Eideard

Master Sgt. Anthony Henry, a top Marine recruiting trainer for the southwestern United States, pulled up to Tulsa’s biggest gay community center on Tuesday morning and left his Chevy where he could make a fast getaway. “I have an exit strategy,” he said…

But as it happened, one of the strangest days in the history of the United States Marine Corps unfolded without the protests and insults that Sergeant Henry had feared. Sergeant Henry, who had been invited to set up a recruiting booth on the first day of the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center in downtown Tulsa, instead spent it in quiet conversation with a trickle of gay women who came in to ask about joining the Marines.

“It’s your business and you don’t have to share it,” Sergeant Henry told Ariel Pratt, 20, who asked whether she would face discrimination in the military as a lesbian serving openly. “But you’re also free to be at the mall with your girlfriend…”

The Marines were the service most opposed to ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but they were the only one of five invited branches of the military to turn up with their recruiting table and chin-up bar at the center Tuesday morning. Although Marines pride themselves on being the most testosterone-fueled of the services, they also ferociously promote their view of themselves as the best. With the law now changed, the Marines appear determined to prove that they will be better than the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard in recruiting gay, lesbian and bisexual service members…

By 5 p.m. the Marines had packed up their booth and chin-up bar and headed out, with plans to come back later to attend a panel discussion. It was all uncharted territory. As Sergeant Henry had said the day before of the new world the Marines now inhabit, “At first it’s going to be kind of shock and awe.”

But like a good Marine, he was with the program: “My take is, if they can make it through our boot camp, which is the toughest boot camp in the world, then they ought to have the opportunity to wear the uniform.”

That the Marine Corps was last in line to support the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was as much a function of who happened to be Commandant at the time. History recognizes the Marine Corps as the most progressive of U.S. military services at removing and opposing discrimination.

Which is why I don’t find it surprising that [1] other branches of our military turned down the opportunity and [2] the Marines didn’t. RTFA for details, pride in service.

Launched in 2009, MIT’s “1K House” project challenges designers to come up with affordable, sustainable housing solutions that can improve conditions for the billions of people in the world living on less than $1 per day. The “Pinwheel House” designed by MIT graduate student Ying chee Chui is the first prototype.

The 1K House concept was initiated by Tony Ciochetti, the Thomas G. Eastman Chairman at MIT’s Center for Real Estate, after seeing a family of four emerge from a tiny mud hut while he was traveling through rural India. “There is a huge proportion of the world’s population that has pressing housing needs,” says Ciochetti. “Can you build affordable, sustainable shelter for such a large population?”

Ying chee Chui’s “Pinwheel House” is the first prototype to be constructed and is located in Mianyang, in the Sichuan Province, China. The design incorporates a modular layout with hollow brick walls, steel bars for reinforcement, wooden box beams, a central courtyard space and it’s also built to withstand a magnitude 8.0 earthquake.

“The construction is easy enough, because if you know how to build a single module, you can build the whole house,” says Chui.

Chui came out a little over the long-term goal of building a $1000 house, with the total cost coming to $5,925. Not bad considering it’s tough to buy a good second hand car for that price! A larger building than was originally designed was a factor in the cost – the whole house came to about 800 square feet, rather than 500 square feet. Chui is confident that the smaller module could easily be built for US$4000 or even cheaper if a large number of houses were built at the same time.

There are a number of individual and production processes that could lower the cost of construction significantly. Economies of scale really kick in if producing a modular design like this off-site – to be trucked in and assembled on-site. Wooden box beams can be replaced with several less expensive construction techniques, wood, composite or steel. IMHO, steel being the best choice – recycled and recyclable, easy to train installers/framers, fire rating reduces insurance requirements.

No doubt – even in China – the cost of land is probably higher than the cost of the house erected. At least in urban China.

An Italian couple have sought legal help to persuade their 41-year-old son to fly the nest.

The Venetian parents, who have not been named, say their son has a job but refuses to leave home and wants his clothes washed and his meals prepared. They have sought help from lawyers at the consumer association Adico.

Lawyer Andrea Camp said a letter was sent to the son, advising him to leave home in six days or face legal action. If he refuses, lawyers will ask a court in Venice to issue a protection order for the elderly parents against their son.

“We cannot do it any more,” the father was quoted as saying. “My wife is suffering from stress and had to be hospitalised. He [the son] has a good job but still lives at home…

The couple turned to Adico after hearing of a similar case earlier this month in which Adico persuaded a son to leave home. After he left, his parents changed the locks.

Har!

Akron Children’s Hospital has opted to drop “OMG” from future advertising after a few complaints over its new billboard in the Montrose shopping area.

The billboard reads “OMG! There’s an Akron Children’s ER in Montrose!” and looks down upon the busy intersection of Route 18 and Cleveland-Massillon Road.

Blogger Cindy Orley felt the sign was a slam against God and began writing about it last week. She and her father, a local minister, voiced concerns to Children’s Hospital.

