DoD's autism epidemic

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Mark Baard

Hoping for the best. Photo: CC/Jordan

One percent of Air Force/Army/Navy/Marine brats have autism. That’s double the rate for the general population.

So I’m not surprised to read the US Defense Department’s announcement of a $2.2 grant to help the military better treat its personnel, and their families, who’ve been affected by the disease.

It may be that military moms and dads are exposed to more heavy metals in their jobs, as well as chemical and biological weapons. That, and experimental vaccines.

As a military spouse who has been contributing to Age of Autism since it was Rescue Post, I am especially thrilled. We’ve seen growth here at Age of Autism, but we’ve also seen growth of the autism epidemic both in the military and civilian community. We’ve also seen a rise in the challenges, or problems, that come along with this heartbreaking rise. In the military community the most recent FOIA shows that as of 2007, one in every eighty-eight military dependent child of an active duty member has autism. This figure most likely doesn’t include my own boys because of how and when the stats for the FOIA were tracked. Currently we’re waiting on new statistics.

via AGE OF AUTISM: Age of Autism Adds Military Category.

Defense experts: Prepare for sudden, destabilizing, crises

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Mark Baard

Photo: CC/David Lisbona

Military brass and scholars this May will meet to discuss a frightening near-future scenario, filled with loose nukes, bioweapons and untraceable terrorists.

This year’s symposium will examine the nation’s preparedness to prevent or manage four WMD crises that could transform U.S. security:

* Collapse of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime, in which a number of current, unresolved nuclear proliferation challenges threaten to unleash a sudden and destabilizing wave of proliferation;

* Failure of a WMD-Armed State, creating unprecedented risks that radical actors will obtain WMD and unprecedented challenges for prevention;

* A Biological Terror Campaign, in which terrorists employ deadly biological pathogens to strike at multiple cities; and

* A Nuclear Detonation in a U.S. City, delivered covertly and leaving great uncertainty about who did it, will it happen again, and how we should respond.

via Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction – National Defense University.

Scanning faces for autism

Posted on August 19, 2008 by Mark Baard

Computer scientists revive eugenics tool to spot brain damage

(SS scientists studied Tibetans' facial characteristics on an early expedition.)

University of Missouri computer scientists are sure to anger “neuro-diversity” advocates with this one: Hypothesizing that autistic kids have unique physical features, they will create a roadmap with head size and facial feature measurements for diagnosticians.

The research is being funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

“Instead of looking at brain structures slice-by-slice in an MRI (magnetic resonance image), we developed tools to create 3-D representations of the structures in order to visualize and make comparisons,” said Kevin Karsch, a research assistant in Ye Duan’s computer graphics lab, in a recent announcement. “Using the 3-D representations, we are comparing the brain structures of autistic children to those of non-autistic children; no one has ever done that.”

Note: FXSmom last year blogged about using facial characteristics to diagnose genetic disorders.

MU Researchers Study Facial Structures, Brain Abnormalities to Reveal Formula for Earlier Detection of Autism | MU News Bureau
The U.S. Department of Defense awarded Duan, in collaboration with researchers at the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, a $110,000 grant to create a facial imaging system that will make identical measurements of the faces of children with ASD. Additionally, the NARSAD Foundation, the world’s leading charity dedicated to mental health research, awarded Duan the prestigious Young Investigator Award and $60,000 to fund 3-D imaging of various segments of the brain in children with ASD. The projects also are supported by a $100,000 contribution from other MU sources and $30,000 in Research Scholar Funds.

We are developing a quantitative method that will accurately measure these differences and allow for earlier, more precise detection of specific types of the disorder,” said Ye Duan, assistant computer science professor in the MU College of Engineering. “Once we have created a formula, we can pre-screen children by performing a quick, non-invasive scan of each child’s face and brain to check for abnormalities. Early detection is crucial in treating children and preparing families.”

Boston shrinks will challenge association's "ethics"

Posted on August 6, 2008 by Mark Baard

from Mark:

Boston area shrinks this month will protest the American Psychological Association’s weak stance against torture.

The APA’s ethics code (see excerpt, below) is giving shrinks a free pass to help U.S. forces commit war crimes at Guantanamo Bay, protester organizers say.

Psychologists have a long history of participating in torture.

The entire “positive psychology” movement, for example, is rooted in sadistic animal experiments by former APA president Martin Seligman, who coached CIA interrogators (unwittingly, Seligman says) on torture techniques.

Seligman decades ago electrically shocked dogs until they stopped trying to save themselves: a state he called “learned helplessness.”

More recently, Seligman explained his theories at a CIA-organized event. At least CIA two psychologists at Guantanamo credit Seligman with inspiring their torture protocols.

Psychologists Won’t Let Go of Torture Debate – World of Psychology
“If the conflict (between a psychologist’s moral duties and a government order) is unresolvable via such means, psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority.” It is worth noting that this new option is absolute and unqualified and applies not just to the specific requirements enumerated in the code but more generally to all “ethical responsibilities.”

