Entries Tagged 'why, daddy?' ↓

Who knew there were so many kinds of screw heads?

001 screw drive styles.jpg

In April 2000, one year after the Columbine killings in Littleton, Colorado, and eight years before the killings at Virginia Tech, a group of New York Times reporters and editors created a series of stories on what they called rampage killings*. In developing the story, they compiled a database of 100 of these multiple murder incidents occurring in the United States over the previous 50 years.

The examination included reviews of court cases, news coverage and mental health records, and interviews with families and friends, psychologists and victims, in an effort to glean what the people closest to each tragedy had learned. In some cases, reporters questioned the killers themselves.

What the study revealed were the great number of similarities among the cases, and not the superficial details often seen in television dramas, such as CSI. The greatest single factor binding these tragedies together was missed warning signs.

…most of the killers spiraled down a long slow slide, mentally and emotionally. Most of them left a road map of red flags, spending months plotting their attacks and accumulating weapons, talking openly of their plans for bloodshed. Many showed signs of serious mental health problems.

We’ve all heard the claim that people who are planning suicide aren’t the ones talking about it. It’s a myth.

Few people commit suicide without first letting someone else know how they feel. Those who are considering suicide give clues and warnings as a cry for help. In fact, most seek out someone to rescue them. Over 70% who do threaten to carry out a suicide either make an attempt or complete the act.

The Times study showed that rampage killers are also not taken seriously, often at great cost in lives ended and ruined. In the months and weeks before their incident of violence, the killers studied were found to have left many clues, offered hints, held conversations about their plans with friends and family, made purchases of necessary materials, and occasionally even invited others to come watch their actions. Often, their instability or their anger was noticed by people around them — several killers in the study had been given nicknames of “Crazy Pat,” “Crazy John,” and “Crazy Joe.” For many people who live a life of alienation, there is no single person who could put all these signs and clues together. Our lives are often compartmentalized today, with spouses, family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, schoolmates and others all involved in our lives, but often unaware or unacquainted with people in the other domains.

Often, those who noticed odd or disturbing or violent behavior made the assumption that there was someone else in the person’s life who was aware of the problem and would take responsibility for guiding them towards getting the help they needed. Quite often, though, even when they were referred to someone who could help — a doctor or a therapist or even a mental hospital — either the severity of their problem was not properly recognized, or the patient did not cooperate sufficiently to make any difference before being discharged. Like any other major illness, when left untreated, it doesn’t just get better spontaneously.

Forty-seven of the killers had a history of mental health problems before they killed; 20 had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems; 42 had been seen by mental health professionals…Psychiatric drugs had been prescribed at some point before the rampages to 24 of the killers, and 14 of those people were not taking their prescribed drugs when they killed. Diagnoses of mental illness are often difficult to pin down, so The Times tabulated behavior: 23 killers showed signs of serious depression before the killings, and 49 expressed paranoid ideas.

Part of the problem is that mental illness carries a terrible stigma in the US. With our culture of confession, nearly every physical disease has its society and its spokesperson, even such formerly taboo topics as Erectile Dysfunction or adult incontinence. Yet, who is the poster child for bi-polar disorder or clinical depression or mental retardation? If Britney Spears had shaved all her hair off because she was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, would she be the subject of endless cruel jibes ? Most likely not. Yet, because her actions were likely caused by some type of mental illness, we dismiss the cause and make light of the behavior.

We shouldn’t expect that every person who suffers from a mental illness is going to wind up as a rampage killer. But we need to begin understanding the signs of mental illness, and reaching out to those you know who are suffering or having trouble coping with the events and circumstances of their lives. We need to realize that when we think we see someone “snap,” we’re actually watching the culminating moments of a long and painful drama.

*Although there were four major articles in the series, most of them are in the Times archive section and downloadable for a fee. However, the article linked to here is available for free.

On Friday, April 14, the CNN program, “Your World Today” had as a guest Retired US Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, speaking about US options in Iran. Gardiner, a former lecturer in military strategy at the National War College, has specialized in war games focusing on decision-making at the Presidential advisor level.

Speaking about military options towards the Iranian nuclear threat, Gardiner said, “I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way.” When asked to explain why, he pointed to the recent New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh as one reason — indicating that Hersh’s unnamed source is known to the New Yorker‘s editors who will have verified that he made the statement. He continued:

…the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year. I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, “Hey, I hear you’re accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.”

