It’s no secret that America’s public health professionals lean left. As Sally Satel and Theodore R. Marmor reported in these pages in 2001, “The American Public Health Association . . . has taken up far-flung political causes. Campaign finance reform, affirmative action, and the war in Nicaragua have been subjects of its policy statements. In 1996 the theme of the APHA’s annual meeting was ‘Empowering the Disadvantaged: Social Justice in Public Health.’ ”
You can now add to that list the issue of military recruiting. In the January 2011 issue of the APHA’s American Journal of Public Health, two authors compare recruiters to pedophiles. The headline of their commentary asks, “Should We End Military Recruiting in High Schools as a Matter of Child Protection and Public Health?” The Scrapbook won’t keep you in suspense: Their answer is yes.
“Recruiters for the various U.S. armed forces have free access to our nation’s high schools, as mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act,” write Amy Hagopian, Ph.D., and Kathy Barker, Ph.D. “Military recruiter behaviors are disturbingly similar to predatory grooming.” The authors continue:
Adults in the active military service are reported to experience increased mental health risks, including stress, substance abuse, and suicide, and the youngest soldiers consistently show the worst health effects, suggesting military service is associated with disproportionately poor health for this population. We describe the actions of a high school parent teacher student association in Seattle, Washington, which sought to limit the aggressive recruitment of children younger than 18 years into the military.
In response to similar cases of rank politicization, Satel and Marmor commented:
Fixating on social transformation as the proper role of public health professionals risks taking physicians and epidemiologists away from their traditional mission, or trivializing it. That mission is to develop the scientific and practical bases of disease prevention and to devise effective ways to educate the public about health risks. Misguided political activism is also demoralizing. Columbia University scholar Ronald Bayer, a contributing editor of the American Journal of Public Health’s Policy and Ethics Forum, laments that so many of his colleagues believe “public health officials can do little or nothing to change the prevailing patterns of morbidity or mortality in the absence of social change.” He dubs that mentality “public health nihilism.”
Meanwhile, The Scrapbook notes that over at its website, the American Public Health Association is calling for a “dramatic increase in funding” for public health activities. “A larger investment is required in our public health agencies and programs to equip them with the necessary resources to restore their effectiveness and adequately protect the health of the American public.”
Lawmakers on the receiving end of such pleas would do well to bear in mind that the organization making them has a rather capacious, not to say highly politicized, definition of “public health,” and a disturbing inability to distinguish between sex predators and the men and women in uniform who provide for the -common defense.
Nice Bieber!
By now, it comes as no surprise that 16-year-old Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber has a large and devoted following, mostly consisting of teen and tween girls who work themselves into a Beatles-like frenzy (known as Bieber Fever). These so-called Beliebers join fan clubs and plaster the singer’s face all over their bedroom walls and inside their middle school lockers. In fact, a very large Justin Bieber poster shown here (which more resembles a painting) was recently discovered and even made the news.
Why, you ask, was it at all newsworthy? As it turns out, the poster was not found in some 13-year-old’s room. Rather, it was located within the heavily fortified compound of a feared (until now) Brazilian drug lord. Reports the London Guardian:
More than two thousand heavily armed police operatives swept into Rio’s most notorious shantytown today following a week of explosive confrontations that have left at least 50 people dead. The operation, unprecedented in the city’s history, began at around 8 a.m. and focused on the Complexodo Alemao, a gigantic network of slums that is the HQ of Rio’s Red Command drug faction and houses around 70,000 impoverished residents. . . . Gang members reportedly attempted to flee the 2,600 police and army operatives through the favela’s sewage system or by disguising themselves as Bible-carrying evangelical preachers. They left behind “mansions” filled with wide-screen televisions, swimming pools and a sauna. In the home of Pezao, one of the area’s top traffickers, police found a giant poster of the Canadian singer Justin Bieber.
Authorities also seized 10 tons of marijuana and a “small arsenal of assault rifles and a missile.” For all we know, Pezao could have owned an SS-20 Soviet ICBM. It doesn’t matter now. His days of intimidation are clearly over. From here on in, this high-level trafficker will probably be known within Brazil’s penal system as “Pezao the Belieber.”
Berkeley Finds a Soldier to Admire
The civic carnival that is the Berkeley City Council is at it again. The members of the council, who wrote a letter to the U.S. Marine Corps in 2008 saying they were “uninvited and unwelcome intruders” to their shining liberal city on the Bay, have finally found a man in uniform (an American uniform, that is) to admire. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the council will vote this week on a resolution supporting Private First Class Bradley Manning (U.S. Army-under arrest), widely believed to be the source of the purloined State Department cables, as well as other classified intelligence and military information, turned over to WikiLeaks for worldwide dissemination.
The drafter of the resolution, Berkeley’s “peace and justice commissioner” Bob Meola, told the Chronicle that Manning is “a patriot and should get a medal.” While it’s certainly a landmark moment when the Berkeley city council positively recognizes any member of the armed services, The Scrapbook looks forward to the day when said member is one who is fighting for his country rather than against it, preferably serving under arms, rather than languishing under armed guard, awaiting trial in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Va.
Stuxnet Update
In the continuing saga of Stuxnet, the computer worm that crippled the Iranian centrifuge operation at Natanz, it seems that the Iranians might not be as close to mopping up as people had previously suspected. A few weeks ago, experts predicted that it could take Iran up to a year to disinfect their computer systems and get their centrifuges spinning at peak levels again.
Ed Barnes of FoxNews.com now reports that it might take even longer. Barnes says that a number of Western cybersecurity firms have seen spikes in queries about Stuxnet originating from Iran which, he suggests, may mean that the Iranians still don’t have their arms around the problem.
What’s even more striking is this quotation, from Ralph Langner, a German cybersecurity consultant who has been on the case with Stuxnet since it first broke into the open:
“The Iranians don’t have the depth of knowledge to handle the worm or understand its complexity,” [Langner] said, raising the possibility that they may never succeed in eliminating it. “Here is their problem. They should throw out every personal computer involved with the nuclear program and start over, but they can’t do that. Moreover, they are completely dependent on outside companies for the construction and maintenance of their nuclear facilities. They should throw out their computers as well. But they can’t,” he explained. “They will just continually reinfect themselves.” “With the best of expertise and equipment it would take another year for the plants to function normally again because it is so hard to get the worm out. It even hides in the back-up systems. But they can’t do it,” he said.
Obama Out of Touch?
President Barack Obama may need to get out more and reconnect (or connect for the first time) with average Americans. In a December 10 interview with NPR, he commented: “You know, when—when families sit around the kitchen table, they say to themselves, what are the things we have to have? College education for our kids. Paying our mortgage. Getting the roof repaired. A new boiler.” A new boiler? The Scrapbook notes that only 11 percent of U.S. residences are still heated with boilers. Now pardon us while we go put a penny in the fusebox—we were running our shirts through the wringer and the lights just blew.
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
"More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile, their Indian nanny, who traded room and board for baby-sitting, just got accepted to M.I.T. on a full scholarship and . . . ” (Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, December 8, 2010).