witness

17-year-old fatally zapped by Taser likely youngest stun gun victim: rights group

By The Canadian Press

WINNIPEG - An international human rights group believes the 17-year-old victim of a police Taser in Winnipeg is the youngest Canadian to die after being zapped by a stun gun.

The teen, Michael Langan, died Tuesday.

A spokesman with Amnesty International says Langan is believed to be the youngest Canadian to die after being Tasered since 2003 - the year the agency recorded the first death linked to the device.

The group says at least 21 people in the country have died after being hit by a police Taser.

In Tuesday's case, police say the youth was a suspect in a theft and an officer deployed an "electronic control device" when he refused to put down a knife.

Source

My emphasis.

There's only one correct answer to each question...


first

second...



Now, that was unexpected. Icky, and yet...

My 87 year old father-in-law is a World War II veteran. He was a navigator in the RCAF, flying 32 bombing missions over Germany, once making an emergency landing in Belgium, and once, when an engine caught fire over the Irish Sea, bailing out and parachuting onto Snowdon. But those days are long past. Because he is now increasingly unable to take care of himself, J and I last year started trying to find him an acceptable home for when he can no longer live on his own. Naturally, we consulted Veterans Affairs, and we were happy to discover that although the VA now only administers one veterans hospital in the whole country, that institution happens to be located on the island of Montreal (in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue) and is easy to get to from our place. When we contacted the hospital we were told that the waiting time for J's father would be about a month, and so we were content that moving him in wouldn't be difficult if and when it became necessary. Months later, J decided to confirm the details of the procedure for having him move in to the hospital, and she was told that the waiting time was now two years. Two years?!

Normally, you'd expect a gradual decline in the number of veterans making use of such facilities. There are no more Canadian veterans of World War I, and the numbers of World War II veterans is obviously dropping, so why the sudden bulge in patients at Ste-Anne? The answer is grimly telling. As J was told by the administrator at the hospital, there has been a wave of veterans coming back from Afghanistan to become patients at the hospital... mostly psychological cases.

Since 2001, about 15,000 Canadian troops have been stationed in Afghanistan. There have been 85 deaths of Canadian military personnel in Afghanistan (including one acknowledged suicide) and about 300 wounded. The vast majority of these casualties have occurred since 2006 when Canadian troops were deployed in the Kandahar region, taking on active combat missions. In a CBC report from November 2007:

A recent military survey of returned soldiers found that nearly 400 of the 2,700 who had served in Kandahar may have come home with mental health problems.

All of which gives some sense of the scale of the impact of our participation in this war. Nothing of the impact on Afghanistan, however. In fact, there has hardly been a serious study of the number of civilian casualties of the War in Afghanistan. Marc Herold, a professor with the Departments of Economics and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire, has conducted a study attempting to gauge the number of civilian casualties due to US bombing in Afghanistan for the period October 2001 to May 2003, finding between 3100 and 3600 deaths. This is, by his own admission, a minimum figure, and undoubtedly a very low estimate, only counting media-reported deaths directly caused by the bombing and purposely not including related but later deaths or deaths due to the repercussions of bombing, also not including civilian deaths caused by other military operations, notably, ground operations. In a 20 May 2002 article in the Guardian, Jonathan Steele reports estimates of about 20,000 civilian deaths directly and indirectly due to the US bombing. And that figure is only for the first 8 months of the war.

Finding the number of so-called Coalition deaths in Afghanistan is easy. Finding the number of Coalition wounded is a little harder - that's an impact of the war that doesn't have any mainstream media marketability, apparently - and finding the number of Coalition troops with psychological scars is harder still. As for the psychological scars of Afghanis... we'll never know, and we'll only be able to get a very small idea of the scale of such damage as we view - from our safe vantage point - ongoing developments in the country... its further decline into misery, war, hunger, narco-business, increases in small-time terrorism, the increased power of Islamic fundamentalism, the worsening of conditions for women... Rulers make victims, and victims make more victims, until there's either no one left... or the process is put to a stop.

+++++++++++++++

I was invaded by the power of the night



title from twenty love poems: 1, by Pablo Neruda
veinte poemas de amor: 1

( this way... )

( have you passed through this night? )


This is our world: holocaust.gz.

I want to restage the Dunkirk rescue at the Gaza coast.

This great evil - where'd it come from?
How'd it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who's doing this?
Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might've known?
Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine?
Is this darkness in you, too?
Have you passed through this night?

