9/11 and 9/12 … The Hangover
Well, it’s over. Another 9/11 anniversary is past, yes the most memorialized crime in history once again reared its ugly head. I wrote my own 9/11 post, but it was so filled with anger I decided to forgo it. And while I was reviewing what every other pundit on the planet had to say about 9/11, a whole bunch of Americans converged on Washington to insist that under no circumstances must America’s incredibly well paid health insurance industry death panels be hindered in their efforts. It’s been a strange weekend, but frankly, living in a country where many people think that the government actually helping sick people should be our lowest national priority is a little strange at the best of times. I mean, our goddamn prison population has access to better health care than tens of millions of Americans. Interesting national priorities.
I was asleep in a trailer in the Oregon woods during the 9/11 attacks. I was dreaming about huddling with some folks in the corner of a basement or some such from an explosion. And then I was walking along a road in an open area with a city on the skyline. On one side of the road was an endless pile of tan dust or sand. There was a rickety barbed wire fence and some brush between me and the dust, and I was looking for a way to get through it and look at the dust closer. Then I woke up from my dreams, went into the main house, and started watching cable TV true crime shows. The news of the attacks scrolled by, and that was that. For the first few moments I thought maybe it was some sort of War of the Worlds thing, like maybe a preview for a movie that had been mistaken for something real No such luck, 19 people had indeed hijacked airliners and used them as weapons.
And sadly within a few days the second hijacking took place and the real nightmare began. Within a week of 9/11 I knew that the “War on Terror” was going to make the “War on Drugs” look cheap and effective by comparison. What had been a terrible crime perpetrated by a tiny handful of religious extremists was parlayed into a terrifying existential threat to western civilization. The great terrorist witch hunt had begun, and while Americans were driven almost to hysteria watching out for terrorists jumping out of every corner and crying for the government to do anything to protect them from this threat … the rich and the military went on the greatest shopping spree in history. In fact they were so carried away with the thrill of having infinite credit cards, and a universal mandate, they even thought they could buy entire countries and reshape the world in their image! Yes, by God, good was finally going to triumph over evil!
Sadly, Iraq and Afghanistan, the first two countries in their heroic agenda have stuck in our craw, and despite never ending blood and money, don’t look like they will be transforming into the occupied post war Germany and Japan of our “greatest generation” anytime soon. Al Quaida is still around, even Bin Laden is still making the rounds, th0ugh he’s lost his edge. France is still around despite despite the fact that many of the proponents of the “War on Terror” had confidently written its epitaph. There’s no Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East, and just in general the Muslim hordes that were just over the horizon have failed to materialize. In fact except for a truly heroic pile of debt, some ungovernable occupied Muslim lands of our own, and a government/military/banker complex bloated beyond all reason like some great cancerous octopus … everything is pretty much the same as before the War on Terror. Yeah, Bin Laden wasn’t able to nuke New York, but there never was much chance he was going to do that anyhow. And yeah, terrorist attacks continue. As they have since the beginning of recorded history and will until human beings evolve past the shaved chimp stage.
Exit Bush, enter Obama, and we’re in a bizarre new land. Americans who for years stood by while Bush shovelled trillions out the door to bankers and the military are now up in arms because Obama wants to spend comparatively modest amounts on medical care for sick Americans? On one hand it’s nice that people are waking up to the fact that Washington has robbed us blind and that Washington’s credit cards need to be cancelled, on the other hand the anti-Obama and anti-liberal tone of it all was disturbing. Because I’m pretty sure most of these people were pro Bush, which hardly argues this is some national movement. And arguments on whether the march is spontaneous are pointless, because spontaneous or not they are benefiting the very efficient death panels we already have, the insurance companies who work so hard to make sure we have the most profitable and least effective health care system in the developed world.
And on top of this weirdness, boy, Obama is really blowing it. I suspected all along he was a clever politician with a silver tongue. Yeah, that’s an upgrade from a clever politician who only took the cowboy boot out of his mouth to change feet, but it wasn’t what we needed or were promised! Sadly it seems like Obama’s “strategy” so far has been to double down in Afghanistan and on the economy, and hopefully ram some sort of health care reform package through using the favours the former two generated. In fact for all practical purposes Obama has simply continued or even expanded on Bush’s policies, while liberals grow increasingly desperate to avoid acknowledging what the liberal intelligentsia knew from the beginning, Obama is no liberal. And as a last delicious icing to this giant cake of absurdity, Americans are having coniptions calling President Obama a socialist, a communist, and a fascist for doing exactly what Bush was doing!
So what’s really going on here? Beats the hell out of me. My current theory … I’m still dreaming in my trailer in the woods.
(The above image as proof that millions of people marched on Washington? Um, no, even though it was widely claimed as such. It’s a photo from some previous event, probably the Million Man March in 95. And an example of to what great lengths the partisans in this debate will go to, partisans on both sides I should add. I’ve seen credible estimates of 60,000 or more, up to hardly credible millions. I suspect the media is mostly ignoring it because even they aren’t really sure what is going on. In President Obama’s America, every day is Halloween I guess.)
Health Care, Shmealth Care, what’s all the fuss about?
