September 11, 2001, came during the year I lived in Australia, and on that day I was helping my brother paint his house. Even now I feel pangs of guilt when I remember seeing the surreal, agonizing spectacle of the two smoking towers on my brother’s television.
It doesn’t make any sense, since I would have been in Arizona, thousands of miles from New York, if I had stayed in the US. But there it is: the feeling people say they get when they return to work from a vacation and find that during their absence, a co-worker died in an accident. A vague feeling that you should have been there and taken part in the grim lottery.
Sometimes, when I think of the people who were murdered that day, I feel a great weight of sadness. And sometimes I go to Legacy.com and read brief profiles of the dead. I find that grieving for a few individuals is more cathartic than gnashing my teeth for the faceless 3,000. Here’s a few of the profiles I reviewed last night:
It seems to depend on whether the US has a major foe or a minor one for the US to commit to defending friendly countries. There was virtually no response from the US until after Russia had made its entire point about the vulnerability of Georgia and then the EU had validated it.
Gee Georgia, you had an earthquake or something? Here let us send humanitarian aid in after the fact, but not so much as a waved hand while the situation was actually developing. Almost shades of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1938.
“I was very firm with Vladimir Putin,” Bush said. “Hopefully this will get resolved peacefully.”
Even as Putin rushed home Saturday to manage his military, the sports-loving Bush refused to let the fighting completely ruin his trip as the first sitting American president to attend an Olympics on foreign soil. He gave pep talks to U.S. athletes, posed for photos with them — which he later called the best part of the trip — and then was their biggest fan.
Yea sure… Very firm, just like he is with Iraqi government surplus income. Shades of Katrina.
UPDATE: The Senate has now passed the final reconciliation of the bill by an 89-3 margin. I haven’t yet found which 3 senators were crazy enough to vote against consumer product safety.
Meanwhile, a new editorial in the Wall Street Journal criticizes congress for protecting American consumers. The Wall Street Journal is run by Australian Rupert Murdoch, which explains why they don’t care so much if American kids get lead poisoning.
Acne constantly whines about how, like… his life and everything really sucks and stuff. Usually a middle class teenager with an allowance, unlimited access to a computer and WAY too much time on his hands. Acne’s vague existential arguments about the meaningless of life and emptiness of existence are culled from the lyrics of the 20 gigs of MP3s he has squirreled away on his hard drive.
By now, both of my readers have noticed that there is a kid who keeps posting nonsensical lyrics to heavy metal songs in the comment section. In the past, I’ve dealt with pests like this by simply banning their IP addresses. It hasn’t been any trouble to ban the addresses as quickly as they can make them up, but now there’s a new factor: I’m taking my fiancee (unlike the kid who posts the lyrics, I actually have human relationships) to Australia to meet my brother, and I’m not going to be able to check in every day.
So for the immediate future, all comments will go to the moderation queue, unless the commenter has a previously-approved comment. I’m don’t like to do that, because it can discourage first-time commenters, but I really don’t have a choice.
Bush’s Iraq adventure has killed more than 4,000 American and British soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It has displaced millions, and left the Iraqi economy and Iraqi society in a shambles. It will wind up costing the American economy more than $1 trillion in direct cost, opportunity cost, interest on debt, and long term costs like treatment for wounded soldiers.
But in honor of Bush’s half-glass-full spirit, I think we should look on the bright side: medical researchers are discovering a lot about prosthetic limbs, traumatic brain injuries, and post traumatic stress disorder. The latest discovery is that PTSD physically scars the brain:
At a recent conference for some of the area’s leading neurologists, San Francisco physicist Norbert Schuff captured his colleagues’ attention when he presented colorful brain images of U.S. soldiers who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan and were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The yellow areas, Schuff explained during his presentation at the city’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center, showed where the hippocampus, which plays major roles in short-term memory and emotions, had atrophied. The red swatches marked hyperfusion - increased blood flow - in the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for conflict resolution and decision-making. Compared with a soldier without the affliction, the PTSD brain had lost 5 to 10 percent of its gray matter volume, indicating yet more neuron damage.
Schuff’s research is at the forefront of a bold push by the Department of Defense to address PTSD, the psychological disorder that will haunt an estimated 30 percent of the veterans returning from the current two wars, according to the Pentagon. Forty thousand veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon officials say, have already been diagnosed with PTSD, which is defined as an anxiety disorder triggered by exposure to traumatic events; symptoms can include nightmares, flashbacks and panic attacks.
Left untreated, clinicians say, patients with PTSD are more likely to engage in anti-social behaviors such as alcohol and drug abuse. The disorder, neurologists are now learning, can also lead to long-term maladies, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.
So not every aspect of the Bush presidency has been negative. Just look at what he’s doing for neurological science!
Concerns about environmental damage are undermining support for McCain’s plans to expand offshore drilling
A recent poll indicated that while a slight majority of Americans want more areas to be opened for oil drilling, around 3/4 of Americans think that we should focus our efforts on investing in new energy technology, rather than on expansion of drilling. Since John McCain has made support for more drilling a centerpiece of his campaign, that result would seem to favor Obama.
Also, most Americans don’t think that more drilling will significantly lower gas prices (they’re right), and they think that the Bush/McCain proposals to expand drilling are more likely to enrich oil companies than to lower the price of oil.
The Russian newspaper Izvestia reported today that Russia may respond to Bush’s Eastern European missile defense system by deploying nuclear bombers in Cuba.
The US responded with a statement by General Norton Schwartz, Air Force chief of staff nominee. Schwartz stated that such a deployment would be “something that crosses a threshold, crosses a red line for the United States of America.”
I thought that Andy Young’s take on the situation sounded about right. According to Young, the Russians are probably just posturing for the sake of domestic politics, and we probably won’t be seeing a Russian airbase in Cuba. But I disagree with his assertion that the Russians might build an airbase in Venezuela. Unlike a Cuban base, a Venezuelan base couldn’t be justified by linking its construction to the missile site. And it’s very hard to see how such a base would do anything for the Chavez government, beyond giving the US a pretext for another coup d’etat.
(cross posted at appletree and www.liberalavenger.com) (via reddit)
Attorney General Michael Mukasey has asked congress to declare war. Not against a sovereign state, but against an organization made up of loosely-affiliated cells. And his purpose in asking for this declaration is to allow the government to detain “enemy combatants”, without evidence and without charge, for the duration of the “war”. In other words, forever. This is particularly disturbing given the administration’s position that the government should be allowed to confer “enemy combatant” status on American citizens.
What Mukasey proposed is nothing less than an indefinite suspension of one of our most important rights: the right to habeas corpus. The right to demand that the government present evidence before detaining a suspect. Specifically, Mukasey is asking Congress to reverse a recent Supreme Court decision that overturned part of the 2006 Military Commissions Act. The act stripped detainees of the right to appeal decisions made by special military tribunals.
