May272013
The Administrators of the Pittsburgh VA hospital discovered there was legionella in their water supply. Rather than taking proper steps to, you know, fix that before it killed people less work to use an agent that doesn’t kill legionella to treat the water. They didn’t even bother to tell staff and patients. As a result five veterans died and sixteen more got sick. One of those killed was a WWII veteran only in for dehydration. How are the people who deliberately poisoned all those people being punished? Have they been arrested for manslaughter? Have they at least been fired? Of course not. They got huge bonuses for “doing such a good job.” Have a Great Fucking Memorial Day! There are six more honored dead who would have been alive if they hadn’t gone to the hospital to remember today.
May42013
finepoints:
gwydionmisha:
“The follies that led to poor helmets and a lack of torso protection for men in the trenches.”
Lives would have been saved by not allowing the Selective Service Act of 1917 to pass.
Lives would also have been saved by countries choosing not to fight unnecessary wars. WWI haunts me because it’s a ridiculous amount of slaughter and maiming in service to nothing. I feel that way about a lot of the wars we have fought. (Yes, that includes the endless Bush wars, Vietnam, etc..) War should be a last resort and sacrifice should only be asked for something worthy. Similarly, if we are demanding that sacrifice, we need to do everything in our power to limit the damage and to properly compensate survivors and their families. To this end, I support body armor, fixing the VA backlog, the GI bill, not nickle and diming people for benefits generally, providing better psychiatric care, job placement, and whole host of other things that help veterans and their families.
November272012
the-mad-curator:
Sometimes it’s weird for me to think that I was actually in a war. Nobody really considers the Kosovo/Bosnian conflict a war, but having been there … shit, that place was hell. What’s sad to me is that given the modern perspective of what is or is not a war, I find myself caving to this perspective and not really thinking I was a combat veteran of an actual war.
(via the-mad-curator-deactivated2013)