Health Care. OK, this seems to be a touchy topic, so what the hell, I’ll wade right in. My last basically throwaway post sure got a lot of comments, I’ll see what we can generate this time. For today’s post, I’m going to proceed from the general to the specific. IE I will make some general observations about health care in the USA, then discuss the Obama plan. And this will definitely be generalized and only scratch the surface. I’d say you could write a book about the Obama plan alone, but that would be an understatement since the plan itself is a book, over 1000 pages long.
My first point is that there is a fabulous amount of misinformation being bandied about regarding the topic of health care. As far as I can tell, most Americans are pretty much unaware of how our own system works, and completely utterly misinformed about how health care works in other countries. It’s not that they don’t know about other countries, it’s that they are firmly convinced of things about them that just aren’t so. As a Canadian, it’s shocking to me how badly the Canadian system is misrepresented in the USA. I’ve only ever known one Canadian who complained about the Canadian system, and she was someone who could charitably be described as a filthy rich snob. Average Canadians for the most part are perfectly happy with a system, sure, there’s some kvetching, there’s always kvetching anywhere.
The second point is that most Americans seem to be under the impression that our health care system works. And is some ways it does, it’s certainly better than the health care system in virtually all the non-industrialized world. Which isn’t saying much, nu? There are some major problems, problems that need to be addressed. For one thing we spend a huge amount of money on health care, and the costs have been rising faster than inflation for decades. We spend more money per capita than any other country on health care, that alone is shocking, especially considering that millions of people have little access to care. And as much of a third of that money is wasted, all sorts of extra tests and necessary medications are administered because doctors are afraid of malpractice. just for starters. Medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the USA, that alone is a national disgrace. And yeah, for those who say that the uninsured can just “go to county hospitals.” Yes, in fact they can go to any ER and get treatment. Of course having people go to an emergency room for treatment is the most fabulously expensive way to provide people with health care, another reason our health care costs are astronomical. Then there’s the problem that the average American spends more money on health care in the last year of their life than in their entire previous life. And while this makes sense in some cases, a huge chunk of this is dying senior citizens having their life extended for a few months by heroic care … often against their express wishes! Sigh. I could go on, but this article seems to cover many of the problems with the US system in a reasonably neutral way.
Point three. We would all benefit from cradle to grave health care. I know that sounds simple, but again and again I hear Calvinist arguments that “people should just buy their own health insurance, if they don’t, tough. ” The problem with this argument is that while it may have a certain “holier than thou” appeal, in practise it means that the uninsured cost the taxpayer far more money for health care than if we simply insured them. First off, the direct cost of having people wait till they are sick enough for a visit to the ER. And a second cost because of all the productivity lost (let alone lives lost) because of the unavailability of health care. When workers don’t show up at work because they are sick, that increases costs to business … that are simply passed on to us. Lastly, and one would think obviously, do people want the person who sat down at that table in MacDonald’s before them and their family to be treated for their communicable illnesses or not? Apparently with some people the answer is no, we want our families to be exposed to sick people in the streets.
In any event, we come to the Obama system. First off, as a commenter helpfully showed yesterday, there’s a fabulous amount of lies and dis-information being spread about Obama’s plan. Some of it makes my jaw drop, there’s people with a straight face claiming this bill will result in seniors being “euthanized” as the government decides what care they should get. Right. More than 22,000 people die every single year in the USA for lack of health coverage, a problem the Obama mitigates, but people would rather let these people die because some spam email told them the plan was going to kill people? I don’t think I can even debate with people so partisan that anything Obama proposes must be opposed, because that’s where a lot of this”outrage” appears to be coming from.
In any event, the main criticism of the Obama plan is how much it will cost. I’ve seen estimates as high as one and a half trillion over the next decade. That is a lot of money, no doubt about it. And while the plan does propose to rein in rising health care costs by addressing some (but not all) of the problems in the current system, no one thinks it will add up to a trillion and a half dollars in savings. Two points here. I can see an easy way to save that much or more over the next decade. Let’s pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq tomorrow. That will save far more than a trillion and a half dollars, both in direct savings, and in indirect savings because Americans won’t be getting maimed and psychologically scarred in foreign wars. And in any event, we’ve given trillions of dollars to the banks just this past year, apparently to save executive bonuses. What the hell is wrong with spending a trillion and a half dollars over ten years if it provides millions of American with health care? I mean if it’s the government’s job to protect Americans, health care is the front line since disease and injury kills more Americans ever year than all the wars and terrorist attacks in US history combined.
But of course the US government, both factions of it, don’t give a rat’s ass about saving American lives. It’s about saving corporate profits (and subsequent campaign financing,) and foreign wars and sick Americans are a source of almost mind-numbing profit. So sadly, I fully expect Obama’s plan will be shot down, or so gutted as to be simply yet another layer of bureaucracy designed to make Americans think we are being cared for … when in fact they government is just performing yet another wallet drain and moneyectomy on lower and middle class Americans.
(The above image is public domain under US copyright law as it was created around 1528. Credit: Hans von Gersdorff. Der verwundete Mann. Feldtbůch der Wundartzney (Strasburg, 1528). Field book of surgery. The wounded man. Yes, I would definitely say he has been seriously wounded. Of course he should have waited until his suit of armour came back from the cleaners before running around a battlefield.)