He said, quite frankly, “Yes, we know they are. We’ve captured some of the units, and they’ve confessed to working with the Americans.”

The evidence is mounting that that decision has already been made, and I don’t know that the other part of that has been completed, that there has been any congressional approval to do this.

My view of the plan is, there is this period in which some kinds of ground troops will operate inside Iran, and then what we’re talking about is the second part, which is this air strike.

This is the same pattern used by the military in our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. CIA and Special Operations Forces were first on the ground in Afghanistan, gathering intelligence, making contacts with opposition parties and providing targeting information for airstrikes. In Iraq, there were reports that Special Forces and CIA were operating inside Iraq as early as August of 2002, three months before the Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force, and seven months before the war officially began.

While planning and preparation are vital to the success of a military campaign, the similarity to our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to indicate that we are approaching this potential conflict in a manner that may not be appropriate to this situation. Iran has four times the land area and three times the population of Iraq. It has missile technology capable of delivering a chemical, biological or nuclear warhead as far as southern Europe or Western India. It is also much further along in its nuclear weapons development program than Iraq was in 1981 when Israel destroyed the French-built Osirak reactor outside of Baghdad. All indications are that Iran has learned from the action against Osirak and has both scattered and hardened its nuclear development facilities.

Although it has discussed plans to do so, Israel is unlikely to undertake a mission against Iran similar to the Osirak mission due to the much longer distance to Iran and the necessity of traversing either Saudi Arabian airspace or Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi airspace. Another big difference is that Osirak was one target, while Iran has 14-20 nuclear development facilities. During the 1981 raid against Osirak, Israeli fighters flew over Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis have much more sophisticated air defenses today, including AWACS planes purchased from the US in late 1981. If Israel were to fly over Iraqi airspace, that would indicate to Iran and the rest of the world US complicity and approval in the attack, therefore the US is most likely putting great pressure on Israel to stand down. In return for Israel’s self-restraint, the US has promised support, as Bush made explicit in Cleveland on March 20, 2006, when he said,

“I made it clear, and I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel…”

Although, unlike in Iraq, it is clear that the case for Iranian possession of WMDs is beyond dispute, the problem with our current situation is that, as Gardiner showed in a war game he designed and ran for The Atlantic magazine in 2004, that there is no good scenario for an attack on Iran. Any attack on their nuclear facilities would certainly spark reprisal actions which could cause great difficulties for us and our allies. Our forces in Iraq have benefited from Iran’s lack of strong participation in the insurgency; were Iran to act, they could easily incite the Shi’ia in the relatively quiet southern part of the country, with whom they have strong cultural and religious ties. With the current price of oil over US$60 per barrel, any disruptions in the flow of oil could easily send the price up over US$100 per barrel. By blockading the Straits of Hormuz or curtailing their own flow of oil — 4 million barrels per day — Iran could easily wreak havoc on the US and world economies. Then there are the known ties between Iran and Hezbollah, as well as recently reported ties between Iran and al-Qaeda, and other reports which claim that Iranian groups are signing up potential martyrs for attacks against British and American interests worldwide. As Richard Clarke and Steven Simon, former counterterrorism coordinator and senior director for the NSC say in today’s New York Times:

Iran could use its terrorist network to strike American targets around the world, including inside the United States. Iran has forces at its command that are far superior to anything Al Qaeda was ever able to field. The Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah has a global reach, and has served in the past as an instrument of Iran. We might hope that Hezbollah, now a political party, would decide that it has too much to lose by joining a war against the United States. But this would be a dangerous bet.

The discussions and plans for an attack against Iran, Gardiner believes, will, despite the experience in Iraq, call for regime change. The feasibility of such an action is near zero, due to many of the factors ment
ioned so far. But supporters and former members of the government seem not to have learned anything from the difficulties faced in Iraq due to too-optimistic planning. Richard Perle, leading neo-conservative and former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, said at the 2006 AIPAC Policy Council Middle East security roundtable discussion on March 5:

Those of you who see The Washington Post will have seen in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago a map laying out the critical facilities in Iran that are supporting their nuclear weapons program. I trust we know where we are. If we don’t know where they are, what should we think about a diplomatic solution? So, either we know where they are, or we don’t, and if we know where they are, let me tell you that with six or eight B-2 aircraft… those facilities could be eliminated in a single evening, and I hope we are making it clear to the Iranians and to our European allies and to others that if the choices between standing by and watching Iran become a nuclear weapon state, and the President commanding B-2 aircraft to eliminate those facilities, we will not hesitate to eliminate the facilities. Finally, when I say I hope it doesn’t come to that, I hope that before that becomes necessary, we will see a regime change in Iran, and the best way to do that is to support the millions of Iranians who want to see the regime change. We haven’t been doing it… it took a year from last year to get the announcement the other day that we’re going to invest $75 million in supporting the opposition. It should be a lot more money and it should be spent with enthusiasm—not by a bureaucracy that’s not eager to undertake the task.