~ from The Thin Red Line, by way of Explosions in the Sky

A quick and dirty video for an atmospheric piece by Pinkville.

I've given it some thought, and so, yes, I'm stealing myself for... President McCain.

The Democrats continue to demonstrate that they are more committed to Republican policies than to their own electability... and as much as there's a mainstream assumption that Clinton or Obama will comfortably win, one should never underestimate the Democrats' ability to steal defeat from the jaws of victory. Anyone remember 2004? Anyone remember, for example, the AWOL candidate devastatingly - successfully - attacking the war record of the decorated war hero (while the latter said nothing in his own defence for 3 weeks)? That's the political culture we're dealing with. And the Democrats are the party that meekly handed over the Presidency in 2000 without a peep. No demands for investigations into voting irregularities, no challenges in the Senate, no word from Gore, just the "high road" to slavish devotion to the policies of the day (you know, Bush's policies, that the vast majority of the Democrats in Congress and the Senate supported in full, or in part, or in principle).

Anyway, I'm not sure America is yet capable of electing a black President, and though it may be ready to elect a woman, would she be Hillary Clinton? I'm not too sure. She isn't well-liked or likable, her platform is indistinguishable from Bush's (except perhaps for being more devoted to war in the Middle East), and she's bad-tempered enough to be a good bet to shoot herself in the foot some time between now and the first week of November. As we know, there are no other Democratic candidates...

Meanwhile, if McCain passes his greatest test - the Republican party nomination - he certainly has as good a chance to win as either Clinton or Obama. He isn't tainted by the Bush administration, he has a reputation as an independent politician, he is heralded as a war hero, and he'd have that big Republican machine behind him - the one that owns the voting machines, the Supreme Court, the media, etc.

Of course, if McCain wins it will be difficult living with a lunatic in the White House, someone who is genuinely unpredictable rather than merely predictably berserk like the current administration. And McCain, for all the talk of independence and likability, remains an extremely right wing, pro-corporate, militaristic political figure.

So I'm stealing myself up for it. And if I'm wrong, I'll just have to deal with one or the other of the Democrats' front-running right wing, pro-corporate, militaristic candidates.

So will we all.

Japanese scientists create fearless mouse

By The Associated Press

TOKYO - The age-long animosity between cat and mouse could be a thing of the past with genetically modified "fearless" mice that Japanese scientists say shed light on mammal behaviour.

Using genetic engineering, scientists at Tokyo University say they have successfully switched off the rodents' instinct to cower at the smell or presence of cats - showing fear is genetically hardwired and not learned through experience, as commonly believed.

"Mice are naturally terrified of cats and usually panic or flee at the smell of one. But mice with certain nasal cells removed through genetic engineering didn't display any fear," said research team leader Ko Kobayakawa.

"The mice approached the cat, even snuggled up to it and played with it," Kobayakawa said.

"The discovery that fear is genetically determined and not learned after birth is very interesting and goes against what was previously thought."

The findings suggest human aversion to dangerous smells like that of rotten food, for example, could also be genetically predetermined, he said.

Kobayakawa said his findings, published in the science magazine Nature last month, should help researchers shed further light on how the brain processes information about the outside world.

Source

But one must wonder why scientists (and others) would be interested in excising fear from mice... or humans. A number of articles have appeared online and in the press regarding experiments being conducted in the United States (and elsewhere) to produce soldiers without fear... More tinkering with human nature to benefit the lucky few in power...

The story and a cute video (which is a featured news story at yahoo.ca today) also appear at the Guardian Unlimited

( hither to me )

Pitfalls of speaking English as a second language...

If you don't get out of here, I'm gonna blow you!

~ a Montreal bailiff (as shown - without comment - on the local news this evening)

If you're curious, today's Wikipedia Main Page features the article on Pierre Rossier I wrote (as the principal contributor).

"Accidents" of War
The Time Has Come for an Honest Discussion of Air Power
by Tom Engelhardt

The first news stories about the most notorious massacre of the Vietnam War were picked up the morning after from an Army publicity release. These proved fairly typical for the war. On its front page, the New York Times labeled the operation in and around a village called My Lai 4 (or "Pinkville," as it was known to U.S. forces in the area) a significant success. "American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting." United Press International termed what happened there an "impressive victory," and added a bit of patriotic color: "The Vietcong broke and ran for their hide-out tunnels. Six-and-a-half hours later, ‘Pink Village' had become ‘Red, White and Blue Village."

