The industry says high prices are the only way to recoup the vast sums that it ploughs into advancing the frontiers of medicine. But if we were starting from scratch it would surely be better to finance research collectively, perhaps with big payments for scientists who hit upon breakthroughs. Of course it's unthinkable that a competitive world would ever unite in the way that would be required to put people before profit. But then isn't it also unthinkable to ask people to accept early death when there could be another way?

"In the military, you're trained to shoot at a target, but sometimes the humanity of that target intrudes, and people come to question what they've done," said Dr. Shira Maguen (putting it, I would say, mildly). Maguen is a staff psychologist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and lead author of a recent study of the factors causing PTSD, conducted in conjunction with the University of California, San Francisco. The study, published in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Traumatic Stress, used data from 1,200 veterans of the Vietnam War. It found, much to the researchers' surprise, that "the negative psychological effects of killing" made all other factors pale in comparison.

McChrystal argues that the current situation is “critical,” and that an escalation “will be decisive.” But as former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst A.J. Rossmiller says, the war is a stalemate. “The insurgency does not have the capability to defeat U.S. forces or depose Afghanistan’s central government, and…U.S. forces do not the ability to vanquish the insurgency.” - While the purported goal of the war is denying Al-Qaeda a sanctuary, according to U.S. intelligence the organization has fewer than 100 fighters in the country. And further, the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, pledges that his organization will not interfere with Afghanistan’s neighbors or the West, which suggests that the insurgents have been learning about diplomacy as well. --- The Afghanistan War can only be solved by sitting all the parties down and working out a political settlement. Since the Taliban have already made a seven-point peace proposal, that hardly seems an insurmountable task. Anything else is a dangerous illusion.

Speaking to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Clark said American leaders should strengthen the national partnership with Pakistan -- including sharing intelligence regarding al Qaeda operations -- and promote economic development in Afghanistan to undercut the drug trade fueled by growing poppies. Gen. Clark, a former Democratic presidential candidate, praised President Barack Obama for taking his time in developing an Afghanistan strategy and said that any troop increase should wait until a firm endgame has been establsihed for U.S. Involvement in the country.

If you hire a lawyer, the chances are you won't be sentenced to death in Houston. University of Denver Criminologist Scott Phillips reviewed 504 capital indictments over three decades in Harris County, Texas, and found that defendants who hired lawyers for the entire trial were never sentenced to death -- and were more likely to be acquitted. The results of his study, published over the summer in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, are truly stunning. Since nearly all defendants facing the death penalty in Harris County were poor, Phillips argues that his results further demonstrate the arbitrariness of capital punishment.

Water quality in the Clinch River is already impaired, and the river cannot withstand additional pollution. Since 2002, the Clinch River has been identified by the EPA as having unacceptably high levels of mercury, chlorane and other toxins. The river's condition is even worse after the coal ash disaster last year. Nevertheless, TDEC is not requiring TVA to limit the amount of mercury, selenium or other metals that will be discharged from its new scrubber system. Under the Clean Water Act TVA should be required to help restore water quality and at a minimum to install the best available treatment technology for its wastewater. Instead, TVA is dumping essentially untreated wastewater into the Clinch River.

Bob Koehler: Moving forward from the latest massacre, three narratives — well, one of them is no more than the familiar, all-purpose shrug of experts, puzzled over yet another “isolated incident” — are vying to explain what happened and set the direction of our future. Is Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged killer of 13 people at Fort Hood last week, A) a Muslim terrorist; B) a solitary guy who snapped; or C) a broken healer and victim of the misbegotten war on terror?

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the last week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise, said senior U.S. officials. In his communications with Washington, Amb. Eikenberry has expressed deep reservations about Karzai's erratic behavior and Afghan government corruption, particularly in the senior ranks of the Karzai government, said U.S. officials familiar with the cables. Since Karzai was officially declared re-elected last week, U.S. diplomats have seen little sign that the Afghan president plans to address the problems of corruption they have raised repeatedly with him.

If Bill Clinton - or, presumably, Al Gore (or even Ralph Nader) - had been President in 2001, the Ft. Hood massacre almost certainly wouldn't have happened. Because George W. Bush was president, it did. Here's why it's Bush's fault:

Fort Hood is still reeling from last week’s carnage, in which an Army psychiatrist is accused of a massacre that left 13 people dead. But in the town of Killeen and other surrounding communities, the attack, one of the worst mass shootings on a military base in the United States, is also seen by many as another blow in an area that has been beset by crime and violence since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Reports of domestic abuse have grown by 75 percent since 2001. At the same time, violent crime in Killeen has risen 22 percent while declining 7 percent in towns of similar size in other parts of the country. The stresses are seen in other ways, too. Since 2003, there have been 76 suicides by personnel assigned to Fort Hood, with 10 this year, according to military officials.