The danger to our mission in Iraq, the danger to the safety of our people and institutions around the world, the likelihood of financial crisis if oil prices skyrocket, the danger of increased terrorism and instability in the Middle East and in Islamic enclaves around the world, the uncertainty about the number and position of likely targets — all these factors make military action unwise. The probability that any such attack will increase Iran’s resolve to rebuild its nuclear program quickly, more secretively, and with the intention to use it before it can be pre-empted again, makes military action not only unwise, but ultimately futile and self-defeating. At the end of his war game exercise in 2004, Gardiner distilled the lessons of the exercise into advice for the Administration, which he still subscribes to today:

When I finished the wargame for the Atlantic Monthly, I summarized what I had learned in the process. “After all the effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers. You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work.” I have not changed my mind.

When US policymakers say the military option is on the table. I don’t think it’s rhetoric. I don’t believe US policymakers understand the military option won’t work.

(Crossposted from my column at Newsvine)

Technorati Tags: attack, clarke, enrichment, gardiner, hezbollah, iran, israel, military, news, perle, richard-clarke, richard-perle, sam-gardiner, terrorism, uranium, war, world-news

On Friday, January 20, Katherine Patricia Singleton was killed in Iraq. That’s all the information there is. No rank, no location, no cause, just her name on the list at icasualties.org.

There’s a short article in her local newspaper, The Pensacola (FL) News Journal with a dateline of January 21, but not much in the way of detail there, either:

Army soldier Katherine P. Singleton is the daughter of Doryce Blake and Maryon Singleton, who resides in Myrtle Grove.

Singleton on Friday night confirmed his daughter’s death but declined further comment.

Details surrounding her death were not available late Friday.

According to Pensacola News Journal archives, Katherine Singleton enlisted in the Army’s Delayed Entry Program in 2001.

They followed up with a blurb in the Sunday edition of the paper, but there wasn’t much new information:

The Department of Defense on Sunday has not yet confirmed the death of Army soldier Katherine Patricia Singleton, a former Escambia High student who reportedly died Friday in Iraq.

The Web site, iCasualty.org, listed Singleton and two unidentified service members as casualties Friday in Iraq.

The Defense Department listed the service members as two Marines assigned to Regimental Combat Team 2, 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward). They were killed in action by a suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device in Haqlaniyah.

The Marines’ names are being withheld until their families are notified.

Singleton’s father, Maryon Singleton, a Myrtle Grove resident, confirmed his daughter’s death Friday. Family members declined comment Sunday.

Singleton is the third local casualty in Iraq since October.

The official Pentagon news release site confirms and now lists the names of the two Marines who died in Haqlaniyah. No mention of Singleton, however.

So what’s going on here? The comments to the post on Atrios Eschaton where I first read about the mystery are full of speculation. There are several links to a story on truthout.org which reports on testimony from Colonel — formerly Brigadier General — Janis Karpinski, who, as the former commandant of the Abu Ghraib prison is the only senior miltary official penalized for the torture which went on in the prison. Karpinski, testifying before the non-official Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration claimed that “several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women’s latrine after dark.” (A whole new level of scandal for our troops, if true. I don’t see any convincing evidence other than the testimony of Karpinski.)

Some commenters suggest that Singleton may be victim of a rape which the military is trying to cover up. Some speculate that she amy have been used as a combat troop against regulations. Others suggest that the whole thing is a hoax, perpetrated for some unknown reason.

I don’t have any answers, although I have emailed the reporter of the original article asking if she has any more info. I’ll update if there’s anything to report. It seems like the story here is the lack of a story, but anyway you look at it, there’s something strange going on.

