A third-grade teacher in Illinois discusses marine ecology with his students using a tank designed to be an instructional tool. Source: reef2rainforest
A buried lede in a Wired article caught my attention:
The majority of schools in the area reported higher-than-average student absenteeism due to flu symptoms. Only one school didn’t: The one with the fish tanks. “It really stood out”…
Keeping fish tanks gives new meaning to “defense in depth”.
…it’s important not to think of humidification as any sort of magical fix. You still have to wear a mask and wash your hands and stay socially distant and avoid crowded indoor spaces. “Any one of those alone is not enough,” he says. “But each one is like a card that you’re putting into a deck to stack the odds in your favor.”
Speech given at the 3rd National Conference on Whiteness, University of Chicago, November 7, 1998.
I use the term whiteness to describe such things as white racial identity, white culture and European Americans as a people.
This is different and broader from how other people may use the term.
At the Center for the Study of White American Culture we’ve developed a perspective we call decentering whiteness.
In brief, we say that…
* Whiteness forms center of our society in the United States
* We believe no single racial or cultural group should control the center
* We need to take whiteness out of the center and replace the center with multiracial values
When we talk about being in the center of society, by that we mean having access to power, control of resources and having the ability to enforce one’s values.
The post title comes from a 1946 “Paper Bullets” booklet that was “DEDICATED to the men and women of the Overseas Branch, United States Office of War Information… to serve their country as propagandists in time of war….”
…like mustard gas, which clings to the ground for months after battle, psychological warfare and its poison of hate and distrust linger on for years.
Fast forward to 2016 and American soldiers still suffer from mustard gas experimentation done on them. They were told by their government to never speak about it and were denied healthcare claims.
We girls could not use perfume, we could not use hairspray, anything in the house” because of his ailment.
Daughter Beverly Howe, a nurse trained in chemical, biological and radiological treatment from Thomasville, Ga., said she interviewed her father for a school paper in the early 1970s, and he disclosed the gassing reluctantly to her for the first time. As a nurse, she recognized the symptoms from her training. “He said it was secret and they weren’t supposed to talk about it,” she said. “If they did, they’d be in big trouble.”
Then, while visiting a Veterans Administration hospital in Columbia, Mo., in the late 1980s or early 1990s, a VA X-ray technician who had seen Arlie Harrell’s records asked if he had ever been exposed to mustard gas.
“I was mostly horrified when I saw the look of terror in my dad’s eyes,” said Ayers, who was with her father at that appointment. “The man told him it was OK, you can talk about it now. He said, ‘Yes,’ and that was about it.”
Put these two themes together and you get a story about lingering effects of mustard gas mixed with racism (hate and distrust).
Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program — formally declassified in 1993 — to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American.
“They said we were being tested to see what effect these gases would have on black skins,” Edwards says.
An NPR investigation has found evidence that Edwards’ experience was not unique. While the Pentagon admitted decades ago that it used American troops as test subjects in experiments with mustard gas, until now, officials have never spoken about the tests that grouped subjects by race.
[…]
All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.
Simple sketch of the kind of telematics system found in any modern car. Hughes was acquired by Verizon in 2012.
Massachusetts has just voted by wide margin to extend their 2013 right to repair law to cover connected-car platforms and telematics (tracking and analysis) services after 2022.
The aim was to fight the growing problem of automakers restricting their proprietary diagnostics tools to anyone other than official franchised dealer networks. When the law came into effect in 2018, it required that every vehicle sold in the state has a “non-proprietary vehicle interface device” for accessing mechanical data.
The state now requires new telematics-equipped vehicles be made accessible via a standardized open-data platform for owners and their third-party mechanics or service providers to access a vehicle data from mobile devices. General Motors calls their telematics system OnStar, and Ford’s system is called SYNC.
The letter I signed in support of this new law is here.
Some background to these issues, which I’ve documented on this site since at least 2005, can be found here.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
