Shaving Toward Oblivion.

Conditions: Rain's a-comin'.


Back In Iraq.

A series of insurgent attacks in Iraq this week put the lie to the reports about the success of 'the surge' and the developing safety of the Iraqi people.

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber struck the funeral of two Sunni tribesmen who joined forces against al-Qaida in Iraq, killing at least 50 people Thursday and reinforcing fears that insurgents are hitting back after American-led crackdowns.
[...]

Insurgents also struck against Awakening Council members in Baghdad on Thursday. Two council members were gunned down in the Sunni district of Azamiyah. Hours later in the same area, five council members and a civilian were killed by a roadside bomb. And the head of the Awakening Council in the southern Baghdad area of Dora was killed by gunmen who sprayed his car with bullets, also wounding his son, police said.

The violence came two days after a string of suicide bombings in four cities of northern and central Iraq killed 60 people _ attacks that U.S. officials blamed on al-Qaida in Iraq.
[...]

The sudden spike in bloodshed this week adds to the other worries now piling up in Iraq: violent rivalries among Shiites and persistent cracks in the Iraqi security forces.

Violence across the country has declined since seven months ago, including dramatic suicide bombings like Thursday's funeral attack. American officials credit the change to the U.S. troop buildup and the rise of Sunni tribal groups known as Awakening Councils that have turned against al-Qaida-linked militants. A truce called last year by anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has also helped.

But the new bloodshed highlights how fragile those gains are.

- HuffPost.com

Far be it for me to criticize the military commanders in Iraq, but it seems that every time anyone starts talking about how the situation is becoming calmer, or the latest military strategy is working, or a corner has been turned, that should really be the signal for the Iraqis to all hide under their beds for a week or two.



Falluj-ian Update.

The Iraqi city that stood up to the American invasion, was turned into a holding area for bad guys before being clusterbombed back to the stone age, how goeth the war there?

FALLUJAH, Apr 14 (IPS) -- Fallujah remains a crippled city more than two years after the November 2004 U.S.-led assault.

Unemployment, and lack of medical care and safe drinking water in the city 60 km west of Baghdad remain a continuous problem. Freedom of movement is still curtailed.
[...]

Now a less visible form of destruction is being spread, he said. "The new wave of destruction is represented by tearing the social tissue apart. The Americans are paying tremendous amounts of money to get people of Fallujah to fight each other."

The road into Fallujah from the main Amman-Baghdad highway is safer today, but nobody is allowed into Fallujah who is not from the city and can prove it by providing elaborate identity documentation. That can only be obtained by undergoing biometric identification by the U.S. military -- a process which includes retina scans, body searches and finger-printing before issuance of a bar-coded ID badge.

The city remains sealed. Many residents refer to it as a big jail.

The city remains tense in the face of power struggles and turf wars between tribal chiefs and Awakening group commanders, in Fallujah and in other areas of the volatile al-Anbar province. Disputes between the Iraqi Islamic Party and Awakening groups are also creating security tensions. The Awakening forces are former resistance fighters that the U.S. pays to be now on its side.

- Alternet.org

Hmm, well it's bad news for the Fallujans, but potential good news for the potential makers of Rambo 5: Fallujah Follies.



Killing For Fun And Profit.

Back when traffic lights were invented, people were effectively trusted to stop when the lights turned red. Which obviously was never going to work, because people can't be trusted. So after video cameras were invented it didn't take long for the two to be combined, in order to fine and therefore punish people who ran red lights. Now here's the catch: If people make money from other people running red lights, then would the first people want to make it more difficult for the second people to *not* run red lights?

Six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. The local governments in question have ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.

- Leftlanenews.com

Of course if this was just restricted to figures on a spreadsheet we could all have a laugh about it. But in reality shortening the amber cycles lead to collisions, which lead to injuries and deaths. So in a very real sense, these cities have put profits before peoples lives. And not foreign anonymous 'brown' people in some far-off land, either. Put that in your profit column.



The Small Voice Of Common Sense.

Some very large defense contractors in The U.S would very much like to charge billions of dollars for the opportunity to build a Missile Defense System. The only real problem is that people keep saying that the thing won't work. What kind of people?