The Four Horsemen: War, Plague, Depression, and Obama
It appears we aren’t all going to die of the swine flu just yet. That pretty much covers that topic. A few points to reiterate. The reason this was such a big deal, though the media did overreact, was that this is a new and and contagious disease. Yes, it is a flu, but it was a brand new flu that humans had never been exposed to before. And sometimes new diseases can be quite lethal. Right now it’s looking like it isn’t terribly lethal and it’s not spreading as fast as it could have. It’s possible it will come back with a vengeance next fall, but presumably by then we will have a vaccine.
Another point is that from what I have read, is that historically it appears that quarantines can work for small isolated communities and remote islands, but efforts to quarantine large cities, regions, or countries are ineffectual. So there was no point shutting down the border, the fact of the matter is that the authorities handled this fairly well. At least in the USA. The Egyptians killing all their pigs is strange, but governments aren’t always rational, and often don’t want to lose face by admitting they blew it.
Speaking of which, the endless US occupation of Iraq continues. In fact violence seems to be ticking up again, not surprising considering what a horrible mess the country is. It’s not really a country actually, or a very fractured one a best. So the USA evacuation of Iraqi cities, whatever that means, may be delayed. I’m not betting on a voluntary US withdrawal any time soon, and even if we do, the country will fall to pieces, not transform into some Germany or Japan magically rising out of the bloody sands of the Middle East.
It’ even less likely that Afghanistan will be building any American fast food franchises soon, they don’t even have a Green Zone. Still, western armies have been campaigning in the region for centuries, so tis may go o awhile. I guess the theory is that someday we will get it right? Beats me. Things are no better in Pakistan. Historically when it comes to western crusades in Asia, we can look forward to endless low grade fighting, with the occasional disaster. Well, and endless piles of dead brown civilians, but that doesn’t even make it it on radar in the west. On the plus side these endless colonial adventures keep us supplied with veterans should we ever actually have to defend our country I suppose.
OK, so we’ve covered war and plague. In the other pillar of the trifecta of bad news we’re dealing with these days, the economy. It’s still not looking good. Warren Buffet says things are cool, but I’m not a big follower of prophets of any sort as my readers may have discerned. A prophet in a fellow who has made a string of lucky guesses. I’m still predicting that things will get worse before they get better. And in any case, for most of us in America, no matter how badly our wars, our economy, or the flu transpires, life will go on.
And the Obama administration will go on. At this point I’m more disappointed than my worst fears. Obama continues to use his golden tongue to say nice liberal sounding things, but there’s been no real change from Bush’s policies both foreign and domestic. He’s increased military spending, widened our foreign wars, continued to shovel money into the bankers ravenous maw. Some change. He’s even completely caved on looking into some of the human rights abuses under Bush, under the “we must look forward” mantra. Right, we’re still hunting down octogenarian prison guards from a war that ended in the first half of the last century, but crimes committed by the last administration have to be swept under the rug?
Worse, Obama’s election seems to have completely eviscerated what was left of the antiwar and liberal movements in the USA. Or at least made it completely PC to ignore any hint of liberalism in the media. I mean, we have a black, liberal president, so how can the liberals complain? Snort. However, rather than rant at length about this, I will link to a site which covers the whole topic in depth. I don’t agree with everything, but I agree with the gist of it and highly recommend it to my readers: Status Quobama: A Hundred Days of Fake-Progrssive BS and Liberal-Left Surrender.
Coming up this week, Ten Allied Military Blunders, the Dyatlov Pass incident revisited, and a commentary on some of the jingoistic comments people have left on Doug’s Darkworld.
Have a great week everyone.
(The above image has been released into the public domain by its creator. Credit: Orlovic. It’s an American Predator drone, IE one of our robotic flying death squads … shot down over Serbia … on display in a Belgrade Aviation Museum. Somehow I doubt it’s there to celebrate the American bombing campaign in Serbia. As always I chose the image to illustrate that there are always other perspectives, despite what they say on CNN and Fox “news.”)
Finally, a global calamity where the best thing to do is stay home, drink beer, and watch TV. I’m doing my part.
(Click on image to see the full size version)
Thank God for silver linings. I mean, global warming, the Af-Pak War, Somali pirates, world wide economic collapse, Susan Boyle … it’s all been too much lately. And now a new global menace is on the horizon, swine flu. It’s actually swine-bird-human flu to be more precise. It’s broken out in Mexico, and appears to have already spread to four continents. So what’s so bad about a little flu? Well, this flu is killing a fair number of its victims, including healthy young people. The scientific expression for a flu that kills healthy young people is “Oh, shit.” So how serious is this? No one knows. Should we panic and run for the hills? Definitely not. But, the gentle reader may ask, people are dying! Yes, they are. In fact people die of flu epidemics every year, typically in the hundreds of thousands every year. So let’s not lose perspective here. Moving right along, in my usual fashion I will comment on various aspects of this unfolding situation.
First of all, as disasters go, we are really prepared for this one. There are huge stockpiles of drugs to treat flus. There are enormous planet wide medical resources working on this as we speak, a vaccine will likely be ready within months. Virtually every government entity on the planet has whole departments devoted to public health, all of which can be brought to bear. And epidemics have been studied by very smart scientists for decades, we actually have a pretty good handle on this. These people do actually know what they are doing.
