Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Tomb of the Prophet Jonah blown up outside Mosul

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In the continuing battle over the religious future of the city of Mosul, the modern heir to the Biblical city of Nineveh, the Tomb of Jonah (also known as the Mosque of the Prophet Yunus, after his Arabic name) was blown up today. Video showed the structure being completely leveled by explosives.

The Mosque, previously a Church and originally part of an Assyrian palace complex, was supposed to be the burial ground of the 8th Century BCE prophet most famous for being swallowed by a fish when he tried to avoid going to Nineveh to preach. Today the area is a suburb of Mosul, which lies across the river from where Nineveh stood.

Government officials blamed ISIS for the attack, which seems to be the case. It was not immediately obvious exactly why the extremist Sunni Islamist would target a Sunni Mosque of significance to the core of Islam. Jonah/Yunus is one of the crossover figures from the Hebrew Bible, Christian Old Testament, and Quran.

However, ISIS has reportedly destroyed a number of other Sunni Mosques in Mosul already since capturing it in June, perhaps to remove competition against their hardline views.

Less than a week ago, ISIS expelled all the Christians from the city for the first time in 18 centuries.

Video still seconds after detonation of the minaret and building complex. Watch

Video still, seconds after detonation of the minaret and building complex. Watch

The secret Nazi weather station in Canada

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This week’s obscure history — Did you know: The Nazis built an automated weather station in Canada* in 1943 and no one noticed until the 1970s. At that point, retiring ex-Nazis began admitting new, minor ultra-classified and secret projects from the war. The site, which was the only land-based Nazi operation in North America during the war, was located after 1980. Seems like scavengers had perhaps gotten to it earlier, without realizing what it was.

Also aiding the “long lost” nature of the site: The station suffered a critical malfunction almost immediately and ceased transmission and they weren’t about to attempt a second landing party right away. Only one crew member from the first mission survived the war. A second crew was sunk on the way to set up a new station in 1944. Other ill-fated U-boats, of course, had similarly poor luck off the North American coasts.

*Technically, the area at the time was not yet part of Canada and was being administered from Britain.

Wall Street wants to make money off “urgent care”

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If there’s profit involved in some aspect of the human condition, America’s big money investors will try to find a way to inflate the price and take a cut. The latest profit-from-suffering scheme is to try to grab a slice of the revenue stream from urgent care clinics that are not part of hospitals.

But what is happening here is also playing out across the nation, as private equity investment firms, sensing opportunity, invest billions in urgent care and related businesses. Since 2008, these investors have sunk $2.3 billion into urgent care clinics. Commercial insurance companies, regional health systems and local hospitals are also looking to buy urgent care practices or form business relationships with them.

The business model is simple: Treat many patients as quickly as possible. Urgent care is a low-margin, high-volume proposition. At PhysicianOne here, most people are in and out in about 30 minutes. The national average charge runs about $155 per patient visit. Do 30 or 35 exams a day, and the money starts to add up.

Urgent care clinics also have a crucial business advantage over traditional hospital emergency rooms in that they can cherry-pick patients. Most of these centers do not accept Medicaid and turn away the uninsured unless they pay upfront. Hospital E.R.s, by contrast, are legally obligated to treat everyone.

 
I suppose it would be too much to suggest not trying to introduce a profit motive into every single thing — or to treat every citizen as a potential cash cow. Too much to ask that people only be asked to pay the actual cost of their urgent health care without having to pay extra to make billionaires wealthier. Don’t even suggest that this could be made a public function.

Detroit still shutting off water to poor families

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In a deeply wrong-headed and immoral approach to close a budget gap, the water authority for the City of Detroit is still shutting off thousands of households’ public water access, claiming they have not paid up. In many cases the landlords have not paid through the rent contribution to the water bill, but either way, it’s reprehensible to shut off water to low-income families who are already barely scraping by. Now they can’t cook full meals, wash dishes, bathe, or stay hydrated. There’s no drought or natural disaster. It’s just budgetary.

We covered this crisis in depth on Arsenal For Democracy Episode 90 —
Part 2 – Bill and Persephone on Detroit Water Shutoffs:
Part 2 – Detroit – AFD 90

As an update, activists are now engaging in civil disobedience to try to halt the public water shutoffs, which have been condemned by the United Nations office for Human Rights.

See also: “Detroit’s Water Cutoffs: Counterproductive and Coldhearted” by Detroit-area U.S. Rep. John Conyers, on why this strategy makes no sense in addition to its basic cruelty.

