Tag Archives: United States

CIA Documents Outline U.S. Plans/Threats to Nuke North Korea Over the Years

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To mark the 60th anniversary of the Korean War, the CIA earlier this year released 1,300 documents from 1950-1953 outlining, among other things, extensive planning by the United States to use nuclear weapons against North Korea during the Korean War, as well as threats to do the same.

According to an Associated Press summary of the documents,

Based on previously declassified documents, however, historians believe the U.S. came closest to unleashing its atomic arsenal against North Korea in April 1951, on the eve of an expected Chinese offensive.

With Truman’s signoff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered A-bomb retaliation if large numbers of fresh Chinese troops entered the fight. In the end, the U.S. military repelled the Chinese push and the weapons were never used. But Pentagon planners retained the option.

The planning went so far as to include rehearsal raids on Pyongyang with B-29s that involved dropping dummy nuclear weapons on the city.

The newly released documents are available on the CIA’s website here.

DigMyPics.Com vs. ScanCafe.Com

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Like a lot of people, I have thousands of photographs preserved on 35mm slides and negatives that I’ve really wanted to get scanned. There are a lot of companies that will do that for you, but the two leaders in that area are DigMyPics and ScanCafe . . . two companies that have often had a contentious relationship, to say the least.

After ScanCafe.Com became popular a year or so ago, based on undercutting DigMyPics pricing, DigMyPics started a campaign to highlight the fact that ScanCafe was shipping photos to India for scanning.  For example, on its website DigMyPics had this helpful FAQ entry,

Will the work be done in the USA?

Some companies quietly your photos to a foreign country to have the work performed to increase their profit. For instance, one company in Miami will ship your photos to Costa Rica and another in California will ship them to India to have the scanning done even though these companies never mention those facts on their websites or they give the information in carefully chosen language and bury it in far less prominent places than their pricing.**

Nothing against Costa Rica or India, but I wouldn’t want my photos shipped there by a third party and out of my control.

While outsourcing to another country may make sense with high volume, low margin manufactured goods, it hasn’t worked so well with services. Irrespective of the clear risks involved with sending your photos to a third world country, it’s quite clear that dealing with the company’s employees who are working on your project in your language and culture produces a much more efficient and gratifying end user experience as well as a superior final product.

Rest assured that DigMyPics never ships your photos anywhere else and that all work is done right here in the USA by professional American photographers and artists.

Got that. India and/or Costa Rica are “risk[y] . . . third-world countries” where your photos are “out of my control.” Certainly you’d be much better sending your photos to a safe, American company (cue the Lee Greenwood music).

So last night, I was once again pondering whether to send my negatives off to be scanned and hit the DigMyPics site to see what their current pricing was. And this is what is currently on their front page,

DigMyPics.com

To our customers and friends,

On Monday May 5, 2008 at approximately 2am, Arizona Time, DigMyPics suffered a devastating fire which destroyed our building and most of its contents.  The fire was large and the neighboring city of Mesa was called in to help fight it.  Three large ladder trucks were used to douse the flames.   Despite the best efforts of both city’s firefighters, the building was completely destroyed. Our website, email, customer database, and telephone lines are all currently down as a result.

As you can imagine, Annette and I are heartbroken by what has happened. We always believed that our customers placed their trust in us when they sent us their photos and videos and we took that responsibility personally and extremely seriously.

Annette, the employees of DigMyPics, and I are all still in shock and disbelief and we aren’t sure if we’ll even try to rebuild the company.  What we are sure of is that we want to help those people that had put their trust in us to retrieve whatever is retrievable.  We’re putting together a restoration team to help us restore whatever is uncovered.  The Gilbert Fire Department has been extremely helpful to us and are sensitive to what we had in the building.  They’re working hard to help us find and extract our customer’s photos and videos.  The scene is currently under their custody as they investigate the fire’s cause but today we delivered a trailer to them and they’ve agreed to put any photos, film, hard drives or computers that they find in that trailer and give us access to it twice a day.  We’ll take the material to another site we’ve temporarily leased to begin work on salvaging any images or videos that can be saved.