Hospital leaders say they meant no disrespect and received few complaints but, nevertheless, they will drop OMG from future advertisements.

I wouldn’t expect a typical hospital administrator to have more backbone than a marshmallow – or Akron, Ohio to be the center for sophisticated communications; but, rolling over and playing dead for offending some local religious nutball should be disgusting to the remainder of thoughtful adults in the region.

You are out there aren’t you?

Wow – we could sell these to FEMA

The French army top-brass were left red-faced when after a mobile command post worth 600,000 euros complete with military computers, was stolen…

The modular command post system, which resembles a cargo container, was discovered during the search of a warehouse in Bobigny, northeast of Paris, that had been rented by a man suspected of fraud…

The army noticed the command post was missing from its Montlhery barracks south of Paris during an inventory on July 18. Investigators suspect someone inside the barracks of involvement with the theft as the command unit can only be moved by a flatbed truck.

The Le Parisien newspaper reported the command post was supposed to have been sent to the Ivory Coast, where former colonial ruler France has a large military presence supporting a United Nations peacekeeping mission.

A 46-year-old Ivorian national and another suspect have been arrested and another two other suspects are being investigated, the local magistrate said.

Heartwarming to learn that military services outside the United States have traditions comparable to Sergeant Bilko. And it’s just as easy to steal from the French Army as it is from Uncle Sugar.

Australia’s national broadcaster faced calls for a review of funding on Tuesday over a television comedy scene with a fictional Prime Minister Julia Gillard draped in a national flag after having sex on her office floor.

Conservative opposition lawmakers said the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had overstepped good taste with a scene in which actors playing Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson cuddled naked and used the flag — with its historic ties to Britain and Australia’s Queen Elizabeth — as a sheet.

“Having sex in the prime minister’s office under the Australian flag is the last straw for me. It is sick. I’m offended and we should take a stand,” one lawmaker who could not be named told a closed door meeting of MPs, a conservative spokesman told a press briefing.

Another MP called for a rethink of taxpayer funding for the ABC, saying the program degraded the office of prime minister, currently held by center-left Labor rival Gillard, while monarchists said the use of the flag was disrespectful…

Gillard herself has laughed off controversy over the satire…Good for you, Julia!

An ABC spokesman for the program said Gillard had only been shown in a “very gentle, tender scene.”

“If it’s okay for others to drape themselves in our flag for all manner of occasions, I really don’t see why it can’t be draped over our prime minister as a symbol of love,” the spokesman said.

And the answer from reasonable adults, hopefully sophisticated, certainly couched in free speech is — “tell the stiffs to stuff it where the sun don’t shine!”

Cowardly reactionaries of every land wrap themselves in the national flag every time they feel threatened by present or future freedom. Letting people speak, letting people laugh, is no longer a choice governed by monarchists and conservative fops.

“It’s bad,” Erin M. Carr-Jordan said, swab in hand, as she collected samples from a surface that she would later deliver to a lab for microbial testing. Nearby, a restaurant worker diligently sanitized tabletops and banisters outside the play area, but he did not appear to use his rag and spray bottle inside the children’s maze.

Dr. Carr-Jordan, a child development professor and a mother of four from Chandler, Ariz., has visited dozens of restaurant playgrounds in 11 states in recent months to test them for cleanliness. What the inspections and lab analyses have revealed is the widespread presence of an array of pathogens, from coliform bacteria to staphylococcus, at levels that experts said indicated that restaurants might not be disinfecting their playlands as diligently as they should…

“I’m not shocked or blown out of the water, because this is my business,” said Philip M. Tierno Jr…who surveyed some of Dr. Carr-Jordan’s results. At the same time, Dr. Tierno said, “There are very high counts, and that means these places are not cleaned properly or not cleaned at all.”

Dr. Carr-Jordan’s campaign, which has attracted the attention of the fast-food industry, began in April when she stopped at a McDonald’s near her Phoenix-area home because one of her sons needed to go to the bathroom. On the way out, her children asked if they could play in the children’s park, which McDonald’s calls a PlayPlace. She assented and accompanied her children inside.

What she saw was alarming.

“My kids were going, ‘Yuck!’ ” she recalled of the scene, which she videotaped with her cellphone and posted on YouTube. “It was gross and sticky. There were curse words and gang graffiti. The windows were black. There was matted hair and an abandoned Band-Aid.”

Despite complaints to the manager and several follow-up visits, the play area was not cleaned, she said. So Dr. Carr-Jordan, who has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology but is no expert in microbiology, had samples tested. When the results were analyzed by Legend Technical Services Inc., an environmental testing company, they indicated the presence of potentially harmful bacteria, and she began inspecting and testing the playgrounds at other fast-food restaurants in her neighborhood. Lab results…showed that most were far from clean, she said.

RTFA and learn how Dr. Carr-Jordan has expanded her fast-food vigilante territory, what little response she receives from local authorities – and even less from the Feds. Everyone passes the buck up the political food chain.

