Politics & Controversy

The news from Fallujah is grim. Casualties are heavy on all sides, the city is being bombed to ruin, and those few civilians that remain are without water or power while bodies rot in the streets. DefenseTech reported on the Fallujah push last week and included some quotes from the Army’s new Counterinsurgency Operations field manual:

• Concentrate on elimination of the insurgents, not on terrain objectives…
• Get counterinsurgency forces out of garrisons, cities, and towns; off the roads and trails into the environment of the insurgents…
• Avoid establishment of semipermanent patrol bases laden with artillery and supplies that tend to tie down the force. (Pay special attention to prevent mobile units from becoming fixed.)
• Emphasize secrecy and surprise…
• Judicious application of the minimum destruction concept in view of the overriding requirements to minimize alienating the population. (For example, bringing artillery or air power to bear on a village from which sniper fire was received may neutralize insurgent action but will alienate the civilian population as a result of casualties among noncombatants.)…

The news reports, obviously, suggest that a different sort of war has been playing out on the ground.

FleshBot pointed to a story in The Guardian that reports on a study by Prima Magazine that suggests married women of today have less sex than married women of the 1950s.

women in the 1950s had sex an average of twice a week. But a survey found two-thirds of today’s women said they were too tired to manage that much.

When I mentioned this to Sandee, she echoed what Prima says about it:

Since then we have started working and often still have to run the home and look after the kids. It’s hard to find the time for sex, and when we go to bed we are too tired to do anything but sleep.

Kids aren’t an issue at MaisonBisson, of course, but Sandee’s perfect world is one in which she can be a full-time home-maker. She would gladly greet me at the door with a drink and a smile when I return from work, she says.

Of course, the problem there is that wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and most households require two or more breadwinners.

On the heels of “<a href="/post/10260" title=“There _were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in“>There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in” comes a story from Alternet: “Bush has failed the military on almost every level — marking the difference between being militaristic and pro-military.”

Discounting that he sent American troops into Iraq on false pretenses, a real commander would fight for the welfare of his troops. But Bush has demonstrated a consistent unwillingness to do so, and as a result many high-ranking officers have endorsed Kerry, including retired Navy Adm. William Crowe and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. John Shalikashvili.

Further, that the Bush administration has somehow linked our security with music piracy is even less comforting to me. Like “oh, terrorists might steal music, we better get them!” Sorry for the digression, but efforts like that cost money that could be spent on, say, body armor while doing little to actually make us safer.

Can our military afford four more years?

The story focuses on the brain as an organ, in this case, an organ donated for medical research after the death of the host.

What has prompted the lawsuits, protests and threats just over one year after the

procedure is not the facts of the initial donation, but the university’s decision to terminate the experiments, and therefore the care, of the brain.

What the [right to life groups] and their supporters claim is that Brian Schultz, the nine-year-old organ donor who legally passed away one year ago, is actually alive and well in the research lab.

The full story, as a PDF, is availble here: Right to Life, After Death?

Let this be clear, this story is fiction. Any resemblance of the events, names,

personalities, places, or organizations in this story to actual names or events is

coincidence.

Alexander Rudzinski is the pen-name du jour of Roderick Russell, a magician, illusionist,

and sword swallower with a professional and personal interest in understanding

consciousness and cognition. “I wrote it as a personal exercise [] to potentially spark

some thought and interesting discussion.”

Mr. Russell can be found at < http://www.roderickrussell.com/ > .

bookofjoe reports on a October 5 Washington Post story titled: Lead Levels in Water Misrepresented Across US. What the headline really means, however, is that lead levels are under-reported accross the US.

“The problems we know about are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Erik D. Olson of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, “because utilities are gaming the system, states have often been willing to ignore long-standing violations and the EPA sits on the sidelines and refuses to crack down.”

I won’t be holding my breath waiting for the Bush administration to kick the EPA into action on this, considering he ordered the EPA to raise acceptable contaminant thresholds (a hand-out to mineral extraction industries that hurts water-drinkers everywhere) shortly after taking office in 2001.

It’s an old story, the growing gap between rich and poor, and it’s probably booring as hell to most. Thing is, I fear it’s shaping America in more ways than can be counted. I’ve been at a loss to make a clean argument about this, so all I can do now is give you this: Across the Great Divide:

In 1999, CEOs made 458 times as much as production and non-supervisory workers. If minimum wage had risen during the 1990s as rapidly as CEO pay, it would have been $24.13 an hour by 1999 instead of $5.15. Less in the realm of fantasy, if wages had at least kept pace with productivity, which rose 46.5 percent from 1973 to 1998, the median wage would have risen to $17.27 an hour, rather than $11.29, giving $12,438 more a year to full-time workers.

And it behoves me to ask, why does the Federal Reserve Bank, when setting percentage rates, not consider executive salary increases as signs of inflation? How can executive salaries increase 400% in ten years, but not set off alarm bells among those who watch the economy?

Links: starting with politics, going to copyfight, ending nowhere.

• On The Mediathis week is reporting on the controversies about Sinclair TV and Bush’s wiring, looks at why there’s a dearth of local real local news, and, most interestingly, compares Bush’s lies to Kerry’s exaggerations.The whole show is available as MP3.
   
• RealClearPolitics lists polls in swing states and elsewhere.
   
• EarthBrowser (for Mac) gives us a glimpse of the world, showing swirling clouds and other weather, but hiding the politics and tension.
   
• WalMart vs. the music industry?
   
• SpyMall