Remarksman

Welcome to the U. S. of A., kids!

This reader comment is pretty good:

ViolettVerq:

I think not even tasering a FRICKING INFANT will wake up this country of yours with its abusing policemen. First I thought: ‘This story will be it. It will create the wave that the US system needs. Tasering a 10 year-old body and heart cannot, under any circumstances, be appropriate.’

But I don’t think anything will happen. You can taser pregnant women, old grandmas for being too slow, old people in wheelchairs that YELL they have a heart condition, everyone. I cannot comprehend it.

The Lung Flute is a simple device that uses sound waves to vibrate wads of mucus in your chest cavity until they rip apart and become more easily cough-up-able.

The idea for the horn came one night in 1985. Hawkins, an acoustics engineer, and his colleagues began brainstorming how they could use sound to mess with various bodily functions. They joked about what frequency a toilet would need to vibrate at to force an uncontrollable bowel movement and, slightly more seriously, a way to dislodge goo in sick people’s lungs. Months later, Hawkins was reminded of that discussion when he learned that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a group of lung diseases that includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, makes breathing tough for 10 million people, and causes 127,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. “It’s the number-four cause of death in the U.S.,” he says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I should do something about this.’ ”

Today, doctors in Japan use the $40 Lung Flute as a tool to collect sputum from patients suspected of carrying tuberculosis, and in Europe and Canada it’s used to help test phlegm for lung cancer. Clinical trials in the U.S. have shown that it is at least as effective as current COPD treatments. At press time, Hawkins expected the device to receive FDA approval any day, and says the reusable device could also provide home relief for patients with cystic fibrosis, influenza and asthma.

Really cool! But what do you want to bet that what is $40 in Japan costs $250 in US hospitals?

The president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, reportedly on the CIA payroll, is also, as it’s politely put in the press, a “suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade.” Ahmad Rateb Popal, the president’s cousin and another figure long linked to the drug trade, runs a local security company protecting American supply convoys that, according to Aram Roston of the Nation magazine, is involved in an industry-wide protection scam, using American Army money to pay off the Taliban not to attack. In addition, American arms and ammunition are clearly ending up in Taliban hands. The recent presidential election was a spectacle of fraud; the Afghan Army, despite years of training, may hardly exist (as Ann Jones reported for this site in September); the ill-paid, ill-trained Afghan police are known to operate on the principle of corruption; and a surprisingly small percentage of foreign reconstruction funds actually makes it out of the pockets of big private contractors and western specialists, as well as security firms, and into Afghan hands.

Ever wondered why our country’s laws so often favor the rich over middle and working-class people? Consider this: Last week, the Center for Responsive Politics released its latest survey of congressional financial disclosure forms. Of the 535 voting members of Congress, over 44 percent of—237 to be exact—are millionaires.

So next time that the Congress does something that seems outrageously biased in favor of rich people—say, slashing top income tax rates or spending $440 billion over 10 years to cut estate taxes on one quarter of one percent of Americans—remember who members of Congress are really helping: themselves.

Yet another argument for election reform.