public (and off the DoD books). That means cleaning up jet fuel spills, solvent spills, unexploded ordinance, PCBs, and all sorts of other really cool contaminants. I could tell you stories …

The other factor that’s changed over time is the need to treat soldiers right. The lessons of Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome and Depleted Uranium Shells (though both of the latter of these are still of questionable scientific concern) have finally sunk in, and military personnel are demanding a certain level of safety in materials used and handled — and the DoD lawyers are demanding it, too.

This article is all about a new development — the deployment of “green bullets” — which use a tungston alloy head, rather than lead, to keep firing ranges from not becoming any more contaminated than they already are. Interesting stuff.

I don’t know if it got a lot of play outside the Orlando area, but since I was there, and traveling, it piqued my curiosity: a new full-body X-ray for airport security that can identify hidden items (among other things), while providing something of a peep show for the manning personnel.

One system, the Rapiscan Secure 1000, uses low-energy X-rays to search a person through clothing. When Rapiscan project manager Bryan Allman scanned himself, detected was a plastic knife hidden in his shirt pocket.
But the outline of his body — every inch of it — also was clearly visible. Perhaps proving the machine’s revealing nature, airport officials refused to put a woman in the scanner.
Security officials said the scanner would only be used when a passenger shows an “anomaly.” Also, the security worker examining the scan would be the same sex as the person being searched.

Alas, the machine was not deployed by the security gate I passed through.

I’ve found both interesting and amusing the increased sensitivity in the airline security about making sure that only folks of the same gender are engaging in personal screening, whether it’s getting this sort of peep show or doing pat-downs. After all, we’re trying to make it so that there’s no chance of someone in security using their authority to cop a feel, right?

So I’m waiting for someone to bring sexual orientation into the whole thing — is the woman patting down that woman passenger actually a disinterested party, or a lesbian sex maniac? Ditto for that guy groping my ankles — is he just doing his job, or might he be a some gay ankle fetishist? And, heck, get a bisexual in there (let alone a transgendered person), and hilarity can really ensue. Not to mention lawsuits.

Of course I’m not trying to minimize concerns here, and there have been some cases where people being searched thought they were being felt up inappropriately — and having this sort of “body picture” machine is only going to make that potential worse (“I’m sorry, Ms. Aguillera, please step this way for an x-ray …”). I’m instead, like I do with systems suggestions at work, being the normal sort of pain in the ass about assumptions folks are bringing to the table, i.e., that only men would act sexually abusively toward women, and vice-versa.

Equally interesting is a machine that blows your hair (and, based on the picture, makes you look like a fashion model) to sniff out explosive residue … and, hey presto, can also detect drug residue, too. Yeah, that’s great — I’m sure there won’t be any false positives (or second-hand contamination) from that.

There’s a serious HIV problem in some Inuit communities around the Arctic Winter Games 2002. So a local health association has started distributing condoms to women.

The condoms advertise that they taste like like arctic char or muskox. In fact, they don’t, but they are meant to send a strong message.

(Via Boing Boing)

For the bigger sumo, the hardest problem is finding his malehood because it’s always buried within the rolls of fat. The first thing to do is get the fat out of the way,” she says. You can’t move the fat with your hands alone. And it’s not like you can ask somebody else for help. What I did was sat on top and moved my butt around in a circle until I found his thing. From there it was easy. Naturally, he doesn’t do much else but lie there. It’s nearly always the woman on top, or a sitting position.

(Via Trance Gemini)

Okay, let me get this straight.

The US indicates (in leaked documents) that it is considering targeting nuclear weapons (still badly mispronounced by our current President) at the Axis of Evil plus China, Russia, and … oh, I forget who No. 3 was.

Well, duh. Does anyone really think we don’t have nukes aimed, officially or ready for a moment’s download, at countries that have demonstrated a possession of or interest in obtaining Weapons of Mass Destruction — be they nukes, bio-weapons, or chemical weapons. Why wouldn’t we?

See fire at building at Saudi Arabia.

See young women in burning school, at risk of being burned alive.

See members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the mutaween, or religious police) blocking their exit from the building, because the women are not garbed in the abaya (an enveloping outfit similar to the Afghan burqa). See the mutaween also scuffle with firemen trying to get into the building, for the same reason.

See 15 young women die, mostly by being crushed in the ensuing crowd.

See Allah weeping, and considering being extremely unmerciful to the self-rightious assholes who let this happen.

The English-language Saudi Gazette, in a front-page report on Thursday, quoted witnesses as saying that members of the police, known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, had stopped men who tried to help the girls warning “it is a sinful to approach them.”
One civil defence officer told al-Eqtisadiah he saw three members of the religious police “beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya.”
“We told them that the situation was very critical and did not allow for such behaviour. But they shouted at us and refused to move away from the gates,” the newspaper quoted the officer as saying.

