Whispers from the Wild

Years and thousands of lives after invasion, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has just released a new message to the people of Iraq:

Rebuild your OWN damn country.

From the BBC:

A senior US government auditor has called for American funding of Iraqi reconstruction projects to end.

Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said Iraq was likely to earn more than $70bn (£35bn) in oil revenues in 2008.

This, he said, meant the government was capable of funding reconstruction projects itself.

This is absolutely abominable.  A country invades another country in violation of international law, bombs the crap out of it, executes its president, brings corruption and mercenaries who are above the law and when they can’t do much more damage they turn around and say “Now it’s up to you to repair the damage we’ve done.”

It doesn’t matter to him that the money has been wasted because of Bush cronies crowding around to cream off the money.  It doesn’t matter to him that the corruption is due to no-bid contracts awarded to crooks and liars such as Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater.  All that matters to him is that Iraq’s oil revenue should be used to repair the damage.

Newsflash – you bomb a country illegally, it’s your responsibility to fix the damage.  How the hell does he get to say it’s now all Iraq’s fault?  The poor Iraqi people have been kicked when they are down so much, I’m not surprised they want to not reknew the US mandate to stay in their country.

Sadly you couldn’t make this crap up

I happened to catch an episode of “Penn and Teller: Bullshit” which discussed Creationism.  For those who haven’t encountered it, this is a fundamentalist Christian belief that their Bible must be taken literally and applied to history.  Amongst other things, they believe the earth is about 6,000 years old, was created by God and that Evolution is just mumbo-jumbo theory that doesn’t work.  They also want Creationism treated as science and taught in schools as science, alongside (first of all, then replacing) evolution.

Well, I could buy the theory that the total balance present on the earth, where every tiny little thing (with the exception of mankind) works alongside and is compatible with, every other thing.  I could buy that such a perfectly balanced situtation is the work of some kind of omnipotent, omnipowerful being.

But my question is this:  Why the CHRISTIAN God?  There are a lot of religions on the earth, none with any better evidence than any other that their religion is the one true religion.  So why Christianity?  Why point to the Bible and use that as the template – why not use another religious text?  Hell, as Penn and Teller point out, Raelians believe exactly the same thing as Creationists, except for one thing – they believe that extra-terrestrials, aliens from another planet, are the ones with the plan, not an omnipotent invisible but still present God.  Can someone definitively tell me why Christians are right and Raelians are not, in any way other than to say “the Bible says so”?

Because if Creationism is exclusively down to the God portrayed in the Bible – then this is a deliberate attempt to circumvent the Constitution of the United States by removing the separation between God and state.  And if that is the case, the US is more in danger than ever of becoming the very radical fundamental religious state that it says is such a danger to the world as, say, Muslim states.

It’s a slippery slope.

Obama wants to withdraw troops within 16 months.  McCain says that’s wrong, because… well, because McCain says so.

Maliki says that he agrees with the plan, and even embraces it.  McCain says that’s wrong, because… well, because McCain says so.

Most Americans agree that the focus of the war on Terror should be Afghanistan, not Iraq.  McCain says that’s wrong, because… well, because McCain says so.

Is this all McCain has?  “Because I think this, everyone else is wrong”?   Sounds even more like he’s following in the steps of Bush.

McSame indeed.

On Monday the Washington Times carried an article about an exchange of letters between the Department of Homeland Security and a company called Lampert Less Legal. The purpose was to investigate the viability of disposing of airport check in passes in favour of something entirely more sinister. RFID chipped bracelets for all passengers. While that in itself is worrying, the bracelets have a capability that is downright scary: On command they can administer a taser shock of up to 200,000 volts.

So is the DHS interested in making every man, woman and child wear their own shock collar just in case they are a terrorist?

Apparently the answer is yes.