Which brings us to my first point, the armchair quarterbacking and conspiracy theorizing in this situation has already gotten ridiculous to offencive. In the states especially there are racist (or maybe just ignorant to be fair) pundits calling for the the USA to seal the border with Mexico. This is dumb for so many reasons. The first being that it not possible to seal a border. The second being that this would deny us a huge tool in monitoring people who come and go and identifying the infected ones. And yes, it would cost a huge pile of money. It would also cause a false sense of security, because the experts say that the best way to fight this is locally. The more we can stop its spread locally, the better off we will all be. We aren’t going to be able to stop this, but if we slow down its spread it will both give us time to make a vaccine and get us into the northern hemisphere summer, when the flu season tends to peter out all on its own. Lastly of course, it’s too late to close the border, the virus is already spread to four continents for God’s sake. I hate to say it, but “closing the barn door after the cows are gone” seems to be one of the only arrows left in many right wing pundit’s quivers.
And when we come to conspiracy theories, it gets worse. No this isn’t terrorism. It would take amazingly sophisticated technological resources to even consider using the flu as a biological weapon, few countries have those resources, let alone terrorists hiding in caves. Secondly, the flu is about the last pathogen one would chose to use for a biological weapon. No matter what, it is going to spread back to one’s own people. And worse, flu viruses are highly mutable and it could easily turn into something far more lethal than was intended. By the same token of course the people claiming this is some “new world order” plot to “thin the herds” also falls flat. There would be better ways to do it, and the herds are thinning themselves quite nicely as it is. (Not to mention the sophomoric immaturity of believing in some secret globe spanning secret world government.)
That being said, one should also keep in mind that while this flu almost certainly wasn’t created as a weapon, it most certainly will be used as a weapon. Aforementioned pundits are using it already to spread their message of hate. Some countries have already used it as an excuse to hit the USA with economic sanctions. And it can be assumed that governments, militaries, intelligence agencies, and commercial interests are quietly discussing how this can be best used to their advantage. Ex post facto conspiracies if you will.
And despite my cheery optimism, how bad could this get? Well, I’ve been reading about the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, and the answer would have to be “pretty bad.” In 1918 somewhere between one third to half the human race caught Spanish Influenza, and 20 to 100 million people died. In October of 1918 nearly 200,000 Americans died of the flu, the worst mass death toll in US history. That’s about one person in every 500, so almost everyone knew someone who died. A comparable modern death toll would be 600,000 dead Americans. That kind of puts hurricane Katrina in perspective, hell, it puts almost every war the USA has ever fought in perspective.
Will it get that bad? No one knows, but in a few weeks we will know a lot more. If one is worried, wash one’s hands frequently and avoid crowds. (Wearing masks is optional, it can’t hurt but it’s probably little protection outside of health care settings.) And if one is really worried, stay home and watch TV. Because the last thing we need is people panicking in the streets.
Skol!
(The above image is a reproduction of a painting made before 1918 and is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. I’m also pretty sure it’s public domain under US copyright law. It’s “Death of a Maiden” painted by the amazing Austrian artist Egon Schiele. He was an up and coming artist who might have changed the art world, but because of his untimely death few people outside of art history classes have heard of him. He died in 1918 of the Spanish Flu at age 28, three days after his six months pregnant wife died of the same. He made a few sketches of her in his last three days, his last works. So while the overall impact of a pandemic may be minor, the individual impact is tragedy beyond words. There was another Austrian artist of the same age in 1918 who survived the flu, damn shame he didn’t die instead. The Lord works in mysterious ways, nu?)
Everything you always wanted to know about fallout but were afraid to ask
OK, in a previous post we have escaped being incinerated by a nuclear weapon’s initial flash through dumb luck, and escaped being crushed and imploded by the ensuing shock wave through quick wits and a fortuitously placed shelter of some sort. Now we are standing outside the subway staring at the starkly beautiful and terrible mushroom cloud rising a few miles away. “This can’t be good” would be a reasonable assessment of the situation, aren’t we now doomed to die a horrible death from fallout induced radiation poisoning? No. In fact if you’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance you will be around to tell this story to your grandchildren. And they won’t be mutants from fifties horror movies either, well, at least some of them.
The reason is that the danger from fallout is exaggerated, and even better, a few simple precautions can reduce that danger considerably. What is fallout? Fallout is dust and debris sucked up and pulverized and irradiated by the nuclear explosion, tossed up into the air by the mushroom cloud, and delivered to nearby locations by the wind. Unless the bomb was designed to create fallout, which is unlikely, fallout is going to be rather minimal. However, even better, fallout is simply radioactive dust falling from the sky, possibleyin rain, possibly invisibly. Why is that better? Because, for that dust to really hurt you, it has to get inside you. Thats right, the mere presence of radioactive fallout, while not a good thing, is not nearly so bad as inhaling or swallowing the dust.
So now the clever reader just figured out the purpose of the pillowcase they had stuffed in their briefcase or purse because they read about it in Doug’s Darkworld, and has already ripped it into strips to act as an impromptu breathing mask. Wrap your face so that as much as possible you’re breathing through cloth, wet cloth if it can be arranged, and proceed on your way. The fallout is only going to drift downwind from the bomb site, try to proceed away from both the bomb site and any area downwind from the site. Think of it this way, invisible poisonous dust may be falling from the sky, if you can avoid breathing or eating it, you will be OK. It’s also a good idea to not let any accumulate on your body.