 
Technorati Tags: iraq, death, army, soldier, mystery

UPDATE 2-3-06 7:05pm EST: I just received a response from Angela Fail, the reporter who wrote the original story:

This has been a challenging story to track down. Katherine’s father confirmed her death but has refused to discuss any of the circumstances surrrounding it since then. We’ve been waiting on information from the Department of Defense, but have yet to receive any.

I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.

(Thanks, Angela, for replying so quickly!)

On Thanksgiving, it’s customary to evaluate your possessions, both spiritual and physical and to take some time to appreciate them. I have a wonderful wife of 22 years and a nice home. We share our home with a dog and 5 cats, all of which we’ve rescued from shelters. My parents are healthy (touch wood) and now happily retired to Florida, my sister is newly freed from the the constraints of a terrible marriage. My brother and his wife have a new daughter — a baby sister for their 2-year-old twins. My wife’s brothers are all in pretty good places financially and family-wise and my 15 nieces and nephews are all doing well. After 2 years of uncertainty about the future of the company I work for, things seem to be looking brighter. I’ve paid off all my credit card debt this year, I’ve lost 60 pounds and I feel much healthier. I am thankful for all of this.

So, of course, I feel strange about having so much when others have so little. While I sit down with my family for a nice Tofurky dinner, what will be the scene in the homes of the 34.6 million people in this country who are living in poverty?

I like the clarity of numbers. At Poverty USA, they have some of the clearest numeric descriptions of what it means to be poor in America today. I took their “Poverty Tour” and saw how the budget breaks down for a family of four living at the government’s “poverty line” pre-tax income of $18,392. I compared that with the $11,128 annual income for a person working at the minimum wage. I took a look at their “Poverty Map” and noted the states — which they depict in red — which are the poorest. Mississippi ranks first in the nation in overall poverty (19.9%), child poverty (26.7%) and senior poverty (18.8%) (Strangely enough, the map lists the rates for Washington, DC, but doesn’t rank the statistics for our government’s back yard. If it did, DC would be 1st in the nation in overall poverty: 20.2%, 1st in child poverty: 31.1%, and 3rd in senior poverty: 16.4%. The presence of all the rich old legislators and government functionaries is probably what bumped DC from 1st place in the senior poverty measure.)

Closer to home, the Maryland Food Bank has an eye-opening Flash interaction called “Hunger 101″. I chose a character and followed his scenario and see who is hungry and how difficult — impossible! — it is to obtain the minimums which EVERYONE in a rich country such as ours should be able to take for granted.

I took on the role of Bryan Jenkins, who is 38 years old. “He was recently laid-off at a high-profile technology company and has applied for unemployment. His wife Katie works as a substitute teacher, earning $1460 a month, but $300 goes to taxes. They have two children in elementary school. The car payment is $350 and the mortgage on the house is $700. His savings is depleted and he is struggling to make ends meet.” After paying the bills, Bryan/I had $15 to spend to provide the 51,800 calories our family needed to survive this month. He/I make too much money to qualify for food stamps, the soup kitchen was closed, the food bank was empty… what do you do? The numbers are TOO clear here.

I can donate* some money, and today, I am most thankful I can do that.

*To find a local food bank where you can donate, check out America’s Second Harvest.

It’s 9pm and my co-worker K. just IM’ed me in a panic.

Yoiks! I can imagine the knot in her stomach, especially since the laptop is a brand new HP which the company just bought her when she came back from her second mommy leave. But, a quick Google on “pen stain lcd monitor” brought up a page on Appletechs.com’ forums entitled “Help! My 3-year-old wrote on my Powerbook screen with a marker!” Obviously, K isn’t the first one to suffer this problem, since this post was started on January 2, 2003 and the most recent addition was yesterday, November 17, 2004!

The range of suggestions is pretty amazing, from eucalyptus oil to a product called Kleen Screen, to fingernail-scraping to WD-40. The consensus seems to be either 70% Isopropyl alcohol on a Q-tip, or — and this one is pretty weird — writing over the mark with a dry-erase marker and quickly wiping it off. Seems the dry-erase marker has a pretty strong solvent in it to keep the ink liquid, so writing over the ink dissolves whatever is there.

You find amazing things on the web when you are trying to stay away from politics for a little while!

It’s not the scale of the tragedy, but what it symbolizes to me. I’m crying for the family and friends of the astronauts and I’m crying for every one of us who ever dreamed we’d be up there, too.