According to the article:

This bracelet would:

• take the place of an airline boarding pass

• contain personal information about the traveler

• be able to monitor the whereabouts of each passenger and his/her luggage

• shock the wearer on command, completely immobilizing him/her for several minutes

By linking the luggage with the passenger at check in, any suspicious luggage found by airport staff could facilitate the immediate detention of the passenger the luggage belonged to. While this in itself is not a bad idea, there are no clues in either the promotional video or the website about the extent of personal information these bracelets may store – or how it could be retrieved.

It is obvious from the articles and video that RFID chips are the popular media here, but how secure are they from hand held hacking devices? While there are undeniable benefits to airport security, what guarantees are there that within a few months an RFID receiver that can read and clone the identity information won’t start to become available on the black market?

In England, the London Transport system have been using RFID equipped cards (known as ‘Oyster transit cards’) for a while now. The idea is that you buy credit by touching the card to an RFID receiver at a pay point, then each time you make a journey you do so by touching the Oyster card to the receiver panel on the top of the entry and exit gates. The computer then works out how much your trip costs and debits the amount. An easy system to use. But is it secure? Apparently not. Last month articles began to appear on the internet discussing how Oyster cards had been hacked.

The other major concern has got to be how to protect the bracelet from tampering, while protecting the wearer from “false positives” to such an anti-tampering system. The last thing air crew want is the bracelet to be removed in flight from someone who genuinely is a risk, but by the same token bored children waiting at the departure gate are going to be playing with their bracelets purely because they’re a new novelty. This raises the issue of what to do in the event the bracelet believes it’s being tampered with. As well, if the taser function can be activated by a radio signal, there is always a danger that it can be set off accidentally, which also has to be balanced with ease of use. Take the scenario where there actually is a madman armed with a weapon that wants to attack an air crew – if triggering the bracelet requires the entry of a complex code, the steward or stewardess is going to be assaulted before they can trigger it, or worse going to trigger the wrong bracelet trying to enter the code. If it’s too easy to trigger there’s a danger it might be triggered by a simple wrong keypress.

The final thing I want to mention in this diary is something that is becoming increasingly important to me as a father-to-be in October – what will I allow for my child in the name of “security”? I have to say that I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I’d rather find an alternative method of transport than let someone strap a taser to my child. Naturally the promotional video claims that “most people would prefer” their system. I wouldn’t. I would balk at wearing one of these things myself, but there is absolutely no way I would inflict that upon my child.

So will this ever come to pass?

According to a letter from DHS official, Paul S. Ruwaldt of the Science and Technology Directorate, office of Research and Development, to the inventor whom he had previously met with, he wrote, “To make it clear, we [the federal government] are interested in…the immobilizing security bracelet, and look forward to receiving a written proposal.” The letterhead, in case you were wondering, came from the DHS office at the William J. Hughes Technical Center at the Atlantic City International Airport, or the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters.

In another part of the letter, Mr. Ruwaldt confirmed, “It is conceivable to envision a use to improve air security, on passenger planes.”

Coming soon to an airport near you.

There seems to be a new disease creeping up on America, and it’s called fundamentalist christianity.  I’m not talking about regular Christianity, whose followers try to follow the teachings of the Bible but are generally easy going about non-believers or non-followers of their particular kind of Christianity, I’m talking about a new breed which has a ruthless, crusades, inquisition style of Christianity very much in keeping with President Bush’s “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” mentality.

It’s difficult to lose a friend to that, because when someone joins this fundamentalist christianity (yes, I’m deliberately spelling it with a small c because I don’t think it IS real Christianity.  “Thou shalt not kill” is not high on the agenda for them) then those who aren’t also fundamentalist christians become that persons enemy, it’s that black and white.  With them or against them, there are no half measures to these people.

Essentially it’s a cult that draws people in when they are vulnerable, makes them feel wanted, makes them feel like they belong and slowly draws them away from previous friends and further into the cult through seeming to be very friendly and supportive.  Like a lot of cults (the jehovah’s witnesses and the mormons come to mind) they’re always ready with Bible quotes – though those quotes are often taken out of context in order to support the argument.

