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DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
WALTER REED ARMY MEDICAL CENTER
6900 GEORGIA AVE, N.W.
WASHINGTON DC 20307-5001

MCHL-MCB

MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD
SUBJECT: COMMAND REDUCTION OF ARMY PERSONNEL (C.R.A.P)

1. As a result of DOD budget cutbacks, we are forced to reduce the size of the force. Under CRAP, older Soldiers will go on early retirement, thus permitting the retention of lower paid Soldiers who represent the Army’s future.

2. A program to phase out older Soldiers via retirement by the end of the current fiscal year will be placed in effect. The program will be known as the Retire Active Personnel Early (RAPE).

3. Soldiers who are RAPEd will be given the opportunity to seek civilian employment with in the Department of the Army. To that end, RAPEd Soldiers will be required to fill out numerous DA forms (currently in the development, test, and evaluation stage) detailing their education and experience. This phase does not guarantee retired Soldiers a civil service position; it does. however, guarantee that Soldiers’ unique capabilities will be considered before being bypassed in the hiring process. This phase of CRAP is known as Survey of Capabilities of Retired Warriors (SCREW).

4. Soldiers who have been RAPEd and SCREWed may request review of their situation by higher authority. This is the Study by Higher Authority Following Termination (SHAFT) phase.

5. CRAP policy dictates that a Soldier may be RAPEd once, SCREWed twice, but may be SHAFTed as many times as the Army leadership deems appropriate.

6. If a Soldier follows the above procedures, he or she will be entitled to to get Half Earnings for Retired Personnel Early Severance (HERPES). As HERPES is considered a benefit payment, any Soldier who gets HERPES will no longer be RAPEd or SCREWed by the Army.

7. The Army leadership wishes to assure younger Soldiers who remain on active duty that the Army will continue its policy of ensuring that Soldiers are well trained through our Special High Intensity Training (SHIT) program. The Army takes pride in the amount of SHIT our Soldiers recieve and can boast that it gives its Soldiers more SHIT than any other service.

8. If a Soldier feels he or she does not get enough SHIT, see your commander. Your commander is especially trained to make sure you receive all the SHIT you can stand.

9. Point of contact is the undersigned.

Name Withheld
Rank, USA
Med Hold Company

Seen on the weblog written by a patient at Walter Reed, worth reading by itself. I’m glad the guy has a sense of humor left…

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This is another interesting anti-smoking advertisement campaign illustrating various other warning and then comparing it with warning given on a cigarette pack. The advertisement aims to people understand the meaning of a warning unlike the attitude that warning is being generally perceived according to the suitability of a person since the danger is not seen just right at the next step; people increasingly tend to ignore anti-smoking warnings.

The advertisement showing several circumstances when ignoring the warning could lead a person to death. The campaign is undoubtedly visually impeccable that portrays the idea very expressively. The basic text of the campaign reads, ‘you wouldn’t ignore this warning. Why ignore them on cigarette packs?’.

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Although the defendant John Paladuk, an employee of C&N Railroad for 36 years, was living in Florida at the time of the alleged copyright infringement, and had notified the RIAA that he had not engaged in any copyright infringement, and despite that the fact that Mr. Paladuk suffered a stroke last year which resulted in complete paralysis of his entire left side and severely impaired speech, rendering him disabled, and despite the fact that his disability check is his sole source of income, the RIAA commenced suit against him on February 27, 2007.

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EFF has just published a long-awaited, brilliant paper on Europe’s proposed digital TV DRM system. The proposal comes from the Digital Broadcasters’ Forum (I was EFF’s rep at DVB for years), and it’s the most restrictive digital TV proposal, encompassing all the evils of Blu-Ray and DVD-HD, and adding new wrinkles.

For example, DVB’s DRM distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate households — if you live in a legit household, you can share your videos among all your household’s devices. If you live in an illegitimate household, you can’t. What’s a legit household? Well, DVB always talks about how much effort they’ve put into protecting households with summer homes, but when I raised the possibility of a household where mom and dad live in Manila, with a son doing construction contracts in Saudi Arabia and a daughter working as an au pair in Los Angeles, I was told that this was a “corner case.”

