The Privitization of the US War Machine
Here's another interesting article from the latest Wired magazine. It covers the Privatization of the US military, and the apparent lost of public control over the checks and balances that are in place to prevent the armed forces from doing things that are unlawful. If the stuff you see in the X-Files isn't scary enough, get a dose of this reality. DynCorp (check out their site to see what they do) is the focus of the article. It was recently acquired by Computer Sciences Corporation, looking to get an in on some lucrative government contracts. DynCorp does everything from fly crop spraying missions over Columbia, to running the government departments computer networks. They were recently hired to provide security for the new Afghan president; during the Gulf War, they serviced and rearmed US choppers; and in the recent forward deployment of equipment to the middle east, it's DynCorp employees who are running the show. Scary? Think about this - when will the time come when making war will become big business; when it will be the interest of profits that drive the US to gallivant across the globe with guns blazing ... then again, that was what the Gulf War was all about, wasn't it?
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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