It’s hard not to be haunted by the story of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. Everyone in Norwood, Ohio, where he grew up, seemed to like him: outgoing, a joiner, a middle linebacker who played above his size, thoughtful toward others. He enlisted in the Army after the September 11th attacks, out of patriotism and righteous anger.
Three deployments over six years in Iraq, including one during the “surge” with intense fighting. A wound that cost him part of his foot, then a head injury in a vehicle accident. Frustration at being unable to find and kill the enemy. Over the years, as the deployments pile up and the mission gets lost, he starts to sound jaded, coarsened. Ten years in, he misses out on being promoted to sergeant first class, and he doesn’t land the recruiting job he wanted, or the coveted posting to Germany or Italy. Instead, he’s sent back to the wars—this time to a remote combat outpost in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, where he sees a buddy lose a leg to a land mine.
Back home, his wife loses her job when Washington Mutual goes under, and there are mortgage problems on their house in Washington state. You couldn’t write a more succinct history of what went wrong in the decade after September 11th.
In a sense, none of these facts matter. It shouldn’t be hard to see the bright line between war fatigue, or P.T.S.D., or whatever name you give it, and hunting down, shooting, and stabbing little children in their homes, and women and men, burning their bodies, and then returning to base and demanding a lawyer. If there was alcohol, it doesn’t matter; if there were marital strains (how could there not be), it doesn’t matter. That Bales assaulted a woman ten years ago is irrelevant. None of these facts begin to explain why he stands accused of monstrous crimes. The idea that no non-combatant is fit to judge a man in uniform is ridiculous—an insult to all the combatants who, in the same extreme circumstances, don’t lose all sense of the humanity of the other and descend into criminality. Worse than ridiculous is the ugly praise Bales has received on some right-wing Web sites, as if war crimes were a blow against political correctness. The smugness of the I-told-you-so anti-war crowd isn’t much better. Pundits and commenters of all stripes find that the Panjwai episode proves what they were saying all along. How satisfying.
No: shame is the only response the rest of us are allowed.
Part of the shame goes beyond the massacre. Just as it should be possible to stare at this nightmare without medicalizing or psychologizing it away with a few biographical details, it should also be possible to see its singularity and its context: a decade of war with no clear, measurable goals and no end in sight, fought by the tiny number of Americans who belong to our all-volunteer military. President Obama has recently been eloquent on the subject of war, its seriousness, its costs. But it has been in the interest of neither his Administration nor his predecessor’s for the electorate to think too much about the fighting on the other side of the planet. Politically, both Presidents have downplayed it—Bush by creating a false image of a clear moral cause demanding relatively little sacrifice, Obama by talking about it as little as possible
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The official name of Mexico is Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United Mexican States). – Provided by RandomHistory.com
“Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.” – Benjamin Disraeli
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dancer Kaja Marquita by Madame D’Ora
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Benito Mussolini Founds the Fasci di Combattimento (This Day in 1919)
In the troubled period following WWI, Mussolini organized his followers, mostly veterans, into a paramilitary organization that promoted aggressive nationalism and violently opposed communism and socialism. Amid strikes, unrest, and governmental failure, Mussolini advocated the use of force to restore order. In 1921, his Fasci di Combattimento became the Fascist Party, planting the seeds for the regime that would rule Italy for nearly 20 years. What title did Mussolini choose for himself? More…
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London teacher Lizzie Griffiths, 25, has decided to spend her life savings on chemotherapy for her beloved bearded dragon, George, whom she adopted from a rescue center a year ago.
After nursing George back to health from a chest infection, Griffiths spotted a tumor on the little lizard’s face, and found out he had developed cancer. Following two unsuccessful surgeries to remove the tumor, chemotherapy was the only option left to save George, who is the first bearded dragon in the UK to undergo the treatment.
Griffiths spent the $4,750 that she and her fiancé had been saving for their wedding on the reptile’s medical bills, and she drives 200 miles each day to see her pet at the treatment center.
