Mixed in with all the other bad news lately is that military spending continues to skyrocket, reaching $1.6 trillion Canadian in 2009. That would be a 1.6 million million dollars spent on killing people.
In other news about rising militarism, here’s an article about Project Hero, which encourages universities to pay the tuition of children who have lost parents in active service in the Canadian military. It turns out that not only is Project Hero paying for very little education, but also that the Canadian military already has a program in place to pay tuition and other expenses for students who have lost parents in active service. So why did former top general Rick Hillier start a redundant project? It looks like it’s an effort to promote militarism in canadian universities.
We’ve all heard it:
Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.
Now an update for the 21st century:
Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day.
But teach a man how to fish, and he’ll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years.
A great photo essay about the kinds of questions that queer people get asked.
My friend Erin is doing a placement through Engineers Without Borders at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Ghana and writing a great blog about it.
Her most recent post takes aim at the pictures of “starving” African children that many charities use in fundraising campaigns. WorldVision provides a typical example. Erin, with encouragement from another EWB volunteer, decided to take pairs of pictures, one a “poor, starving” child shot and the other showing a clean, “Sunday-best” photo.
Hope you enjoy them!
A few of the news stories that have caught my interest in recent days involve violence by uniformed representatives of our society and superiors that protect them. There are some people who will beat others given the chance, and some of these people manage to get a job where they wear a uniform. That’s inevitable, but what shouldn’t be inevitable is that the people who lead uniformed services accept and protect these people.
In East Vancouver, police beat a man after being called to a domestic dispute. After they’d broken fractured bones around his eyes and handcuffed him, they realized that they were at the wrong residence. Not only is that very bad luck for the guy with the fractured bones, but really, if they had been at the right address and beaten up someone there would that have been any better?
“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” That’s what Rear Admiral Harris, in charge at Guantanamo Bay, said after three prisoners supposedly hung themselves. Well, it appears that the warfare was indeed asymmetrical, but not against the U.S. Four American soldiers have come forward to say that they were on guard duty in Guantanamo Bay the night that three prisoners supposedly committed suicide, and contrary to the official report, they saw no one, alive or dead, pass between the prisoner’s cellblock and the camp infirmary where the bodies ended up. What they did see earlier in the evening was a government van usually used for transporting prisoners move between the cell block and a separate installation widely believed to be used for torture. The van returned several hours later and stopped at the infirmary. Since the Obama government has taken office, these guards have been cooperating with federal authorities in investigating what really happened that night, but federal investigators have declined to continue the investigation.
And ABC is reporting that the scopes on U.S. military sniper rifles are being stamped with New Testament references by the manufacturer. That’s not strictly a beating, but it sure breaks the rules.
