I saw this Hockenberry piece about Dean Kamen’s IBOT tonight on NBC (I remember it being on MSNBC a while back), and it is just as amazing the second time around.
Ibot
by John Cole| 4 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
John Cole started Balloon Juice early in 2002. Those who have followed along know that this has been quite the journey.
by John Cole| 4 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I saw this Hockenberry piece about Dean Kamen’s IBOT tonight on NBC (I remember it being on MSNBC a while back), and it is just as amazing the second time around.
by John Cole| 7 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
As if there were not enough reasons to be against the recall in California (which I am not going to state again), my comparison of future California politics to the Italian government in the 1990’s does not seem to be so far-fetched:
Elected officials, political analysts and professors say the upshot of this effort may unleash recalls against other candidates and spur more initiatives.
“That’s a danger here,” said state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, a Democrat who opposes the recall effort. “Once you use it, it could be likely to come back again.”
Some Democrats, in fact, have already issued the threat that they will try to recall any Republican who wins the Governor’s Office.
“The recall petition would be handed to that Republican at their swearing-in, absolutely,” said Bob Mulholland, a political adviser to the state Democratic Party.
The article notes that recall has been tried 31 times before, all unsuccessfully, but this certainly is not something I look forward to, and I live nowhere near California. If I owned a business I would probably look for a state with a more stable political climate, and all Californians should keep that in mind.
by John Cole| 11 Comments
This post is in: Politics
The other day, Dwight Meredith noted the following:
Let
by John Cole| 9 Comments
This post is in: War
This is a sad story that you never hear much about:
When he arrived at Fort Stewart with hundreds of other soldiers Friday, Spc. Brian Jasper didn’t know what to do next.
“Where do we go? Are we allowed to leave?” he asked, but most of the soldiers around him were locked in emotional embraces with wives and other family members.
The 24-year-old from Cincinnati was one of more than 20 single soldiers in Task Force 1-64’s Charlie Company who returned to cramped barracks and unfamiliar roommates Friday.
“It feels so weird being here,” Jasper said, giving several soldiers farewell high-fives as they departed with their families. “I don’t even know what to do after 11 months of being told what to do every day.”
Jasper’s dilemma is a common one among returning soldiers.
And for those who are single, experts say readjusting to peacetime life in the U.S. can be especially difficult.
“Families are often an anchor for soldiers coming back, in terms of helping them get grounded more in the here and now, and at some times helping them process the experience they’ve been through,” said Dr. David Baltzell, a psychiatrist at the Atlanta VA Medical Center’s post-traumatic stress disorder clinic.
When I returned from the Gulf to my base in Germany, even though it was great to be back at my base, it was terribly lonely returning and having no one there. The married soldiers had their children and their wives, others had their fiance to be with, and the single soldier had a barracks room. We had a very tight knit unit (as are most overseas units), and the wives and support groups tried to make it easy for the single guys, but all they really wanted to do was see their loved ones (and who could blame them). Seems like the same thing is being replayed again:
The single soldiers of Charlie Company returned to the nearby barracks to find their beds made and refrigerators stocked with beer, soda and food prepared by the wives of others in the company.
“It was important for me to know that the single soldiers had something waiting for them when they got home,” said Susan Conroy, wife of Capt. Jason Conroy, the commander of Charlie Company. “I knew all the married guys would be going home with their families.”
Some spent the night in the barracks recovering from their journey, which took them from Kuwait to Frankfurt, Germany, to Savannah in less than 24 hours. Others headed out to bars in Hinesville, where they were welcomed with drink specials and marquis messages.
“Welcome Home 3rd ID, Drink & Drown,” read the sign outside the Hurricanes bar.
How many of these single guys are going to get drunk, get in trouble, and suffer military punishment? NCO’s, this is your responsibility- these are still your men. Don’t fail them in garrison.
by John Cole| 18 Comments
This post is in: Democratic Stupidity
The WaPo nails Al Gore’s absurd speech (you know the one that all the ‘moderate’ Democrats were crowing about):
Mr. Gore, who not so long ago was describing Iraq as a “virulent threat in a class by itself,” validated just about every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left. President Bush, in distorting evidence about the Iraqi threat, was pursuing policies “designed to benefit friends and supporters.” The war was waged “at least partly in order to ensure our continued access to oil.” And it occurred because “false impressions” precluded the nation from conducting a serious debate before the war.
This notion — that we were all somehow bamboozled into war — is part of Mr. Gore’s larger conviction that Mr. Bush has put one over on the nation, and not just with regard to Iraq.
You can see why he might want to think so. Mr. Gore believes, for example, that the Patriot Act represents “a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism.” But then how to explain that 98 senators — including all four Democratic senators now running for president — voted for it? The president’s economic and environmental policies represent an “ideologically narrow agenda” serving only “powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who manage to work their way into the inner circle.”
But then why do so many other people support those policies? Mr. Gore has an umbrella explanation, albeit one that many Americans might find a tad insulting: “The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies. . . . ”
Thus, Mr. Gore maintains, we were all under the “false impression” that Saddam Hussein was “on the verge of building nuclear bombs,” that he was “about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs,” that he was partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And because of these “false impressions,” the nation didn’t conduct a proper debate about the war. But there was extensive debate going back many years; last fall and winter the nation debated little else. Mr. Bush took his case to the United Nations. Congress argued about and approved a resolution authorizing war. And the approval did not come, as Mr. Gore and other Democrats now maintain, because people were deceived into believing that Saddam Hussein was an “imminent” threat who had attacked the World Trade Center or was about to do so.
