Festive Roundup: Wikileaks, DADT, Canada's probably selling its water, and other people than me actually like bees

In the spirit of festive days off, I'm lumping all the posting I would normally be doing today into one, easy-to-access/ignore update before I run off to consume heroic volumes of martini with my extended family. Happy Holidays!

Bradley Manning talks about his detention, via proxy friend of his. Unsurprisingly, if he's to be believed, the Pentagon isn't telling the truth!
"But that's impossible!", you may say, if you've been living under a current events rock for the last ten years.

Examples:

The Pentagon says... Manning gets TV time and is not restricted in what he views.
Manning says...except for international TV, and only between 7-8pm when there's no news on. No newspapers allowed. In fact, when it was mentioned to him that the Pentagon said he was allowed the paper, he laughed.

The Pentagon says...he gets outside activity without restraint!
Manning says...he hasn't been outside in four weeks.

The Pentagon says...bedding of "adequate, soft, non-shreddable material".

Manning says...bedding with the weight of a lead x-ray apron and the texture of carpeting that gives him burns at night if he moves, because they take all his clothes from him. Lights on all night so they can watch him. Sure sounds comfy.

The Pentagon says...exercise may include running, calisthenics, basketball, etc.
Manning says...he gets exercise insofar as walking in chains is exercise.

There are some questions about the in/famous Lamo, as someone speculates that the timeline around him turning Manning in doesn't make much sense. I can see it being spurious. I can also imagine circumstances where it's actually quite straightforward and easily explained. As per often, I have no idea.

Despite not being able to do much of anything except sit around and be quietly brutalized, Manning's kind enough to wish everyone a happy holidays, including the guys at Quantico who will be guarding him instead of hanging with their families. Also, dear Santa: I think I want Bradley Manning for christmas.

The US Army is looking into its internal security after the wikileaks....leaks.....just like they did after that guy shot up Fort Hood.

Wikileaks is legitimizing, including actually paying its staff. Rad. Probably still won't be classed as a journalistic organization, despite the overwhelming amount of journalistic functions they serve. Once again, any register of shock and you haven't been reading this blog.


In non-leak-related news:

The most awesome thing to ever happen in the convergence of education and science happened in the UK, when a group of school kids got their paper on bees peer-reviewed and published. They're the youngest ever authors of a peer-reviewed paper. Also, I love them, as this early engagement with science and doing hard things will probably be the first step in them developing cold fusion or something. Bonus: they also like bees, and I tend to like people who can side with the useful underdog.

You might not know this (because I was working, and not here to scream and celebrate about it), but the US Senate voted through the takedown of the Military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, finally putting one tiny, Lady GaGa-protested piece of their operations in line with the constitution. Despite how many decades overdue this is, how much LGBTQ rights have (understandably) been in the media recently, and despite my sass, this is awesome. I can see no reasonable downside to this. I was so excited I went through the work to make myself a celebratory cosmopolitan. On a tuesday. Big news.


And as the scariest piece of news in this update, Rabble.ca reports that the EU and Canada are in the middle of negotiating a trade agreement (CETA) that would put the rights to our fresh water up for privatization and sale. Maude Barlow from the Council of Canadians is angrily calling shenanigans--if this goes through, it would be the first time ever that our drinking water would be fully covered under a trade treaty. Suddenly that novel I'm inevitably writing about the dystopian water wars sounds much less....novel.


Also, for your holiday pleasure, I found this little slice of excellence:

Happy Holidays, I'm off to get mildly drunk.

EPA's Scientists: Don't approve this pesticide. EPA: Science can die in a fire, we do what we want.

Things I love keep dying.

they just look so happy, and they're always so busy getting stuff done....

First Bats, now bees: mass die-outs are in vogue more now than ever before for a number of reasons, but the unexplained and scary emergence of colony collapse disorder--the swift deaths en masse of entire bee colonies threaten to affect us more than any other die out, period. Even if you're sting-aversive or they really freak you out, the fact remains that bees are still responsible for pollinating every land plant that feeds us (or feeds the things that we eat, for you carnivores out there). They're the biggest part of the agricultural process that we haven't been able to automate, and they're arguably the most important. 
They die, we don't eat. Awesome.

Which is one of the reasons why this news item makes Maggie Koerthe-Baker (a boingboing contributor that I love) really, really mad. 

The other reason is that it's basically proof that the Environmental Protection Agency, charged with protecting the environment, is okay with pissing in the eye of science to cowtow to big chemical companies.

From Grist:

"An internal EPA memo released Wednesday confirms that the very agency charged with protecting the environment is ignoring the warnings of its own scientists about clothianidin, a pesticide from which Bayer racked up €183 million (about $262 million) in sales in 2009. Clothianidin has been widely used on corn, the largest U.S. crop, since 2003. Suppliers sell seeds pre-treated with it....Clothianidin gets 'taken up by a plant's vascular system and expressed through pollen and nectar,' according to Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA), which leaked the document along with Beyond Pesticides. That effect makes it highly toxic to a crop's pests -- and also harmful to pollen-hoarding honeybees, which have experienced mysterious annual massive die-offs (known as "colony collapse disorder") here in the United States at least since 2006."

While this is definitely not the only cause of colony collapse, more and more evidence is pointing to pesticides being the largest cause. 

Maggie drops her usual playful, hilarious tone and lays it out nicely thus:

 "Leaked documents now show that EPA scientists noticed the problems with the research Bayer gave them, pointed those problems out, and explicitly stated that this evidence didn't count as proof that bees weren't being harmed. And then the EPA approved the pesticide anyway. This leaves me furious. Pesticides, in and of themselves, are not inherently evil. But it should be just as obvious that some will be dangerous and we have to make choices and balance risks against benefits, based on scientific evidence. If the agency that's supposed to be handling that job is ignoring evidence and just approving everything? Well, we're pretty screwed."

Personally, I like to eat. I like to eat a lot more than I like dead bees. And I like to eat way, WAY more than I like swelling Bayer's bottom line, I don't care how much Aspirin saved me from blood clots that one time.

Come on, EPA. Pull up your socks.