EFF is the only consumer group admitted to the DRM negotiations — closed door, secretive meetings that you had to pay EU10,000 a year to attend — and then only because it came as the representative of some open source manufacturers. Speaking of which, the DVB spec requires that devices be built to resist end-user modification, which means that open source and free software are right out.

DVB makes TV standards for Europe and parts of Asia, Australia, Africa and Latinamerica; the people working on the DRM project also wanted to see it rolled out in the USA. This is coming soon to a home theater near you.

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A few days ago, a man from a slick new magazine about business sent me an e-mail. He wanted me to do a column for him about what was “new, hot and exciting — or terrible — in business today.” The only catch was that he did not want me to complain about the rich. This is what I sent him:

Here is what’s new and hot and exciting (or terrible) in the world of money today:

The average wage of the American worker adjusted for inflation is lower than it was in 1973. The only way that Americans have been able to maintain their standard of living at the middle and lower ends has been to send more family members to work and to draw down savings or go into debt or both.

The most sought after jobs in the United States now are jobs in finance in which basically almost no money is raised for new steel mills or coal mines, but immense sums are raised to buy companies, recapitalize them — which means pay the new owners immense special dividends and other payments for going to the trouble of taking over the company. This process results in fantastically well-paid investment bankers and private equity “financial engineers” and has no measurably beneficial effect on the economy generally. It does facilitate the making of ever younger millionaires and an ever more leveraged American corporate structure.

An entire new class of financial entity has been created called “the hedge fund.” It is new not in the sense that there were not always funds that hedged by selling short or buying assets uncorrelated with other assets. The new part of this phenomenon is that it is based on a demonstrably false premise: that these entities can consistently outperform wide stock indexes. They have not and cannot, and yet their managers and employees for a time are paid stupendously well.

As with the private equity function, the main effect is to siphon money from productive enterprise into financial manipulation. Or, to put it another way, to siphon money from Main Street to Greenwich or Wall Street.

Starting MBA’s at hedge funds, which are basically gaming enterprises, get paid multi-six figure sums. Starting teachers in the state of Florida get paid $28,000 a year.

Here’s what else is new and exciting (or terrible) in money: there is real poverty among the soldiers who fight our wars. There are fist fights to get children into $30,000 a year kindergartens and pre-schools in the right neighborhoods in Manhattan. There are 40 million Americans without health care insurance. There are almost 40 million baby boomers with no savings for retirement. There is a long waiting list for Bentleys at the dealership in Beverly Hills.

There are soldiers’ wives selling blood to buy toys for their kids. There is a man selling non-functioning body armor who threw a $10 million Bat Mitzvah for his daughter.

In Brentwood, where the houses start at $3 million, the housewives complain about what a terrible country America is. In Clinton, South Carolina, where the textile mill closed fifteen years ago and there is real hardship, the young men still believe in America and their fiancees at Presbyterian College wait for them while they fight in Iraq.

This is a small part of what’s new and exciting (or terrible) in America in the world of money right now.

I never heard back from the man at the slick new business magazine.

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Our ongoing study of the Bush Justice Department (to be published in 2008) investigates the implications of the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales Justice Department’s blended religious -fundamentalist and neo-conservative rhetorical vision. The study views the impact of the Justice Department’s vision on the fight against public corruption and reveals the non-proportionate political profiling of elected Democratic officials.

We presented the preliminary data through August 2004 at the Southern Speech Communication Annual meeting in April 2005 in Baton Rouge and as a refereed panel paper with data through December 2004 at the November 2005 annual meeting of the National Communication Association.

We compare political profiling to racial profiling by presenting the results (January 2001 through December 2006) of the U.S. Attorneys’ federal investigation and/or indictment of 375 elected officials. The distribution of party affiliation of the sample is compared to the available normative data (50% Dem, 41% GOP, and 9% Ind.).

Data* indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

Damn! Those democrats must all be criminals to explain this!

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New Spiritually Correct Doll Lets Children Show Where And How Jesus Touched Them

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Controversial Christian Faction Believes Jesus Was Nailed To Two Parallel Pieces Of Wood

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Caitlin Dean was raised not to discriminate against others because of their race or religion. But as a white suburban teen of Italian and Irish descent, she often wondered what it would be like to be the target of such abuse.

She found out “behind the burqa.”