How can all this be accomplished? Wear a mask of some sort, improvised if necessary. Change the mask every 15 minutes or so. Don’t eat or drink anything that has been exposed to fallout, not a good time to quench one’s thirst in puddles or fountains. Changing into uncontaminated clothes and showering yourself off is a good idea when possible. A good idea to cover your hair if you are outside.
OK, by now it is clear that while fallout danger can be minimized, boy, it’s not going to be easy or safe to run around in a fallout contaminated area. On the plus side only areas downwind of the central blast site are going to get fallout. That means if facing the mushroom cloud the wind is at your back, count your blessings and proceed in a direction away from the blast area, preferably with the wind in your face. Fallout is only really dangerous for a few days, it takes decades to fade away entirely but most of the radioactive material in fallout is unstable and decays into harmless dust very quickly. This is why the fallout shelter was invented, if one can get to a decent fallout shelter fast enough, the danger from fallout is mitigated even further.
Which leads to part three of my “How to survive a nuclear attack” series. Fallout shelters. Yes, rather than run around in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, it might be a good idea to lay low in a fallout safe structure. It is even possible to build a fallout shelter. Coming soon. In conclusion, I’m not trying to minimize the terrible danger of nuclear weapons (or nuclear power plant fires, the above information also applies if your local nuclear plant catches fire,) I’m trying to illustrate the central idea that there are many possible calamities in our lives where a little knowledge quickly applied is the difference between being a survivor…or a statistic.
(The above image was taken by a US government employee in the course of their duties, and is thus public domain under US law. This is a picture from the Apple-2 nuclear test on 5 May 1945, also known as Operation Cue. This was the last big public(!) nuclear test, and was extensively covered by the media of the day. It’s also the test where the iconic video images linked in the previous post were. Yes, civilian volunteers were trucked in to witness the test and its aftermath, those were the good old days!)
How to survive a nuclear attack using only one’s wits and a pillowcase
Today, a post topic that’s near and dear to me. Having watched every post apocalypse movie ever made, read most of the books, and extensively studied survivalist literature…am I overqualified for this or what? Granted I haven’t had any experience surviving a nuclear attack, but few people have. This is simply logical advice based on my readings about nuclear weapons and their effects. And no, the title isn’t a joke. Well, OK, it is a joke, but it’s true nonetheless. And NO, am not going to recommend riding out the attack a la Indiana Jones in a lead lined fridge. That was just silly.
First, a few codicils and asides. I know a lot of people may be thinking “Survive a nuclear attack? Not possible.” Well, actually, it is. Depending on the size and nature of the attack. For our purposes I am assuming a limited nuclear attack, IE an attack with modest bombs designed to destroy a nation’s infrastructure and military capability. Or even a small attack, say by a terrorist or freedom fighter. The fallout portion of this advice also applies to nuclear plant meltdowns. However, if someone sets off a doomsday device, or the US and Russia fire thousands of warheads at each other, my advice here might be of somewhat limited utility. In fact one might not even want to survive, to borrow from Hobbes, the survivor’s lives after such an event would likely be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And for simplicity’s sake, I am assuming that the attack is occurring with little or no warning. If one has a strong suspicion a nuclear war is going to break out, head for the hills at the earliest possible opportunity.
OK, so there you are, bopping along the street one day, and a nuclear weapon goes off nearby. It’s going to be unmistakable, the first thing you will see is an incredibly bright flash, “brighter than a thousand suns” as it has been described. People close to the epicentre (the point where the bomb exploded) are going to burst into flame or be incinerated as this fellow was. Presumably the gentle reader survives this part of the explosion, and here’s where it gets tricky. Do you whip out your laptop and frantically look up this blog post you only skimmed? No. (And if you do, right about now I’m sorry to inform you that it’s now too late, you’re probably going to be dead in moments.) Time is of the essence here, after the flash you have seconds to as much as a minute or longer to get to shelter…because the flash is going to be followed by a very big blast. It’s also possible that you will be temporarily blinded by the flash. The good news is that it likely will only last a few minutes. The bad news is that even if temporarily blinded, you still need to seek shelter, so the next step will be even trickier for you.
What do I mean by shelter? Well, preferably underground. A subway or basement is good, construction trench, sewer, anything below ground level works. If such is not within a quick sprint, then get down behind the closest solid object nearby that stands between you and the direction of the flash. A building foundation, a stone wall, a retaining wall, under a car, whatever. Just get as low and flat and protected as you can as fast as you can. Lay down, protect your eyes and ears, and wait for it. Count, pray, whatever. The good news here is that the longer it takes for the blast to arrive, the more survivable it will be. The bast will consist of two simultaneous things, a pressure wave and a powerful wind. Give it at least five minutes. If there is no blast, then likely it was a neutron bomb, and you are already dying of radiation exposure. Of course even if you survive the blast, it’s still possible you received a fatal dose of radiation in the flash, but it’s best not to dwell on such things.
The film clip at this link shows this sequence clearly. Note how the buildings etc. literally burst into flame at first from the intense flash of light, followed a moment later by the blast and overpressure which destroys the structures. Um, this close to ground zero, survival is unlikely.
OK, there you are climbing out of the subway station. You’re thinking, “Dear God I am so glad I am a regular reader of Doug’s Darkworld,” unlike the people who you left standing on the sidewalk in your mad rush to get below ground. They aren’t thinking anything anymore, hopefully you didn’t know any of them. Now what? Well, you whip out your pillow case, which by now you realize it would be prudent to carry at all times. You survived a nuclear blast, surviving the fallout is going to be easy.