The Washington Post correctly identifies this as nothing more than what Lileks called the arrogant sheeple meme:
If there
by John Cole| 3 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Check out this breathless letter to the NY Times:
To the Editor:
Re “Is There a Place for DDT?,” by Henry I. Miller (Op-Ed, Aug. 7):
Dr. Miller’s notion that DDT can be applied “carefully and sparingly” to fight mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects is inconceivable. A few summers ago, a helicopter spraying some sort of pesticide to protect us from West Nile virus spewed a stinking wet cloud of pesticide all over our house just after dark. We had no warning, our cats were outside, and our tomatoes were ripe on the vine. To this day, we have no idea of the consequences.
KATHERINE DESMOND
Mamaroneck, N.Y., Aug. 7, 2003
One of the main reasons the government is as inefficient and ineffetive as it is might be because they have to deal with morons and cretins all day long- in other words, taxpayers are stupid. I offer Ms. Desmond as exhibit A. This letter to the editor is so stupid on so many levels that it made my head hurt.
1.) DDT was banned in the United States on June 14, 1972. No one sprayed DDT on your tomatoes, your cat, or you. What happened to you was part of a Mosquito abatement program, and you probably (I don’t know for sure, but you might ask your local authorities- just a thought) got fogged with a synthetic pyrethroid, perhaps Peremethrin, Sumithrin, or Resmethrin. If you click the link, the EPA has deemed these to be safe (and this was done under the Clinton EPA, so even Democrats can feel safe).
2.) As you live in Mamaroneck, NY, you might want to contact your local officials and ask them these questions, or, just for fun, you could use the same internet you used to write this letter to the editor and read the voluminous documents that Westchester County has put out on the issue.
3.) Why you would mention a mosquito abatement program in NY when discussing an article about the selective use of DDT in thrid world countries to control disease is beyond me. Maybe it is because DDT sounds like DEET, the active ingredient in most bug spray nowadays. I dunno. I am trying to figure it out. Maybe you are just another ill-informed environmental hysteric- in which case I understand totally.
4.) While DDT is everyone’s bogeyman, let’s remember one thing- one of the main reasons DDT was banned was because it was starting to become less effective in this area. Mosquitos and other insects were becoming resistant. DDT simply was no longer necessary because other methods had been developed, and it no longer was an acceptable risk to take. If there were no other methods, and we lived in a tropical climate, I would wager (hope) we would have the good sense to still use DDT, because the alternative is pretty ugly. Here is a partial list of the diseases that have ravaged mankind that could be solved by the ‘selective spraying’ you have mocked: malaria, dog heartworm, anthropod, West Nile virus (WN), eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), western equine encephalitis (WEE), St. Louis encephalitis (SLE), La Crosse (LAC) encephalitis, Dengue, and Yellow Fever. Guess what- they have killed more people than Hitler or George Bush!
5.) When people discuss DDT and selective spraying, I am willing to bet the do not mean arming someone with a DDT filled Super-Soaker to go out and selectively ambush unsuspecting and non-ambulatory mosquitos. In other words, they are planning to use it in regions where a little bit goes a long way, and spraying DDT has far more benefits than downfalls. Places like, say, Ethiopia:
The World Health Organization (WHO) says tens of thousands of Ethiopians may die in a malaria epidemic without urgent preventative steps in coming months after heavy rains enlarged mosquito breeding grounds.
“It looks as though it is going to be a major epidemic of malaria building up over the next few weeks or months,” said David Nabarro, head of the U.N. body’s Health Action in Crisis unit.“It could, if we are not able to cope with it effectively, lead to tens of thousands of deaths,” he told a briefing for reporters on Friday evening.
Nabarro said risks appeared highest in previously drought-hit areas that had been drenched by rain. Since June heavy downpours in southern, western and eastern areas have helped ease a three-year drought, causing serious flooding in some places.
But Nabarro said that since many people had not been immunized a high percentage of the population in risk areas could fall ill. He called for urgent prevention steps such as elimination of ponds where mosquitoes breed, access to mosquito nets as well as spraying of risk areas with insecticide.
Kamla Siamevi, a WHO emergency and humanitarian coordinator, urged the authorities to pre-position adequate anti-malaria medicine in all areas with the potential for epidemics.
The two officials, speaking after visits to regions at risk, suggested an epidemic could inflate Ethiopia’s usual malaria death toll estimated by health officials at 100,000 a year.
Malaria is one of the biggest killers in Ethiopia, along with diseases linked to malnutrition. The Health Ministry says more than 40 million of the country’s 67 million people are estimated to be at risk of malaria.
So here is what I have to say to you, Ms. Desmond. Stay at home, eat your tomatoes, pet your cat, and continue to rail against the use of things you seriously do not understand. It will be of no consequence to you- you will never meet any of the people you are killing.
Mosquito Hysteria and the War Against DDTPost + Comments (3)
by John Cole| 4 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Bloggers have been making fun of this for a while now:
A new Congressional report has found that the government’s much ridiculed color-coded terrorist alert system is so vague in detailing threats that the public “may begin to question the authenticity” of the threats and take no action when the alert level is raised.
The review by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan branch of the Library of Congress, offered lawmakers options for replacing or overhauling the system, including a proposal that the five-color palette of alert levels be replaced with “general warnings concerning the threat of terrorist attacks.”
I don’t know what would work better in place of this, but there is no doubt this system is pointless.