Parents speak out on (the latest) war

Cindy Sheehan’s vigil in Crawford, Texas renews questions about why America has gone to war in Iraq. Her son, Casey, 24, was killed in combat in Baghdad in April 2004. Sheehan’s requests for an audience with George W. Bush to discuss the purposes of the American occupation have been rebuffed the President and administration officials.

The story reminds me of an experience from my past. Working as a student intern at the Pentagon during the summer of 1967, I took a lunch break to watch a ceremony presenting a Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously to a Vietnam War soldier who had died heroically in battle. Two military bands played, including one in Revolutionary War costume, and cannons fired several volleys. Civilian and military bigwigs gathered on the steps of the fortress to drone their solemn speeches. The father of the young man received the medal, thanking the government officials for recognizing his son’s valor. Much to their chagrin, however, he added that he was not certain his son had died for a good cause. As I recall, he spoke with Congressmen about his doubts later that afternoon. His comments brought a storm of controversy in the press and on television. The country was just then beginning to wonder whether or not the war and its costs were justified.

Have we reached a similar turning point in public sentiments about Iraq?

Beyond Alan Sokal -- the randomly generated science paper!

In the grand tradition of hoaxes and spoofs, a field of excellence that holds a special place in the heart of this Masked Marauder and Automatic Professor, there has been an interesting breakthrough. Three graduate students at MIT submitted a paper to a computer science conference, one randomly generated by a computer program. Here are excerpts from The Chronicle of Higher Education story by Andrea L. Foster, "Students Whose Phony Paper Brought a Conference Invitation Are Stars of Their Own Video."

"Three Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate students attracted a flurry of media attention in April after a questionable academic conference accepted their randomly-generated, nonsensical paper. Now the students are stars of a lighthearted video they made when they went to the conference even though their invitations had been withdrawn.

"The three -- Jeremy A. Stribling, Maxwell Krohn, and Daniel Aguayo -- are computer-science students studying parallel and distributed operating systems. The organizer of the conference, called the Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, had initially invited them to attend after accepting their phony paper, which was titled "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy."

".... During their technical session, the students filmed themselves presenting three meaningless, jargon-laden papers written by the computer program they had created. For additional verisimilitude, the students assumed fake names and donned wigs and mustaches while each presenting one of the three papers. The papers were "Harnessing Byzantine Fault Tolerance Using Classical Theory," "Synthesizing Checksums and Lambda Calculus Using Jog," and "On the Study of the Ethernet.""

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Here's a site where you can download the video of the session, complete with a lachrymose musical soundtrack. The quality is right up there with the Yes Men satires. Alas, the link to the story is short term because the Chronicle requires subcriptions.

"That's not an alien tripod! It's the the Lafarge cement plant burning TIRES!"

Much of the fire and smoke shown in Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" happens in the lovely town of Athens, New York on the Hudson River. It's the place where the ferry boat is attacked by alien tripods. While all that smoke vanishes at the film's conclusion, some much more noxious fumes are being planned for an old, decrepit cement plant in nearby Revena. The Larfarge company proposes to kock a hole in the smokestack and burn about 5 million tires a year. Since I live downwind from the stack, I'm concerned, as are many of my neighbors in Columbia, Greene and Rensselaer Counties. Smelled any burning tires recently? (There's no end to the ambitious, money-making ideas for destroying the region and our lungs.)

Here's the story on Lafarge from the Albany Times Union, 7/22/05.

Cement plant pares plans to burn tires
Public comment sought as state reviews Lafarge's application

By Patrick Cain
Special to the Times Union

ALBANY--After two years of reviews and revisions Lafarge North America has
filed a new application with the state Department of Environmental
Conservation to burn 4.8 million tires annually at its Ravena cement plant.

The next step is to collect public sentiment as part of the approval
process. The proposal is open to public review until Sept. 2.

The application for a permit is available in the Albany office of DEC, and
in the libraries of Ravena and Castleton, which is downwind of the plant. A
public information session on the application is scheduled at 7pm, Aug. 4,
at the A.W. Becker Elementary School, 1146 Route 9W, Selkirk.

"People need to let us know what they think of the application," said
William J. Clarke, Department of Environmental Conservation region-4 permit
administrator.

Comments can be submitted to Clarke, NYSDEC Region 4 Headquarters, 1150 N.
Westcott Road, Schenectady, NY 12306 or emailed to r4dep@gw.dec.state.ny.us.

Earlier this year the company filed an application to burn 6 million tires
but has since lowered its request. If passed, the 4.8 million tires would
reduce the amount of coal and coke burned by 35,000 tons and serve as 20
percent of the energy used at the plant.

Friends of Hudson, the 4,000-member group that mobilized against St.
Lawrence Cement plant's proposal in Columbia County, are taking aim against
Lafarge because of environmental concerns.