Unless of course the attack happens before I publish part two. Wouldn’t that be annoying? Have a great weekend everyone.
(The above image is from a US civil defence pamphlet and is thus public domain under US copyright law. It shows the areas of the USA that might be potential targets for nuclear attack. A quick glance shows that this includes just about every urban area in the USA, and likely about 99% of the US population. Well, that’s helpful! What a wonderful informative document provided at taxpayer expense! Sheesh.)
We can afford $720 million a day for Iraq, but less than $20 million dollars a day for sick children is too much?
President Bush’s latest veto is almost mind numbing in its audacity. We can’t afford to increase funding for children’s health insurance? Gee, nice of Mr Bush to try to save us a few pennies with one hand while shovelling mounds of cash into his wars with the other. America’s priorities have been skewed for decades, but it’s stuff like this that shows the true cost of our foreign adventurism. We are spending more money on “defence” than the rest of the planet combined, but we are the only industrialized country that does not provide cradle-to-grave health care for its citizens? “Guns vs butter” doesn’t get any more obvious than that.
I found it particularly galling that one of the reasons Bush cites for his veto is that it might cause “people above the median income” to qualify for government health insurance for their kids. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Bush’s income is above the national median income, yet he doesn’t seem to have any qualms about taking advantage of a government funded health care package so generous that the average person couldn’t dream of it. Oh well, the rich and powerful have a sense of entitlement that normal folks like me find hard to understand. Dare I say it, could greed possibly be involved?
Washington and Kennedy are the only two presidents who refused to accept a salary for being the President, the rest were perfectly happy to take full advantage of the perks of office. Heck, Congress has been very busy the past few decades quietly expanding the benefits of being both in Congress and retiring from same. Why a US President would even need a pension is beyond me, any ex-President has a guaranteed income in the millions from speaking fees and writing a book alone if they want.
Oh well. The rich have been getting richer in the USA and the rest of the world for some time. While I do not have a problem with people getting rich, I do have a problem with the way in recent decades that the ultra rich have used each other’s huge salaries and benefits to justify their own increases. The sight of rich people raising each others salaries and compensation ever higher in the name of “fairness” is pretty bizarre. Damned if I know what can or should be done about it, it’s just another one of those things that fall into the “that can’t be good” category as our civilization plunges forward into the unknown.
I suppose some will say that “we don’t have a choice” regarding our spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, that national security concerns require that we stay. Of course these were the same people who said we had no choice but to invade in the first place. Um, “this is our only option” isn’t logical argument, it’s simply a refusal to look at alternatives. Let me see if I understand this, the most powerful nation the world has ever known is so completely paralysed by circumstance that it has only one viable strategy? That’s hard to believe considering the size and complexity of the world and the amazing resources we have at our disposal; and if it were true, it’s a catastrophe because it means our enemies could predict our every move.
Heck, would it be interesting to note here that during the last six plus years while Bush has steadfastly “stayed the course” in pursuit of his war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan…both our direct enemies, Al Qaeda and the Taliban, seem to be hanging in there just fine. And our long term rivals, Russia and China, are not only hanging in there, they are getting richer and more powerful by the day. Meanwhile the dollar, the gold standard in world currency for over six decades, is taking a pummelling that no one predicted in their worst nightmares a few years ago. If this is what six years of “staying the course” has wrought, I think it’s time for some creative thinking about our national strategies.
Toss global warming and peak oil into the soup, and boy, this is one heck of a train ride, eh? I wrote a story once where near the end of a long roller coaster ride a man notices that ahead the tracks come to an end in mid air, and he begins to scream uncontrollably as they clatter and hurtle toward their doom. Just before they plunge off the tracks a big guy in front of him turns around and yells “Jeez buddy, enjoy the ride!”
Have a great weekend everyone!
(The above image is from an 1861 issue of Harper’s weekly and is public domain under US copyright law. I got it from here, and just to be safe am claiming it as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit, it is being used for educational purposes, and its use here in no way hinders the endeavours of the site where I obtained the image. And no, that’s not the sound of my cats constantly complaining, I’ve taught them to sing! That and other fine tips on stress reduction next week.)
“Late last year, biologists looking for cave cockroaches accidentally discovered a dodo skeleton in the highlands of Mauritius.”
I love that line, do scientists live exciting lives or what? Yes, the dodo may live again. Scientists hope to extract the DNA from dodo bones discovered deep in a cave. The dodo was a flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. (A modern reconstruction is pictured above.) They went extinct within 80 years of human settlement on the island. They were basically a big flightless pigeon, dogs and rats made short work of them. They were also good eating, which didn’t help their cause any. And now, because of a lucky discovery by cockroach studying scientists, efforts to recreate the dodo may yield…dodos. With any lucky, dodo drumsticks coming soon to a Safeway® near you, who says science has no practical applications?
Actually, while dodo DNA may teach us a great deal about this bird, there’s no plans to recreate it anytime soon. Jurassic Park type science fiction aside, recreating extinct life from old DNA soups is still a ways down the road. These dodo bones should yield well preserved DNA, caves are usually dry and at a constant temperature, good for preserving things. The dodo in question has posthumously been named Fred. Fred fell down a hole in a cave and couldn’t get out. A common problem as I discovered myself while exploring old mine shafts in Nevada in my youth. It was not unusual to find mummified or skeletonized animals at the bottom of mines, it was kind of creepy actually.
