Thursday, August 5, 2010
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Army Suicide Report Ignores Suicide-Causing Drugs
Army Suicide Report Ignores Suicide-Causing Drugs
Martha Rosenberg SpeakEasy
Martha Rosenberg SpeakEasy
Why are troops killing themselves?
The long awaited Army report, “Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, Suicide Prevention” considers the economy, the stress of nine years of war, family dislocations, repeated moves, repeated deployments, troops’ risk-taking personalities, waived entrance standards and many aspects of Army culture.
What it barely considers is the suicide-inked antidepressants, antipsychotics and antiseizure drugs whose use exactly parallels the increase in US troop suicides since 2005.
But instead of citing dangerous drugs and drug cocktails for turning troops suicidal (and accident prone and at risk of death from unsafe combinations) the Army report cites troops’ illicit use of them along with street drugs. (The word “illicit” appears 150 times in the Army report and “psychiatrist” appears twice.)
Sunday, August 1, 2010
From Samizdat to Twitter: How Technology Is Making Censorship Irrelevant | Epicenter�| Wired.com
From Samizdat to Twitter: How Technology Is Making Censorship Irrelevant | Epicenter�| Wired.com
To understand what the web has done for free speech, it’s necessary to think about how Natalya Gorbanevskaya and her fellow dissidents produced 65 issues of the samizdat publication Chronicle Of Current Events in the Soviet Union between 1968 and 1983.
In addition, it’s nice to imagine — as Clay Shirky did last week at the Guardian’s Activate conference — that dissidents hold a trump card: the absence of hubris. Power tends to make rulers “certain of what will happen next”, said Shirky. As a result, rulers “try fewer things” than dissidents, who excel in terms of creativity. Meanwhile, as Shirky argues, “the wiring of the population” is “complete to the first degree”. Even North Korea has a mobile phone network.
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