Drinking and Drugging
“Crack is Whack”
Remember that phrase? I heard many people repeat it last week as they appraised the waste of Whitney Houston’s later years and flashed back to her 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer, when she uttered those immortal words. She was bristling not at rumors that she abused drugs but at insinuations that she turned to cheap ones. With album sales like hers, you didn’t have to suck on a pipe.
Sawyer wanted to know what Houston was on. Everyone wanted to know what Houston was on, and news reports after her death took unconfirmed inventory of the pills in her hotel suite, wondering if they represented the extent of her indulgences.
No. By many accounts, Houston also drank. More than a little. In fact one early, leading theory about the cause of her death, which won’t be known until toxicology tests are finished, was that a mix of prescription drugs and alcohol did her in.
But while the drugs leapt immediately to the foreground, with questions raised about which doctors and pharmacies had provided them, the alcohol receded from focus, as it too often does. Wrongly, perilously, we tend not to attribute the same destructive powers to it that we do to powders, capsules and vials.
We don’t talk of its abuse in quite the same titillated, scandalized, censorious tone. Vodka isn’t wack. Beer, certainly, isn’t wack. It has adorable mascots — remember Spuds MacKenzie, the Bud Light bull terrier? It’s advertised during the Super Bowl and on the sides of municipal buses. It even comes in cloying fruit flavors and brightly colored cans, with fun names. Four Loko, anyone?
Because drinking is legal for adults, safe in moderation, the rightful font of epicurean reveries and the foundation of a multibillion-dollar industry with lobbyists galore, it gets something of a pass. Many of us like it — no, love it — too much to survey the damage it can do, look at ways in which our society could work to curb that and acknowledge that the effort isn’t so very vigorous.
Read it all HERE.
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(CNN) — In Syria’s cyberwar, the regime’s supporters have deployed a new weapon against opposition activists — computer viruses that spy on them, according to an IT specialist from a Syrian opposition group and a former international aid worker whose computer was infected.
A U.S.-based antivirus software maker, which analyzed one of the viruses at CNN’s request, said that it was recently written for a specific cyberespionage campaign and that it passes information it robs from computers to a server at a government-owned telecommunications company in Syria.
Supporters of dictator Bashar al-Assad first steal the identities of opposition activists, then impersonate them in online chats, said software engineer Dlshad Othman. They gain the trust of other users, pass out Trojan horse viruses and encourage people to open them.
Once on the victim’s computer, the malware sends information out to third parties.
MORE.
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This shows how our government loves to waste money! And enrich other countries.
There once was a plan to turn over the main U.S. detention center in Afghanistan to control of the Afghans in 2011. That’s out the window. Instead, the military is offering millions to vastly expand the center’s inmate intake.
Specifically, $35 million will fund expansions necessary to house “approximately 2,000 detainees” at the Detention Facility at Parwan on the outskirts of Bagram Air Field, an hour’s drive from Kabul. The Army Corps of Engineers wants to expand “detainee housing, guard towers, administrative facility and Vehicle/Personnel Access Control Gates, security surveillance and restricted access systems,” according to a recent solicitation. A Turkey-based company received the contract in late January.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. As far back as summer 2010, senior military officials in charge of the detention center boasted to Danger Room outright that by January 2012, they wouldn’t be running the square-mile sized prison. They considered handing the detention center to the Afghans a mark of their own success at fostering a culture of law and order within the Afghan government.
MORE.
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Nope, nothing like this at the gym this morning. And I doubt I will ever see such a thing. Because going to the gym in the morning? Just like my wife and I, only the older set appears. But at least there is no competition, as in I can run faster and longer on the treadmill than you can. So far anyways!
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In Chenzhuang Village, China, about 20 miles northwest of central Beijing, the ruins of a partially built amusement park called Wonderland sit near a highway, surrounded by houses and fields of corn. Construction work at the park, which developers had promised would be “the largest amusement park in Asia,” stopped around 1998 after disagreements with the local government and farmers over property prices. Developers briefly tried to restart construction in 2008, but without success. The abandoned structures are now a draw for local children and a few photographers, who encounter signs telling them to proceed at their own risk. Reuters photographer David Gray visited the site on a chilly morning earlier this month and returned with these haunting images of a would-be Wonderland. [21 photos]
MORE .
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Just Another Presidential Fable
A number of folk stories and a few divisive rumors have surrounded the office of the U.S. presidency, and skeptical folks like us check a few of them out.
In the United States, February brings “Presidents’ Day” and some familiar stories, such as George Washington chopping down ye olde cherry tree, circulate anew. Sweet as it may sound about not lying to one’s father, this story is not true. Nor, to bite into a story of more recent vintage, did he have wooden teeth.
Let’s skeptically consider a few of the many fables that regularly appear about current and past presidents, and critically think about the purposes they may serve.
First, we need to address the initial fable of a “Presidents’ Day.” Yes, Martha, there is no such legal designation. Once upon a time there were two presidential holidays in February: Lincoln’s Birthday on the 12th and Washington’s on the 22nd. (Never mind that Washington was actually born on the 11th, based on the Julian calendar in effect in 1731.
MORE.
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June 1941. Erie County, Pennsylvania. “Each group of ten trailers in the FSA camp at Erie has a trailer service unit, water faucet, slop sink, and garbage pail.” Photo by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration
Shorpy . Interesting site to enjoy.
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And prior to another fine dinner prepared by my lovely wife, arguably the best damn cook in Iowa, how about some butt?
Or better yet, this butt?