Our particular friends vulnerability was that she lost a child to stillbirth.  We lost our first child through miscarriage (admittedly at an early stage) in December so we do know what it’s like, but the cult grabbed our friend while she was vulnerable and now she’s been turned to the fundamentalist side of the force.

A sticking point to her is the stillbirth death of her child.  She has gone WAY over the top, insisting that it was a child and should be treated like a child who died after full term birth, even going so far as to alienate other members of her own family.  On her own blog profile she says:

(childs name) was born still on March 30, 2008 at 19 weeks, 2 days. Some say he wasn’t a person; I say those who think that way are not.

And this is exactly the way she treats even members of her own family who disagree.  They’re not with her, so in her mind they’re against her and she treats them accordingly.  Even if they say “Look, I’m sorry you had a miscarriage, but the fetus at 19 weeks wasn’t developed enough to be a child, so we’re not going to pretend it was” that’s not acceptable to her.  To her mind, it must be treated as if it had reached full term, been born and then died of something like SIDS and anyone who responds in any other way is against her.  Needless to say the cult of fundamentalism fully supports this stance which is why she feels so welcomed by them.

I was doing some research today about her latest comments on a board, and unearthed a term I’ve never heard before: Angelversary.  A quick Google Search found the following definition:

Angelversary n. 1. This word denotes the annual date of a child’s death. This day is just as important to a bereaved parent as a birthday, and stillbirth parents are marking both birth and death on the same day. So it is different than a regular birthday. While “anniversary” might work, that often seems to celebratory a word for this kind of day. Angelversary is our answer to describing this most difficult day.

While I could understand someone desperately upset about their child marking an annual anniversary in some way like this, our friend – encouraged by the cult of fundamentalism – is now adding to her “not with me, so against me list” those people who aren’t marking her three month angelversary – she isn’t even waiting a year, it’s every month, every three months, every six months as well that there has to be this remembrance, this commiseration, this round of gratuitous apologies that she lost the child…  It’s way, WAY over the top.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  Miscarriage or still birth that occurs naturally, as it did for us in December and her in March is the bodies way of stopping the development of a child that for some reason is not going to be a viable life.  We don’t know why it happens, and it can be even more depressing when the appearance of the still born seems normal, but some kind of trigger within the mothers body sets off an alarm that the child isn’t developing correctly, so the body rejects it.  And before the anti-abortionists weigh in, we’re not talking abortion here, we’re talking about when a body miscarries on its own with no outside intervention.  This happened to us and it happened to her.  It’s a natural phenomenon, which – although distressing – is part of the species’ ability to ensure as healthy as possible offspring.  It’s survival of the fittest started at the earliest possible time, and we have no control over it whatsoever.

But to take it to these extremes, to DEMAND that everyone else treat it like a full term baby that subsequently died and to alienate and behave in a hostile manner to ANYONE who doesn’t meet those demands – well, that’s way over the top.  It’s attention seeking, drama queen, hit-others-with-religion behaviour that’s worse than childish itself.  Does that sound harsh?  It probably is, but I’ve reached the stage where she’s going to treat me like Satan Incarnate anyway simply because I won’t pay tribute to her dead fetus every month/3 months/however long – so I might as well issue this reality check.

People:  Still birth happens.  Miscarriage happens.  It’s natural.  It’s nothing to feel bad about, it’s just one of those things we have no control over.  But don’t take things too far, don’t turn to cults just because you don’t get as much attention as you’d like or people don’t say the things you’d like.

It’s sad to lose you as a friend, Mrs H.  Should you decide to leave the cult at some point and face reality, both of us here will still be your friend – to our minds you haven’t stopped being a friend until you yourself have told us that if we don’t behave a certain way we’re no longer “people” to you.  But we’re here for you should you get out of the cult, and we hope you do.  That’s a decision you’ll have to make, and I hope that it doesn’t come painfully, such as if you happen to find a disagreement with the cult and realise how fast they’ll drop you.  Should that happen, remember how fast you dropped your friends and family – but true Christianity also includes forgiveness, so don’t forget that either.

We’ll both miss you till then.