Moving right along, I thought I’d check into and report on efforts to clone extinct animals. So far the only practical applications in this field is the cloning of rare and endangered animals. There’s been one success so far, a gaur was cloned, a rare Asian antelope. It died though, and there have been no further successes. Efforts are under way though to clone rare animals, such as a desperate attempt to save a species of turtle. Even if none of these efforts succeeds soon, at the least the DNA is being properly preserved so that when the engineering of cloning advances, we will have the DNA to clone from.
Degraded DNA is is why cloned dinosaurs and such are unlikely, it really doesn’t seem very likely that DNA can be preserved that long. The one attempt being made to recreate an “extinct” animal is an effort to recreate a breed of goat that the last one recently died, its DNA being carefully preserved before it passed on. Right now cloning is being used to clone individual high value animals, like prize bulls or beloved pets. It is poised to be used to clone animals that will enter the human food supply, at least in the USA it may soon be possible to eat cloned meat. I guess that’s OK, but still, do we really need to do this?
It gets worse. Aside from cloning animals, there’s other weirder stuff being done with this technology. Science has succeeded in cloning mice and pigs over many “generations” thus bringing closer the day when animals can be used to grow human organs. This isn’t new news, but for example I just heard that scientists have succeeding in making mice with functioning human brain cells. An animal with parts of two different animals was a mythical idea called a chimera. Now we can literally make animals out of the parts of different animals in the lab.
Including humans, as in this case with the mice with human brain cells. Um, gee, correct if I’m wrong, but isn’t this awfully close to creating a human mouse hybrid? I mean, we don’t think brain cells are self aware or have consciousness, but nonetheless these are functioning human stem cells living inside a mouse’s brain. Just using animals to grow human organs creeps me out, mice with human brain cells kinda scares me. I can see how this would aid in the study of human health, but still, I can also see why many people have ethical qualms about it.
And of course the obvious question, will mice with human brain cells be smarter than humans? I wonder if the fact we are actually conducting these Frankenstein type experiments says the answer is no. Going to be an interesting century, “leave your ethical qualms at the door” seems to be a recurring theme so far.
(A tip of the hat to Living Journey for alerting me to the mouse story.)
(“Ballista at the wikipedia project, the creator of the above image, hereby grants permission to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.”)
Who Am I? (part two)
Some time back I wrote a post where I discussed some aspects of personal identity and how it relates to genetics and gender. A story in the news recently made me think about our personality, is that who we are? And how fragile it apparently is in some cases. A gentleman left his home to walk his dogs last fall. A few hours later his dogs wandered home, but Joe Beiger was nowhere to be found. For twenty five days he wandered the streets of Dallas, apparently with no knowledge of who he was or where he lived.
Then he was spotted by someone who knew him, and after a few minutes conversation his memory began to return. He was returned home, 20 lbs lighter and badly in need of a shave, but within a few hours his normal memory returned…right up to the moment he wandered away. Months later he still has essentially no memories of what he did while he wandered the streets.
Diagnosed with an extremely rare condition called dissociative fugue, Joe now carries a phone with a GPS locater should he wander off again. Science has no idea what causes this or other types of amnesia, though stress or psychological conflict of some sort is strongly suspected. Obviously anything could have happened to him as he wandered away, in fact it makes me wonder how many people who disappear or wander aimlessly into traffic have suffered something like this.
There was a case in CA where a person who just entered a dissociative fugue was discovered in her car at the side of the road. She was alternatively completely unresponsive or extremely combative when two policemen approached her car stopped at the side of a busy freeway. She was taken into custody as a suspected drunk, and when she woke up in a cell the next morning she had no idea who or where she was. Suspected of faking amnesia initially, she was fairly quickly diagnosed as having suffered a dissociative fugue. If the two policemen had not found her when they did she would likely have eventually wandered into an emergency room as such folks often do. Or she would have moved to another town, picked a new name, and started a new life.
Hollywood has really made a mess of retrograde amnesia. Cases like the above two are extremely rare, but they do happen. Sometimes they are triggered by some sort of stress, and often there are previous minor incidents of amnesia in the sufferer’s life. Sometimes they are triggered by a minor head injury. A bump on the head and you’re a new person, your skills and memories intact, but no knowledge of who you are or your personal history. And unlike Hollywood, they person in question does not always miraculously recover their lost memory after another bump on the head or exposure to their friends and family, sometimes they don’t recover it at all.
This is why I always buckle up or hold the hand rail as appropriate. One life and one personality is plenty for me, I have no desire to start over. There was a nineteenth century case where an amnesia sufferer was found years after he disappeared, living in another state with a new name and a new family. He was terribly upset when discovered, he didn’t know what to believe. On his death bed, his last words were, “Please tell me, who am I, really?”
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit and it is central to illustrating the post. Credit: © Frederic Bonn / la modern association – 2000-2005 at Look at Me.)