“I think it’s adorable and I understand he is her number one. I don’t know anyone who could love George as much as Lizzie does,” said her fiancé, Chris Fisher.
Doctors said this weekend that it looks like the chemotherapy is working, and George is beginning to recover.
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24 Awesome Photos Of Maasai Warriors Playing Cricket
Clearly the most bad ass cricket match of all time. And for a good cause. Within their own community, the Massai Cricket Warriors hope to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS and help do away with backwards cultural practices such as female genital mutilation and child brides.
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Vietnam War Captured in Never-Before-Seen
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Intoxicating Trends
Since the 19th century, attitudes to drugs have been in constant flux, argues Victoria Harris, owing as much to fashion as to science.
A US advertisement extols the pleasures of Camel cigarettes, 1936. Getty Images/Archive Photos‘Smoking’, wrote Aldous Huxley in 1954, is ‘hardly less normal and natural than eating’. Not anymore. Smoking can kill you. Before it does, its active ingredients re-program your brain, making you crave it. Hardly natural. Even eating, which western abundance has robbed of its natural historical function as nutritional necessity, has become suspect. Sugar, scientists claim, is as toxic to the liver as alcohol. Both, suggest doctors and politicians, should be subject to increased taxation and restriction.
Conversely, psychedelic drugs are making something of a comeback, at least in the press. Psilocybin mushrooms help combat depression. Ecstasy and LSD relieve post-traumatic stress disorder. Cannabis, too, reduces the pain of cancer and contains tumour-shrinking oils. In February 2012 Sir Richard Branson urged the House of Commons’ Home Affairs Committee to relax drug laws. When asked about the advisability of his own past cannabis use, Branson replied: ‘If I was smoking cigarettes, I would be very worried.’
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There’s a loud conversation going on in America right now about women and sex: An erotic novel called Fifty Shades of Grey is in high demand. It’s dirty, it’s risque, and housewives are getting all panty-twisted trying to get their mitts on it. Which is so silly! It’s been available as an e-book since last year.
Dubbed “mommy porn,” Fifty Shades of Grey is the first part in a trilogy that began as “Twilight” fan fiction. It was written and distributed online by E.L. James, a TV executive from West London, before being published in print by a tiny Australian publishing company. Now, those print copies are all bought up, and horny ladies across the country are in hot pursuit of the book, which tells the story of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, a powerful businessman and a virgin college girl who begin a BDSM-ish relationship. Excerpts from the book are heavy with bad-romance prose, and the content is definitely titillating: Anastasia is spanked, whipped, fucked and other bonus hush-hush things ladies and good girls supposedly don’t think or talk about.
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Tomorrow, March 22, is World Water Day, an event established by the United Nations in 1993 to highlight the challenges associated with this precious resource. Each year has a theme, and this year’s is “Water and Food Security.” The UN estimates that more than one in six people worldwide lack access to 20-50 liters (5-13 gallons) of safe freshwater a day to ensure their basic needs for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. And as the world’s population grows beyond 7 billion, clean water is growing scarcer in densely populated areas as well as in remote villages. Collected here are recent images showing water in our lives — how we use it, abuse it, and depend on it. [36 photos]
2 days with this!
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Words are competing daily in an almost Darwinian struggle for survival, according to new research from scientists in which they analysed more than 10 million words used over the last 200 years.
Drawing their material from Google’s huge book-digitisation project, the international team of academics tracked the usage of every word recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the 209-year period between 1800 and 2008. The scientists, who include Boston University’s Joel Tenenbaum and IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies’ Alexander Petersen, said their study shows that “words are competing actors in a system of finite resources”, and just as financial firms battle for market share, so words compete to be used by writers or speakers, and to then grab the attention of readers or listeners.