Washington - A group of prominent scientists who have been critical of missile defense plans told lawmakers Wednesday that a system being built by the United States cannot protect the country.

They also questioned whether the Defense Department has misled the public and European allies about the system's capabilities.

"The program offers no prospect of defending the United States from a real-world missile attack and undermines efforts to eliminate the real nuclear threats to the United States," Lisbeth Gronlund, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told lawmakers at a House oversight hearing on the missile defense program, according to prepared testimony. Gronlund's group has long expressed skepticism about missile defense.

The hearing was called by the panel's chairman, Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., who has sought to step up oversight of the missile defense program since the Democrats took control of the House last year. Missile defense traditionally has drawn more support from Republicans.

- Truthout.org

Will the mad rush to massive profits be stymied by small details such as it not working? Not bloody likely. It's new, it's shiny, it has words like 'missile' and 'defense' in the title, and they can charge several arms and legs for the thing. There's no way the corporations are going to abandon it now.




Careful What You Look For.



Every scientist likes to think that what they're working on could change the world, but few really are. And at the moment a few who might just change the world are busy at work in an 17-mile long underground tunnel, under the Franco-Swiss border.

The most complex piece of scientific equipment ever built, the collider will send particles crashing into each other at just a wink shy of the speed of light, generating energies more powerful than the sun.

Scientists like Mangano believe that this instrument, when it begins operating as early as this summer, will peer into a looking-glass world that could contain entrances to extra dimensions and super-massive partners of the familiar particles that make up our world. One creature that must be hiding there, the scientists say, is the Higgs particle, one of the most exotic undiscovered objects since the yeti.

Critics think the collider could also spawn a black hole that will swallow Earth.

See, that would be bad, since we also happen to live on Earth, and therefore are within approximately 2 light years of any possible black hole. Are the scientists worried about this?

Mangano, who is part of the CERN group studying the safety of the collider, doesn't deny the scant possibility that the collider could yield a mini-black hole.

By smashing protons and lead ions together at energies reaching 14 trillion electron volts, the Large Hadron Collider will dwarf the world's other atom-smashers, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's mighty Tevatron in Batavia, Ill.

But that energy, Mangano hastened to add, would be concentrated in a space thinner than a human hair. Any black hole would be so tiny that it wouldn't be able to get its teeth around a bit of local chevre cheese, let alone the world.

Still, if a black hole were produced at all, "that would be an extremely spectacular result," he said, a half-smile creeping across his face.

And this is why scientists should be thoroughly vetted before they're allowed to tinker with things that could end existence. I'm not denying that the questions they're trying to answer aren't interesting, and it's obvious in order to figure out how the big bang worked you likely need to create one yourself, but isn't this where common sense steps in?

Harvey Newman, a Caltech physicist who was one of the discoverers of the gluon and is leader of the U.S. contingent on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, said the collider could theoretically produce a mini-black hole by packing a tremendous amount of energy into a tiny space.

But he said the black hole would pose no threat because it would last only 10-27 seconds before decaying -- hardly enough time to start gobbling up the French countryside.

Critics are not convinced. Just last month, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho filed suit in U.S. District Court in Honolulu to block the start-up of the new collider until CERN produces a comprehensive safety report.

Speaking from Hawaii, Wagner said that despite assurances from scientists at CERN and around the world, there was no proof a mini-black hole would disappear. No one has ever seen it happen, said Wagner, who studied cosmic ray physics at UC Berkeley as a young man.

It's just as possible that the tiny black hole would be stable and start chewing up normal matter, he said.

It could take years for it to become large enough to gobble up the Earth, but there's no evidence that can't happen, he said.
[...]

"Look," Mangano said, leaning forward in his chair at CERN's sprawling complex, "what if I told you tomorrow when you shave you will blow up the world? You laugh. You say that can't happen. But how do you know?

- LATimes.com

Um, what? Look, I like to pretend I'm as open-minded as the next man, but I cannot see how my old Philishave in any way shape or form could collide particles at near the speed of light. Your device can, and will. Instead of making stupid analogies that actually obscure any concerns, how about you actually wait a bit and let people think things through before your little science experiment accidentally dooms everyone. The higher the potential mistake, the more care must go into the process. A sentence that should be tattooed onto every scientist and politician's arm, I think.



Peace out.