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran…Discussion Points
I have been wandering around pro-war sites and marvelling at some of the stuff I read, it must be nice to be absolutely sure of yourself. If the wars had gone the way the war advocates had confidently predicted, I’d have changed my tune. I wonder how bad it has to get before war advocates will admit that the invasions might have been a mistake? Though to be honest most of them from the get-go would not acknowledge even the possibility they might be in error. If one’s basic premise is that one s always right, it’s easy to find the evidence needed to support one’s beliefs. Actually, belief has transformed into faith at that point. Still, for the sake of discussion, here is some of my current thinking. I welcome attempts to change my mind, criticism is encouraged. In no particular order a few aspects of the wars I have been pondering. Some inspired by my visits to war advocacy sites, some just from my general ramblings.
The Cost of War. Thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands of wounded Americans, hundreds of thousands of damaged Americans. Yes, nearly two hundred thousand Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans have already applied for disability. That’s about one out of four. In most Hollywood movies the good guys return home from the war and rest on their laurels and live happily ever after. In the real world, war is a sick unhealthy life shattering experience that leaves many of its participants with permanent scars, mental and and/or physical. These disability costs alone are going to cost us 1-2 trillion dollars, on top of the 500 billion the wars have already cost.
One has to wonder, what in the name of God was Saddam going to do to us that would cost us trillions of dollars, kill and maim thousands of Americans, and leave hundreds of thousands of Americans permanently damaged? I don’t see any way Saddam could have done that kind of damage to the USA, so quite literally the cure is worse than the disease. Not to mention that the idea that Saddam was plotting to attack the USA assumes that Saddam was planning on committing personal and national suicide, the USA would have turned Iraq into a molten parking lot in response to such an attack. Saddam was evil, not stupid.
Are Iran and Syria supporting the insurgents? Possibly, wouldn’t anyone in the same position? If Iran conquered Mexico and Canada, the US would sure as hell send arms to insurgents. The extreme position here, that Iran and or Syria are responsible for or causing the insurgency is silly. Insurgencies cannot survive without significant popular support. Blaming problems on “outside agitators” is a slick way of avoiding critical self analysis. Our enemies are going to do what they can to foil us, getting in a high dudgeon about this is like complaining about the rain. Give me a break. We put ourselves in this position, we need to figure out how to get out of it.
Iran will invade Iraq if the USA withdraws? I’ve seen it confidently stated that “of course” Iran will invade southern Iraq if the US pulls out. On the one hand, people that claim they can predict the future with near certainty have a very poor track record historically. In fact for the argument to be valid the basic premise is that the only reason Iran doesn’t invade Iraq is the US presence in the country. Such a simplistic premise strikes me as prima facie absurd, the world is a far more complex place than that and the USA is by no means the arbiter of reality.
On the second hand, here’s a few other things that make the “Iran will invade” conjecture very hard to support. For one thing, it’s not clear that the Iranian military has the logistical structure to support a large scale foreign adventure, such things are very expensive and only a few of the world’s industrial countries have the resources to sustain such operations. Even if they did invade, that would give the USA the green light to bomb Iran at will, destroying much of the country’s infrastructure and military capability at terrible cost to Iran. What could they gain that would be worth that? The most important reason though is that Iran has no need to invade southern Iraq, they have worked very hard for two decades to forge good relations with their fellow Shiites. An independent Shiite southern Iraq or an independent Shiite dominated Iraq would be Iran’s willing ally. In other words, the idea that Iran will invade Iraq is like claiming that the US will invade England, in a word, it’s silly. It’s not even clear that the Iranian’s are evil, and they’re certainly not stupid.
The US will attack Iran soon? Well, there are still rumours that a US attack on Iran is “imminent.” My current guess is that if it doesn’t happen this spring or sumer, it’s not going to happen. For more than anyone ever wanted to know about this subject check out: Target Iran. At this point I’m hoping that no attack will take place, it’s hard to imagine what the USA would get from such an operation, in all likelihood it would make the situation worse both domestically and internationally. Still, sometimes people do really risky things, especially when they convince themselves there are no other options. My guess is that if an attack is made, it will have some very clear and obvious trigger in order to rally support for the war. A Tonkin Gulf incident or some such. So if someday soon the headlines are hysterically screaming that Iran attacked a US ship or seized US hostages, a US attack on Iran is imminent.
Will Iran Attack the USA? While I don’t think it’s likely, some have even postulated that Iran might decide to launch a preemptive war on USA forces in the region. The war gamers have been worried about this for awhile, and war gamers have an annoying habit of being frighteningly accurate sometimes. Some of the greatest military debacles in history were preceded by war gamers telling generals that their plans were flawed…and being overruled by generals who “knew better.” It’s a scary thought, the loss of even one USA carrier would severely weaken the USA’s ability to project force overseas, the loss of more than one would be a catastrophe. Not to mention it would be the start to a vastly wider war, and widespread wars never turn out the way people predict, so I’m not even going to try.
And if an Iranian preemptive war against the USA does happen, George W Bush is the one who deployed the USA military within striking distance of Iran and has been sabre rattling since he took office. In fact no matter what happens in the middle east the next few years, I hope that the American people remember that the USA voluntarily and unilaterally decided to deploy our forces in the region. We set up the playing board, if an enemy spots a weakness in our deployment and exploits it, the people who moved our pieces are the ones responsible for what happens to them. How can it be otherwise?
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is central to illustrating the post and it is not being used for profit. Credit: Pentagon. This is a government photograph that was released to the public in response to a FOIA request.)