There has been a “drastic increase in the death rate of words” in the modern print era, the academics discovered. They attributed it to the growing use of automatic spellcheckers, and stricter editing procedures, wiping out misspellings and errors. “Most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10 to 20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words,” the scientists write in their just-published study. “The words that are dying are those words with low relative use. We confirm by visual inspection that the lists of dying words contain mostly misspelled and nonsensical words.”
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Water Wars Between Countries Could Be Just Around The Corner, Davey Warns — The Guardian
Energy secretary tells conference that growing pressure on water resources could worsen existing war and lead to new ones
Water wars could be a real prospect in coming years as states struggle with the effects of climate change, growing demand for water and declining resources, the secretary of state for energy and climate change warned on Thursday.
Ed Davey told a conference of high-ranking politicians and diplomats from around the world that although water had not been a direct cause of wars in the past, growing pressure on the resource if climate change is allowed to take hold, together with the pressure on food and other resources, could lead to new sources of conflict and the worsening of existing conflicts.
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Why Greg Smith Is ‘Dead Right’ About Goldman Sachs
The resignation letter heard round the world proves what we already know: Washington would like to think it can change the culture of Wall Street — and it can’t.
OK, so who do we believe? In a cover story in New York magazine last month melodramatically headlined “The Emasculation of Wall Street,” journalist Gabriel Sherman made the case that the big financial firms were engaged in “something that might be called soul-searching” about their many sins and their wildly overcompensated contribution to the U.S. economy. Wall Street, under the whip of the giant Dodd-Frank law, was learning to behave. Reduced compensation packages and increased capital requirements were going to tame or snuff out some of the riskier and most reckless practices that brought the nation to the edge of a second Great Depression, Sherman wrote. Best of all, the domestication of Wall Street would redirect the best minds in the nation back into useful things like real engineering rather than financial engineering. Cool!
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bettie page
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If I didn’t know Sebastian Seung was a neuroscientist, I would have pegged him as a computer game designer. His onyx-black hair seems frozen in a windstorm. He wears black sneakers, jeans, and a frayed bomber jacket over an untucked shirt covered in fluorescent blobs. If someone had blindfolded me on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led me into Building 46 on the campus of MIT, past the sign that says Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, taken me up in the elevator to the fifth floor and whisked off the blindfold in Seung’s lab, I still wouldn’t have guessed he had anything to do with brains. There are no specimens floating in jars on the shelves. There are no electrodes plugged into the heads of sea slugs. Instead, I see a dozen young men gazing at monitors, some pushing their computer mice, others drawing tethered pens across digital tablets to manipulate 3-D images, each packed with more megabytes than a feature film on a Blu-ray Disc.
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Today a group of paleontologists announced the results of an extensive study of several well-preserved dinosaur feathers encased in amber. Their work, which included samples from many stages in the evolution of feathers, bolstered the findings of other scientists who’ve suggested that dinosaurs (winged and otherwise) had multicolored and transparent feathers of the sort you might see on birds today. The researchers also presented evidence, based on the feathers’ pigmentation and structures, that today’s bird feathers could have evolved from dinosaur feathers.
We’ve got a gallery of these intriguing feathers preserved in amber.
In a profile of lead researcher Ryan McKellar, The Atlantic’s Hans Villarica writes:
These specimens represent distinct stages of feather evolution, from early-stage, single filament protofeathers to much more complex structures associated with modern diving birds . . . They can’t determine which feathers belonged to birds or dinosaurs yet, but they did observe filament structures that are similar to those seen in other non-avian dinosaur fossils.
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The Justice Department has approved guidelines that allow the intelligence community to lengthen the period of time it retains information about U.S. residents, even if they have no known connection to terrorism.
Senior U.S. officials familiar with the guidelines said the changes allow the National Counterterrorism Center, the intelligence community’s clearinghouse for counterterrorism data, to keep such information for up to five years.
Currently, the center must promptly destroy any information about U.S. citizens or residents unless a connection to terrorism is evident.
The new guidelines, which were approved Thursday, have been in the works for more than a year, said officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
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