"Accidental" bombing one of many for Air Force

Posted on March 15, 2008 by Mark Baard

Last week’s Oklahoma bombing was at least the sixth such accident since 2002. Dummy bombs have struck homes and businesses (or landed near them) in the US, Europe and Asia. They often carry phosphorous and other incendiary materials. — mb

(Dummy bomb: The US Air Force has a habit of accidentally dropping these babies on civilian sites near its bases. And practice bombs ain’t always for practice, history shows. Photo: GlobalSecurity.org)

“God must love the people at Canyon Creek.”

That’s what a manager of an Oklahoma apartment complex told the Associated Press after the U.S. Air Force bombed the complex last week.

But God must also love the factory workers in Choong-chung, Korea, whose workplace the US bombed in 2006:

1/12/2007 – OSAN AIR BASE, Republic of Korea — The 51st Fighter Wing and the Republic of Korea Air Force have completed an exhaustive and Air Force wide investigation of an inadvertent release of a small non-explosive practice munition on Nov. 29, 2006 by an aircraft stationed at Osan Air Base.

An A/OA-10 aircraft assigned to the 25th Fighter Squadron was returning to Osan from a routine training mission at approximately 12:30 p.m. when an apparent systems problem caused the inadvertent release of a 25 pounds practice munition — a BDU-33. The small, non-explosive training munition then struck a civilian factory in northern Choong-chung province damaging the building but causing no injuries.

… And let’s not forget the farmers near East Yorkshire, England, who were bombed by the US in 2004:

US Air Force drops practice bomb
Alan Marsland, who farms land near to the site the bomb landed, said: “It went through the asphalt on this old airfield which is now owned by Allied Grain. Luckily no-one was around.”

Or the West Texas family whose home was hit by the Air Force in 2002.

In fact, all of these incidents involved the BDU-33, which can carry incendiary materials that produce a flash on impact.

The red phosphorous in one BDU-33 also blew off half of Petty Officer John Love’s face a few years ago.

The list goes on.

Continue reading →

media monarchy: pentagon to test invisible gas on crystal city, virginia

Posted on March 4, 2008 by Mark Baard

The Pentagon, as early as this week, will release a gas into the air in Crystal City, Va., to see if its outdoor sampling equipment will be able to detect an airborne chemical or biological attack. — mb

media monarchy: pentagon to test invisible gas on crystal city, virginia
“The Pentagon is scheduled to release an odorless, invisible, and yes, harmless, gases into the city Thursday to test how quickly they spread through buildings, officials said.”

“The test is part of the military’s national security preparation for the capital area,” reports The Examiner.

For good or ill, robots set to kill

Posted on February 27, 2008 by Mark Baard

U.S. engineers are building unreliable, autonomous killing machines, a U.K. computer scientist said today. Terrorists will be making their own.

Too cute? Watch the DoD’s 12-year-old Robart III (left) knock down some Coke cans, here. The Army’ s more recent SWORDS robot (below, right) has made the rounds at auto and robotics shows. (Images: U.S. Department of Defense)

While Japanese researchers are building humanoid robots that will care for their aging population, the U.S. Department of Defense is developing autonomous weapons that will decide which humans to cut down.

But there’s a problem: Robots make lousy decision makers, said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey, in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall.

“Current robots are dumb machines with very limited sensing capability,” said Sharkey, in a statement released yesterday. “What this means is that it is not possible to guarantee discrimination between combatants and innocents or a proportional use of force as required by the current Laws of War.”

Sharkey also predicted that terrorists are likely to replace suicide bombers with killer robots, which they can produce for only a few hundred pounds with off-the-shelf parts.

Some military officers argue that without any messy emotions to get in the way, autonomous weapons (AW) will make more efficient killers.

“AW can better discriminate targets and calculate the impacts of an engagement in real time to insure the impact is proportional to the military advantage gained,” writes U.S. Air Force Major Michael A. Guetlein, in a 2005 research paper (click here to download the PDF). “Emotions and adrenaline cease to affect the decision to engage. Instead, the decision becomes one of probabilities.”

Guetlein also predicts that “social conditioning” (his words) will eventually any public objections to giving robots a license to kill.

“Society is likely to welcome some aspects of AW,” Guetlein writes.

–mb

Notes: See my 2004 Wired article, “Robots May Fight for the Army.”

The DoD has been trying for years to turn soldiers into flesh-and-blood-based killing machines. See “The guilt-free soldier,” about emotion-deadening drugs, which my brother, Erik, wrote in 2003.

Mideast muscle flex looks phony

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Mark Baard

Not much of a confrontation, after all.

Even Fox News smelled something fishy about the U.S. Pentagon’s very clearly altered video of the recent chest puffing exercise in the Strait of Hormuz.

But all of the mainstream media (including CNN, depicted above) are letting this slip, as if they’d learned nothing since the U.S.-led Iraq invasion. If they do it again (I suspect the Hormuz bit was a Pentagon trial balloon to check its media play), it will be fair to call the MSM complicit in a deception meant to garner public support for invading Iran.

The Sci-Tech Heretic

Science, fiction and news through the conspiratorial lens. By Mark Baard in Boston.

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