If we take seriously the ideology, arguments and values now emanating from the right-wing of the Republican Party, there is no room in the United States for a democracy in which the obligations of citizenship, compassion and collective security outweigh the demands of what might be called totalizing market-driven society; that is, a society that is utterly deregulated, privatized, commodified and largely controlled by the ultra-rich and a handful of mega corporations. -- In such a society, there is a shift in power from government to markets and the emergence of a more intensified political economy organized around three principal concerns: deregulated markets, commodification and disposability. -- In spite of the current failure of this system, right-wing Republicans and their allies are more than willing to embrace a system that erases all vestiges of the public good, turning citizens into consumers, while privatizing and commodifying every aspect of the social order - all the while threatening the lives, health, and livelihoods of millions of working class and middle class people. --- As democracy is increasingly reduced to an empty shell and the rise of a corporate and punishing state looms heavily on the 21st-century horizon, the market-driven principles of deregulation, radical individualism and privatization penetrate all aspects of daily life. Such market-driven values and their accompanying power-shaping institutions now profoundly influence the very nature of how the American public think, act and desire. --- All of which are increasingly wedded to the epicenter of a grotesque consumer culture, whose underside is a heartless indifference to the suffering and hardship of the millions of people without jobs, homes, health care and, increasingly, hope. --- --- in the truncated notion of freedom espoused by the right-wing extremists of a market-driven society, democracy is a deficit, if not pathology, and freedom is reduced to the narrow logic of an almost rabid focus on self-interest. This is a truncated version of freedom, defined largely as freedom from constraint - a freedom which, when not properly exercised or balanced, loses its connection to those obligations that tie people to values, issues and institutions that affirm "the existence of a common good or a public purpose." This type of depoliticizing inward thinking with its disavowal of the obligations of social responsibility and its outright disdain for those who are disadvantaged by virtue of being poor, young or elderly does more than fuel the harsh, militarized and hyper-masculine logic of reality television and extreme sports; it also elevates death over life, selfishness over compassion and economics over politics. But more so, it produces a kind of dysfunctional silence in the culture in the face of massive hardship and suffering. -- There is more than moral indifference and political cynicism at work here; there is also a culture for which there is not much room for ideals, a culture that now considers public welfare a pathology, and responsibility solely a privatized and individual matter. --- This is a politics of disinvestment in public life, democracy and the common good.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Taliban have been able to win some support. The cruelty of their rule before 2001 is becoming a distant memory and they are successfully portraying themselves as the defender of the country against foreign occupation. Matthew P Hoh, the senior American civilian representative in Zabul Province east of Kandahar, resigned last week convinced that the US military should not be in Afghanistan. As a former US marine officer who served in Iraq, he says in his resignation letter that the US has joined in on one side in a 35-year-old civil war between the traditional Pashtun community and its enemies. "The US military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency," he says. "Our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people."

There is now a stigma that buying American is cheap, undesirable, of poor quality, and in poor taste. Clearly the only group unquestionably damaged by "free trade" is American industry. - Video included

First it was the weapons of mass destruction, then it was the war on terrrr, and then, of course, there was the day that God told George Bush to end the tyranny in Iraq. It's probably just coincidental that Iraq is expected to award its giant West Qurna-1 oil field in southern Iraq to a consortium comprising Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC, a senior Iraqi oil official said.

It has been six years since a contractor from Delray Beach, Fla., brought the black dusty residue to the province of Samaná, and three years since the ash was cleaned up. Several civil lawsuits and criminal cases later, just when everyone thought it was over, the other shoe has dropped. A civil lawsuit filed Wednesday in Delaware charges that toxic levels of waste dumped at the Arroyo Barril port has made people nearby sick. After years of repeated miscarriages, women whose blood levels show abnormal levels of arsenic are giving birth to babies with cranial deformities, with organs outside their bodies or missing limbs.

If the foreign forces are not seen so by Afghans already, they are on the cusp of being regarded as occupiers, with little to show people for their extended presence, fueling wild conspiracies about why they remain here. The feeling is particularly acute in the Pashtun south, but it is spreading to other parts of the country. More American troops could tip the balance of opinion, particularly if they increase civilian casualties and prompt even more Taliban attacks.

“The handguns used in yesterday’s rampage shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, demonstrate the deadly firepower available to any American--whether that person is a member of the military or a private citizen. Initial news reports describe the handguns possessed by the shooter as a semiautomatic pistol and .357 revolver, apparently neither was military issue. Like the Luby’s massacre in neighboring Killeen, Texas that occurred 18 years ago and left 23 dead and 20 injured, the facts are as simple as they are disturbing: easy access to unmatched firepower allows angry individuals to kill and wound at will. "

Details are sketchy about a shooting that took place today in Ft. Hood, near Killeen TX. No word on whether the shooters or victims are civilians or military personnel.

An elderly Michigan woman died in October as the result of a severe dental infection after adult dental Medicaid benefits were cut in the state. Blanche D. LaVire, 76, had been diagnosed with abscesses earlier in the year and reportedly suffered from advanced periodontitis. Because LaVire was mentally challenged, she required special treatment. Her condition was such that her doctors felt it would be unwise to undergo treatment in a dentist’s office. Advised to have the necessary procedure performed in a hospital, LaVire was then scheduled for an oral surgery near the end of June. The procedure was delayed when LaVire contracted pneumonia. Once she had recovered from the pneumonia, doctors attempted to reschedule LaVire’s procedure, but discovered she was no longer covered by Medicaid. An executive order issued by Michigan’s Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm had taken effect on July 1 that dramatically cut adult dental Medicaid benefits. All oral health services were eliminated by the order, with the exception of emergency services.---

Afghanistan’s boom in the trade in opium, used to produce heroin, over the past eight years of occupation has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban, al-Qaida, local warlords, criminal gangs, kidnappers, private armies, drug traffickers and many of the senior figures in the government of Hamid Karzai. The New York Times reported that the brother of President Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has been collecting money from the CIA although he is a major player in the illegal opium business. Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world’s opium in a trade that is worth some $65 billion, the United Nations estimates. This opium feeds some 15 million addicts worldwide and kills around 100,000 people annually. These fatalities should be added to the rolls of war dead.