I don’t want to give any false hope, some people may have lost everything, but we had some encouraging news today.  The fire department was able to successfully retrieve our servers and their forensic team has told us that the servers look good and that the data is likely retrievable.  We store a copy of the images that have been completed on some of those servers.  The building is completely destroyed but the roof collapse may have sheltered some areas from the worst effects.  Fire crews are removing pieces of the roof and have found some photos and reels in tact.

Ouch.

The Difference Between Iran and U.S. on Human Rights

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Iranian President Mohammad Khatami recently took umbrage at the U.S. State Department’s complaints about Iran’s persecution of Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi. Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. She was recently issued a summons to appear in court, but the Iranian government refused to tell her what sort of charges she was facing.

This prompted the State Department to express “grave concern” over the court proceedings. Khatami struck back, citing the poor U.S. record on human rights at Abu Ghraib prison,

Now they [the United States] must respond to the crimes committed in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and their relentless killing of people in all parts of the world in the name of freedom and democracy and the support they provide to the brutalities and atrocities committed against the Palestinian people.

Abu Ghraib provides a nice counterpoint between how Iran and the United States handle human rights abuses that occur in prisons.

One of the ring leaders of the Abu Ghraib abuses, Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr., was recently convicted by a military court and sentenced to 10 years in jail.

Contrast this with what happened to the murderers of Zahra Kazemi, a female reporter with both Canadian and Iranian citizenship. Kazemi was arrested on June 23, 2003 after taking photographs of a prison in Tehran. Kazemi was assaulted in prison, apparently by a prison official, and died of her injuries a couple weeks later.

Iranian officials first tried to claim that she had suffered a “stroke,” but later conceded that she had died as a result of a blow to the head which caused brain hemorrhaging.

Iran charged a security official with beating Kazemi to death, but he was acquitted. Iran’s official story today is that Kazemi was standing when she inexplicably fell to the ground, hit her head, and sustained the fatal blow that fractured her skull.

Source:

Iran’s Khatami raps US on rights. The BBC, January 15, 2005.

Should Americans Be Allowed to Import Drugs from Canada?

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The whole reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada issues is a bit odd because it tends to reverse traditional political views. Democrats who complain about the horrors of outsourcing jobs and the evils of free trade suddenly find themselves on the side of free trade across the Canadian border. Republicans who are nominally the party of free trade suddenly find themselves talking like anti-globalization activists about the dangers of weak safety standards in countries where the drugs might be made (and, as Clark Venable notes, it’s misleading to claim that the reimported drugs are made in America or Canada).

I am a free trader, a fan of the pharmaceutical industry and an ardent supporter of reimportation. Clark Venable quotes from a New England Journal of Medicine article that purports to make the case against reimportation, but really offers up the main reason to support it,

The mass exportation of prescription medication to the United States threatens the preferential pricing set by the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board.2 Companies may also choose not to market medication in Canada in order to protect the larger and more lucrative U.S. market.3 At risk is nothing less than the ability of countries to set their own policy regarding pharmaceuticals. The availability of Canadian medication is not a viable long-term solution to the problems of drug costs in the United States and represents a substantial threat to the access and affordability of drugs in Canada.

Yes, absolutely — this is precisely what needs to happen to bring sanity back to prescription drug pricing.

The current situation is quite simple. Canada tells a pharmaceutical manufacturer that it will only buy a drug at say $2/pill. The manufacturer says fine, we’ll make that up by charging American consumers $4/pill. The end result is that Americans end up subsidizing Canada’s system of socialized medicine. They get all the benefits of the lower price, while Americans pay the price in higher prices and also to a certain extent a penalty that discourages innovative new products (since in order for a product to be truly profitable, a company has to be able to sustain high prices in the U.S. market, so there is a disincentive to develop products that might be profitable if there were a market system in other countries rather than only in the United States).

As the NEJM notes, allowing reimportation of drugs will go along way to busting up that system which is a very good thing for Americans. Canadians (and other countries for that matter) must know that they cannot be free riders on American consumers forever. If their governments are going to continue to demand below market prices from drug companies, they are going to have to face a tradeoff of important medications being withdrawn or not being made available at all.

It should also be pointed out that the U.S. government also artificially inflates the cost of drugs with requirements that companies sell drugs to Medicare at the lowest rate they are sold for in the United States. Hmmmm…so if a company offers a subgroup a discounted price, it has to offer the government that same discounted price. Guess how pharmaceutical companies decide to price drugs given those incentives.