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Unaccompanied minors forced to defend themselves in court

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America is a special place where we make 6-year-olds who can’t speak English and don’t understand the concept of international borders represent themselves in court because the right to a court-appointed attorney does not include immigration court and they were abandoned by smugglers without adult accompaniment in the country.

Juan David Gonzalez was 6 years old. He was in the court, which would decide whether to expel him from the country, without a parent — and also without a lawyer.
[…]
The young people, mostly from Mexico and Central America, ride to the border on the roofs of freight trains or the backs of buses. They cross the Rio Grande on inner tubes, or hike for days through extremes of heat and chill in Arizona deserts. The smallest children, like Juan, are most often brought by smugglers.

The youths pose troubling difficulties for American immigration courts. Unlike in criminal or family courts, in immigration court there is no right to a lawyer paid by the government for people who cannot afford one. And immigration law contains few protections specifically for minors. So even a child as young as Juan has to go before an immigration judge — confronting a prosecutor and trying to fight deportation — without the help of a lawyer, if one is not privately provided.

So far this year, more than 11,000 unaccompanied minors have been placed in deportation proceedings, nearly double last year’s numbers.
[…]
Judge Achtsam postponed Juan’s proceedings, but he warned the boy and other minors in the courtroom.

“If you do not have a lawyer,” the judge said, “you need to be ready to speak for yourselves at your next hearing.”

Juan left holding the social worker’s hand, grinning proudly when she told him he had done well. But his case was just beginning. Most likely it would end with a final order for his deportation.

Did Eastern Syria really fall to ISIS?

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There have been a number of frantic headlines in the past couple days reporting things likes “Extremist Group Takes Syrian Towns, Key Oil Field”. The suggestion is that more dominoes are falling and key leaders/communities are pledging themselves sincerely to ISIS rule.

Reading between the lines and below the lede, I suspect that the story there is less some dramatic conquest by ISIS and more of another ephemeral mass defection of the neo-feudal eastern Syrian “oil sheiks” — a very loose group of local warlords who have been using the civil war to make their surrounding territories into independent fiefdoms producing oil, gas, and power for all sides willing to pay. That’s a very tenuous alliance for ISIS, because these sheiks have switched sides constantly during the war. In some cases, some were producing and selling gas and power to both the Qaeda-backed Nusra Front and the government at the same time. As I explained it about a year ago:

The pre-Socialism clan system is re-asserting itself in the midst of the chaos because people need local order and income. These clan administrators take control of local oil & gas production and then essentially pay electricity or gas tributes to both the regime and the Islamist rebels to keep them off their backs.

 
I’m betting they defect back the moment they see an opportunity. At the moment, ISIS has access to a lot of heavy weaponry stolen in Iraq. It’s exactly the kind of stuff these warlords have previous expressed interest in acquiring through their oil and gas bartering.

More Gitmo detainees slated for release, but stuck

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Another round of Guantanamo detainees cleared for release remains held by the U.S., even after deals were made with host countries to take them. In the past, the problem has been a lack of countries willing to resettle the released prisoners. I discussed that difficulty in depth when the last of the mistakenly captured Uighur detainees were freed at the end of 2013.

The U.S. will only release detainees to nations that can provide a safe place for them to live, so they often can’t be repatriated to their home countries (e.g. China or Saudi Arabia) due to hostile governments who want to punish them separately from the U.S. treatment. They also can’t be resettled in the U.S. because there is too much political opposition, even when their lawyers vouch for them being perfectly safe.

But the difficulties are usually overcome when the U.S. signs a deal to resettle the detainees somewhere safe in exchange for various goodies and benefits granted to the host country. That’s no longer the case, according to the new revelations, which indicated that Uruguay had completed a deal with the United States earlier this year to take more of the released prisoners, and then we didn’t let them go after all.

The reason for the delay – now, at least – seems to be the backlash from the Obama’s Administration’s unscheduled deal trading five Taliban detainees, who were not cleared for release, to Qatar, for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. prisoner of war held by the Taliban. The action, which did not involve detainees deemed harmless, was taken without notifying Congress beforehand as expected.

This backlash has also complicated things further by the vengeful and shortsighted decision of House Republicans to insert a provision into a major military spending bill that would make everyone at Guantanamo Bay a permanent prisoner forever with no ability for the President to transfer any of them, anywhere, at any time. It remains to be seen if that provision will become law, although it seems unlikely. But it demonstrates an extreme misplacing of priorities to hold people indefinitely without charge, including those the government has decided should not have been detained to begin with.