When even the tame newspapers in Saudi criticize the mutaween, you know things have gone beyond the Pale.

Of course, if this had happened in Cuba, the conservative right wing in the US would be all over this story. If it had happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban post-9/11, the US government would be issuing broadsides in the press. If this happened in China, there would be formal protests.

But Saudi Arabia is, after all, our ally.

If there are martyrs to be welcomed into the Muslim Paradise, I hope those girls are among them.

(Via Bears-Cave)

A few years back, an artist ticked off at the Swedish government created his own “nation” in southern Sweden, Ladonia. Even set up a web page. Lots of yuks.

Until people in Pakistan started e-mailing and applying for citizenship …

(Via Quiddity)

Wow. Color-coded terrorism alerts. I’m reminded of the big, colorful displays at the entrance of National Forests, showing the fire risk. Actually, not a bad idea, to be honest …

… but the execution sucks. The color progression is completely counter-intuitive. At least, if you’re thinking of the rainbow (which is the spectrum most folks think of) it is.

The problem is, they wanted to use the green-yellow-red model, which most folks know from traffic signals. Green = safe, Yellow = caution, Red = danger. But three stages was not enough. What to do, what to do?

Well, choosing Orange for the level between Yellow and Red makes sense. A nice blend.

But what to put between Yellow and Green. Yellow-green? What an unamerican color. Only folks with Crayola 64-packs would recognize that one.

So we’ll put in Blue. Never mind that Green is a combination of Blue and Yellow, and therefore it is a goofy choice. Better (or fitting) would have been Blue as the lowest level, Green as intermediate between Blue and Yellow (duh). This would have worked because, frankly, we’ll never see the Green (lowest) level in our lives. Blue would then be unused, some sort of azure dream to aspire toward. And, meanwhile, we could have gotten some Green time, and all would have been well, and art students and spectrologists and pedants like me would have been perfectly happy.

Dammit. Mix up your colors, and the terrorists win ….

Three things I quoted on that day that still deserve consideration.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.
— Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968)

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
— Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

Now is the time to embrace one another, and work together to show that good is always the victor.
— The Christian Science Monitor, “Resliance and Restraint” (editorial), 12 Sep 01.

Why bother pursuing high levels of customer satisfaction through good service and quality product when you can just sue the snot out of anyone who bitches about you on an Internet forum?

That appears to be the tactic pursued by PetsWarehouse against some folks on an aquarium discussion board who complained about the service they’d received. They — along with CompuServe and the Long Island Better Business Bureau — are being sued by PetsWarehouse for $15MM for defamation.

Don’t think it can work? Some of the defendents have already settled, agreeing to take down posts that they made, run banner ads on their site for PetsWarehouse, or otherwise pay damages.

In the litigation biz, this seems to be what is known as a “SLAPP” (strategic litigation against public participation). A number of states have passed laws to prevent this. New York does not seem to be one of them.

Got a few bucks? There’s a legal defense fund started up for this one.

(Via Boing Boing)

First off, whomever coined the term “shadow government” for what is, in actuality, a backup government, ought to be sent to bed without supper. “Shadow government” conjures up images of the Illuminati, the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Masons running things behind the scenes. They do, of course, but that just makes it even worse to appropriate the term to describe the various civil servants who are off in bunkers now, doing their normal work on 90 day shifts but safe from some al Qa’eda maniac and a suitcase nuke taking out all of Washington, DC.

That having been said, here’s an interesting article from the WSJ about extending the concept, and how our current legal (and Constitutional) mechanisms for keeping the government rolling in case of disaster are, perhaps, obsolete and in need of replacement.

An update to the “Was the Pentagon really hit by a plane?” debate, some footage has been leaked (?) from a Pentagon security camera that purports to show the plane’s impact.

Maybe.

Conspiracy theorists are going to be running with this one for a long time — if they can just come up with a reason.

(Via InstaPundit)

The latest trend to hit the nation’s schools? Holding your breath until you pass out.

I always thought this was impossible. But maybe that’s what They wanted me to think.

Let’s see how much money the Justice Dept. wants to combat this one.

(Via Blather)

The universe is not green. It’s beige. Damn. Beige is such an over-used color.

(Via Blather)

Two planes hit the WTC on 9/11. Everyone not only agrees, they have some jaw-popping video footage of it.

And a plane hit the Pentagon, too, right?

Right?

Check out the Hunt the Boeing site.

(Via Boing Boing; the Discussion page there is somewhat reassuring)

If you’re going to create a group called “The South Florida Human Rights Council,” then it’s probably bad form to eject three gay rights activists from your inaugural meeting because “”We’re not focusing on gays. I don’t want our time to get all boiled up in side issues.”

Just a thought.

The purpose of the group is actually to fight discrimination against Blacks and Hispanics. Worthy goals, certainly. Perhaps just a bit narrower than the organizational name implies.

(Via JillMatrix)