I remember crying when my parents showed me the newspaper with the article about the January 27, 1967 launchpad fire which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee of what was later designated the Apollo 1 mission. I still shudder when I imagine three brave men, remaining astronaut-calm as they struggled to unseal the tin can they’d been bolted into.

I remember struggling not to cry as I stood with Mike Hughes and Ed Gonzalez in the shoestore we managed on January 28, 1986, listening to the radio broadcasting the immediate aftermath of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Later, at home, I, like so many people around the world, remained fixated on my television, watching images of the eerily silent explosion over and over again.

This morning, I felt the same way, the internet alerting me to the first signs of disaster. The images of a hurtling white dot, suddenly separating into smaller and smaller pieces… There are families grieving, nations mourning, and an entire world, looking up at the blue or cloudy or precipitous sky.

I was born in the first full year of the US Manned Space Program, and I was so sure, all my growing-up years, that I would be living in space. Our space dreams are so small today: NASA practically begging Congress for funds to send up a telescope, a fly-by of Pluto, another shot at Mars. We should be living on Mars, on the Moon, on the asteroids by now. Instead, as Richard Fienberg, editor af Sky & Telescope magazine said in his editorial in the December, 2002 issue, “In 1972 we had three guys exploring the Moon, making discoveries. In 2002 we have three guys circling the Earth, making repairs.”

With today’s crash, we’re sure to see a halt to shuttle flights for several months or a year. What happens to our commitments to the International Space Station? What happens to our big dreams? We waste our resources on making the rich richer, our expectations lower, our wishes smaller, our world poorer…

In an excellent and lucid blog entry, Anil Dash takes on the diamond industry for its numerous sins. Not only does he go after the trade in terrorist- and civil war-supporting “blood diamonds“, but he also correctly pegs the sellers of diamonds as

He skewers their ads, their assumptions about their clientele and their pathetic attempts to continue the artificial scarcity of diamonds. And the commenters on his blog go even further, linking to a 3-part Atlantic Monthly article from 1982 on the invention of the diamond engagement ring “tradition”, pointing out the origins of the engagement ring itself as a territorial marker around a man’s chattel — his wife.

An excellent alternative view.

I’ve been thinking about a post I made on Knowledge Pool a couple of weeks ago, regarding frames of reference. It had to do with the Beloit College Mindset list, which gives some relevant pointers to the cultural references an incoming freshman might or might not have. For instance, the class of 2005 was born in the same year as the Macintosh. They’ve never known a world without personal computers.

There are plenty of words and phrases we use all the time which derive from technologies and customs no longer in existence. I wonder if other — younger — people wonder about the origin of terms like:

• flip-side — deals with phonograph records (I believe) and refers to the often-ignored second side of a single
• winding down — when was the last time you saw a wind-up watch?
• carbon copy — this one lives on in the “cc” block of our email programs, but, how many people still use carbon paper, and where do they buy it?
• ditto — anyone who went to school in the 60s & 70s remembers sniffing the newly-printed test papers, made on the Ditto machine, hoping the methanol fumes would get you high

Any others come to mind?

Learned something today about guns. I’ve always been opposed to handguns, never having seen any purpose to them other than killing another person. I’ve read the statistics about how the US has the highest (by far) rate of handguns per capita and handgun deaths per capita. I’ve always believed in an outright ban on all handguns. I’ve been re-evaluating that position lately, but today, I learned how emotional and knee-jerk my attitude towards handguns has been.

I’m quite sure I’ve said, “If we’re not going to ban all hanguns, at least let’s ban automatic and semi-automatic weapons.” Reading in the Volokh Conspiracy today, I realized that, as far as semi-automatics go, I had no idea what I was talking about!

If you see a cylinder above the trigger, it’s a revolver, because when you shoot, the bullet leaves the gun and the cylinder revolves to put the next bullet in place.

If you don’t see a revolving cylinder, it’s a semi-automatic. Why do we call it a semi-automatic? There’s a magazine — that’s what holds the bullets — which you stick into the handle of the gun. But you can’t shoot bullets that are in the handle of your gun! So there’s a mechanism to move the bullets from the magazine into the chamber. When you shoot the gun, the bullet leaves the gun, the metal case is ejected (wear eye protection!), and an extra bullet is automatically moved from the magazine into the barrel. But when you pull the trigger once, you only shoot once. Hence, semi-automatic.

So, anyway, don’t use “semi-automatic” to mean “an especially scary gun”! Almost any handgun out there is a semi-automatic.