All these dispatches from the "front" were, of course, military fairy tales. (There were no reporters in the vicinity.) It took over a year for a former GI named Ronald Ridenhour, who had heard about the bloody massacre from participants, and a young former AP reporter named Seymour Hersh working in Washington for a news service no one had ever heard of, to break the story, revealing that "red, white, and blue village" had just been red village -- the red of Vietnamese peasant blood. Over 400 elderly men, women, children, and babies had been slaughtered there by Charlie Company of Task Force Barker in a nearly day-long rampage.

Things move somewhat faster these days -- after all, Vietnamese villagers and local officials didn't have access to cell phones to tell their side of the slaughter -- but from the military point of view, the stories these last years have all still seemed to start the same way. Whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, they have been presented by U.S. military spokesmen, or in military press releases, as straightforward successes. The newspaper stories that followed would regularly announce that 17, or 30, or 65 "Taliban insurgents" or "suspected insurgents," or "al-Qaeda gunmen" had been killed in battle after "air strikes" were called in. These stories recorded daily military victories over a determined, battle-hardened enemy.
( the rest of the article )

tony blair

but in mere days he may be headed off to lay waste to the Middle East yet again, though wearing a different cap...

I'm expecting to hear that Suharto has been made Ambassador to East Timor... or that PW Botha has been posthumously made honourary Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission... or that Henry Kissinger has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize- Say what?!

( w/ ph )

Magazine's 'peace index' puts U.S., Iran near bottom of list, Canada near top

Source

A meaningless index.

First, the odour, yet again, of delusional - and deluding - Canadian smugness and self-congratulation. How ludicrous is it to place Canada anywhere near the top of such a scale when our troops are killing people in Afghanistan at this moment (making the country "safe" for US strategic and economic interests)? And when Canadian corporations in places like Nigeria have used mercenaries to intimidate and kill local opponents of their exploitative policies. But most striking: how can the violence of Iran compare with that of United States? Iran may be run by a despotic oligarchy of remarkable cruelty - yet it is a less violent place than Saudi Arabia, America's staunchest ally in the area (apart from Israel) - but no violent policies or actions perpetrated by the Iranian regime could even vaguely compare with the scale or nastiness of those of the political and corporate rulers of the US. By any honest and rational measure, the US is the least peaceful country on earth at the moment, and should be accorded the honour of the lowest spot on any genuine index of peace.

Ah well, it's only The Economist...

Shabolovka Radio Tower. Moscow by Richard Pare, 1998. The digital print in the collection of the CCA is about 48'' x 60". Which is big. The tower is 160m high, which is also big.

But not as big as the corpulent-headed emperor, who roosts in his luxuriously appointed nest, the remote in his left hand hand, flipping from channel to channel on his majesty's viewer's choice TV... a rapid-fire montage of gore-splashed images, dow jones swells and shrinkages, and conventional porn. His right hand is busy - as the images flash - busy stroking his upturned sprite of a cock, quickening his already adolescent-like zap-gun pace, and accelerating towards his personal finish line like a NASCAR poll-sitter.

Earlier, the TV images hadn't been working, so he'd called in his official fluffer, whose black skin, broomstick-up-the-ass gait and grimace-like smile somehow set him off like nothing else. There were times when he wanted to call out mammy!, there were times when, if he'd understood French and understood the irony, the first three letters of her name - Con - would have spurred a spontaneous stain on the crotch of his pants. Con equals cunt, but how could he know? He'd gone to Yale on too select a scholarship to require or acquire any knowledge or learning.

She'd given him a few pages to sign, their hands had brushed as she passed him the pen, and a droplet of spittle had fallen from his lip to her sleeve. She had smiled, and wiped his lip dry. And departed. That was enough. The TV on and flashing, one hand on the remote, the other on his prick. The checkered flag waving in the distance.

With an explosion of spunk - liquid mother-of-pearl - he crosses the line. And later, the signed papers make their way down through the drainpipe of command. The orders are digitised, emailed, and transmitted from towers. And ultimately executed.

The next day, he takes his perch on the comfortable couch, turns on the TV, and works himself up with the gore-splashed images - courtesy al-Jazeera, an irony he does appreciate - he works himself up with the gore-splashed images his signature created.