The 15-year-old freshman volunteered with a few other students to wear traditional Muslim clothing to school for an entire day in February after a Middle Eastern Studies teacher at Bacon Academy announced that she was looking for students to promote her class by wearing the garb. Caitlin covered her slender frame and short brown hair with a periwinkle burqa, which concealed her face.

The hateful and abusive comments she endured that day horrified teachers, the teen and many of her classmates. The remarks underscored a persistent animosity toward American Muslims that is driven largely by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But they also opened up an important dialogue that could help teenagers in Colchester and across the state view the Muslim culture differently.

“Hey, we rape your women!” one upperclassman said as he passed Caitlin in the hallway.

“I hope all of your people die,” another sniped.

“You’re probably going to kill us all” and “Why do they let people like this in the country?” were other remarks she heard on Feb. 1.

[..]

“My fear of this hatred of Islam is that it will become synonymous with patriotism,” Parkinson said. “We are a nation of immigrants. Some of the most disturbing comments were, `This is America. Go home.’”

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The demographics of those being arrested are so diverse that many European counterterrorism officials and analysts say they have given up trying to predict what sorts of people are most likely to become terrorists. Age, sex, ethnicity, education and economic status have become more and more irrelevant.

“It’s very difficult to make a profile of terrorists,” Tjibbe Joustra, the Dutch national coordinator for counterterrorism, said in an interview. “To have a profile that you can recognize, so that you can predict, ‘This guy is going to be radical, perhaps he will cross the line into terrorism’ — that, I think, is impossible.”

[..]

A recently completed Dutch study of 242 Islamic radicals convicted or accused of planning terrorist attacks in Europe from 2001 to 2006 found that most were men of Arab descent who had been born and raised in Europe and came from lower or middle-class backgrounds. They ranged in age from 16 to 59 at the time of their arrests; the average was 27. About one in four had a criminal record.

The author of the study, Edwin Bakker, a researcher at the Clingendael Institute in The Hague, tried to examine almost 20 variables concerning the suspects’ social and economic backgrounds. In general, he determined that no reliable profile existed — their traits were merely an accurate reflection of the overall Muslim immigrant population in Europe. “There is no standard jihadi terrorist in Europe,” the study concluded.

In an interview, Bakker said that many local police agencies have been slow to abandon profiling, but that most European intelligence agencies have concluded it is an unreliable tool for spotting potential terrorists. “How can you single them out? You can’t,” he said. “For the secret services, it doesn’t give them a clue. We should focus more on suspicious behavior and not profiling.”

Credit: M. Di Lorenzo et al., Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Cornell U., JPL, NASA; Courtesy: Aviation Week

The Spirit rover attacked Mars again in 2005 September. What might look, above, like a military attack, though, was once again just a scientific one – Spirit was instructed to closely inspect some interesting rocks near the summit of Husband Hill. Spirit’s Panoramic Camera captured the rover’s Instrument Deployment Device above as moved to get a closer look at an outcrop of rocks named Hillary. The Spirit rover, and its twin rover Opportunity, have now been exploring the red planet for over three years. Both Spirit and Opportunity have found evidence that parts of Mars were once wet.

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Researchers taking part in the study, based at Derriford Hospital, are painstakingly mapping the development of more than 300 children from across the social spectrum.

The aim is to find out more about what lies behind diabetes and obesity.

Every year the children are fitted with accelerometers, which record activity over the course of a week.

They are worn around the waist like pedometers, measuring movement ten times a second.

[..]

Professor Terence Wilkin, the programme director, said the amount of exercise children get was genetically set, and had nothing to do with access to sports facilities.

“Those children who had little opportunity at school to undertake activity were bouncing around after school whereas those who’d had a lot of opportunity during the course of the school day settled down, and did relatively little,” he said.

“The most important thing (was) if you added the in-school activity to the out-of-school activity, they were exactly the same.”

That is not the only surprise. Professor Wilkin said children’s activity levels had no bearing on their body mass index – their risk of obesity.

“Even looking over a period of years, because we repeat these measures year by year in these children, we have been unable to show any relationship between the physical activity that a child undertakes and his BMI.”

[..]

Force, said it was much easier for the government to concentrate on promoting sport rather than taking on the food industry.

“This is the biggest manufacturing sector in the whole of Europe. It’s bigger than the defence industry.

“It has enormous political and strategic power. Government would very much like to focus on physical activity, don’t you think?”