She formed a non-profit, Kids Play Safe. And if you care, be prepared to take on the fight on your own – adding other parents, other concerned civilians. You ain’t finding politicians standing in line to help.

She is famed for being the first woman to uncover her breasts live on Italian television, for recording a song entirely about the male organ, and for offering sex to Osama bin Laden (in return, she said, for giving up terrorism).

But now Ilona Staller, better known as Cicciolina, is the unlikely centre of a bitter row over the cost to ordinary Italians of the perks enjoyed by their country’s tens of thousands of politicians. It emerged on Monday that the Hungarian, who starred in almost 40 hardcore pornographic movies, will soon be enjoying a €39,000-a-year pension, provided by the taxpayers of her adoptive homeland.

The stipend, which is for life, is her reward for labouring as a member of parliament for all of five years, from 1987 to 1992. Staller was elected for the libertarian Radical party and sponsored a number of mainly sex-related bills, including one to set up “love parks and hotels”.

Her entitlement is no different from that of any other one-term politician in Italy. But their pensions have come under resentful scrutiny at a time when politicians are seeking painful sacrifices from the rest of society to prevent a Greek-style debt crisis: last week, parliament gave final approval to an austerity package that includes an increase in VAT and provision for big cuts in income tax allowances…

According to one recent estimate, Italy’s cohorts of politicians cost the taxpayers almost €1.3 billion a year. With four levels of government – national, regional, provincial and municipal – the country has an inordinately large number of elected representatives.

But that has not stopped them from giving themselves a distinctly comfortable lifestyle. According to the Italian parliament website, the gross salary of a member of the lower house is €140,000 a year plus an attendance allowance of up to €42,000 and a contribution towards expenses of up to €63,000. They are also entitled to free public transport, free air and sea travel within Italy and exemption from motorway tolls.

Cicciolina played by the official rules of the country at the time and deserves her share of the spoils. I guess. All the other prostitutes and pimps will certainly have their own political parties covering their buns.

They’re no less corrupt and undeserving than our own flavors of politicians – from local to national. They call it service to the nation – and we will be servicing them all for decades to come. While working people have to struggle to get affordable prescriptions.

Examination of lung tissue and other autopsy material from 68 American soldiers who died of respiratory infections in 1918 has revealed that the influenza virus that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide was circulating in the United States at least four months before the 1918 influenza reached pandemic levels that fall.

The study, using tissues preserved since 1918, was led by Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D…The researchers found proteins and genetic material from the 1918 influenza virus in specimens from 37 of the soldiers, including four who died between May and August 1918, months before the pandemic peaked. These four cases are the earliest 1918 pandemic influenza cases they know to be documented anywhere in the world, the scientists say.

The clinical disease and tissue damage seen in the pre-pandemic cases were indistinguishable from those evident in cases that occurred during the height of the pandemic. This suggests, says Dr. Taubenberger, that over the course of the pandemic, the virus did not undergo a dramatic change that could explain the unusually high mortality it ultimately caused.

In the current study, the autopsy materials showed that the virus replicated not only in the upper respiratory tract but also the lower respiratory tract, in a pattern very similar to that of the 2009 pandemic influenza virus. The team also found evidence that two virus variants were circulating in 1918…

Bacterial co-infections were found in all 68 cases studied, the researchers noted. The role played by bacterial co-infections, such as bacterial pneumonia, in contributing to deaths in the 1918 pandemic was previously described by Dr. Taubenberger and his colleagues in a 2008 study. According to the study authors, the new data underscore the crucial role that bacterial infections can play in conjunction with any influenza virus, whether historic or future, and the need for public health officials to prepare to prevent, detect and treat bacterial co-infections during future influenza outbreaks.

Unless, of course, you believe such a pandemic can never happen again, it’s all a plot by pharmaceutical companies and it’s too much trouble to get a flu shot, anyway.

Yes, I got mine a few weeks ago.

The Times Atlas of the World exaggerated the rate of Greenland’s ice loss in its thirteenth edition last week, scientists said. The atlas, published by HarperCollins, showed that Greenland lost 15 percent of its ice cover over the past 12 years, based on information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado in the United States…

However, a number of scientists disputed the claim.

“We believe that the figure of a 15 percent decrease in permanent ice cover since the publication of the previous atlas 12 years (ago) is both incorrect and misleading,” said Poul Christoffersen, glaciologist at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at the University of Cambridge. “We concluded that a sizable portion of the area mapped as ice-free in the Atlas is clearly still ice-covered.”

Other scientists agreed.

“These new maps are ridiculously off base, way exaggerated relative to the reality of rapid change in Greenland,” said Jeffrey S. Kargel, senior research scientist at the University of Arizona…

Professional pundits and ideologues – pretending to be science-based skeptics – rarely understand the function of peer review includes every conceivable aspect of evaluation and judgement.

Scientists exposing what they perceive to be an unscientific exaggeration – even if it supports a portion of a widely-held thesis like climate change – is unacceptable because it’s bad science. Not that any flavor of lying makes a difference to the know-nothings.