Boiling in a vat of stupid

SCOTUS: Total Betrayal of Democracy

Kansas Board of Health Revokes License of Doctor for Not Forcing Ten-Year-Olds to Give Birth

Shocking Interglacial Shift to Hot Arctic Tied to Rapid Antarctic Ice Melt



Saudi Arabia beheads woman for 'sorcery'

 What privatizing prisons brings us... money over people. Man Dies After Prison Tries To ‘Cut Costs’ By Denying Him Care

 The Big Ag companies, poisoning workers in the fields so they can bring us poisoned food. Poisoning Workers at the Bottom of the Food Chain

 


 The United States of America... not the greatest country in the world anymore.

 

Bisphenol A exposure linked to brain tumor diagnosis.

What war does to soldiers.

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

Sorta like this kitty:

 

Making the rounds on Facebook: Charlie Chaplin's final speech in the 'The Great Dictator':

 

 Banks actually just a bit concerned about Occupy Wall Street protesters. As they should be. Also, the squidding of Goldman Sachs.

 I KNEW my fascination with bees had something to do with brains.

 Cool new idea to sterilize hospital rooms.

 Monsanto's genetic food being rushed to market: Under Industry Pressure, USDA Works to Speed Approval of Monsanto's Genetically Engineered Crops.  And childhood obesity be damned, food giants fight proposed nutrition guidelines.

 Looks like Beijing is copying the pea-soup fogs of Jack the Ripper's era: Beijing air goes from 'hazardous' to off the charts, literally

 The Republicans' radical embrace of nullification.

 The trial of Bradley Manning.

 Keeping an eye on the radiation levels in Japan.

 Incoming water wars.

 How doctors choose to die when they know the options available.

 All this might not matter. The melting of the permafrost in the Arctic is releasing huge quantities of methane:

Doctor's house calls

Actually save money.

We knew this all along

US medical staff experimented on terror suspects: report

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Medical personnel apparently experimented on terror detainees during CIA-led torture after the September 11 attacks, aiming to improve interrogation techniques, a human rights group said Monday.

"There is evidence that they were calibrating the harm inflicted by these techniques allegedly and also looking to extend their knowledge about the effects," said Nathaniel Raymond, from Physicians for Human Rights.

The group said it had used public records showing health professionals worked under the supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency during interrogations of "war on terror" detainees after the 2001 attacks.

The doctors and medical staff witnessed waterboarding, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes and prolonged isolation among other techniques.

"What we see is doctors collecting data that is used to draw conclusions related to whether or not the techniques or behaviors that they are observing violate the Department of Justice standard on what constitutes a level of harm, what makes it torture," Raymond told a press conference.

Who are these people? Did we just raise a generation oblivious to the horrors of WWII? Did we just create our very own Dr. Mengeles?

Who on earth could justify any of this?

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the former president told a business audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I’d do it again to save lives.”

Oh yeah. Him. And what about Cheney?

To many, Cheney is the dark side of the Bush administration, and this program will only cement that judgment. ``Frontline" chronicles the brutal campaign by two consummate political in-fighters -- Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- to decimate the CIA, politically emasculate Secretary of State Colin Powell, and construct a near-limitless concept of executive power during war. While many of these strands are familiar, they have not been assembled as effectively before on television to present a coherent picture of what happened after 9/11.

Cheney didn't trust the CIA after it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Iranian revolution, and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, so he created through Rumsfeld's Pentagon his own intelligence network to suit his agenda. Powell and former CIA director George Tenet were no match for this pair, who have known each other for three decades. By the time that Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis ``Scooter" Libby, was indicted last fall, Powell and Tenet were long gone and the CIA was in shambles.

My theory is that these guys got off on torture. You don't need to waterboard somebody 183 times to get information. You do it because it makes you feel powerful. Non-military, cowardly, craven blunderers, they thought it made them manly and tough. What it actually did was make everything ten times worse.

And these 'doctors' who were involved in the torture?

We want their names.

bwak bwak bwak?

Blog sprinkles

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly:

As Krugman noted, conservatives tend not to understand that the left has no parallel ideological desires (wanting bigger government just for the sake of having bigger government). It's why they fell for the bogus Frank quote in the first place.

The left starts with a policy goal (more people with access to medical care, more students with access to college, less pollution, more Wall Street safeguards) and crafts proposals to try to complete the task. The right starts with an ideological goal (smaller government, more privatization, lower taxes) and works backwards.

Krugman himself.

If you divide twelve teabaggers by three parties, how fast will you get to five erasers, two blots, and a dammit, math is HARD?

Of course this man needs his guns!

Aliens? Aliens!!1!!:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Genetic material pulled from a pinky finger bone found in a Siberian cave shows a new and unknown type of pre-human lived alongside modern humans and Neanderthals, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The creature, nicknamed "Woman X" for the time being, could have lived as recently as 30,000 years ago and appears only distantly related to modern humans or Neanderthals, the researchers reported.

"It really just looked like something we had never seen before," Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told a telephone briefing.

Things your grocer won't tell you.

Look at how much the Obama daughters have grown up since last year!

That was CLOSE!! A 7.2 no less...

Check out your doctor.

Asteroid will hide star tomorrow in the wee hours of the morning ... briefly.

Everybody will be having fun... until somebody yells,"He's gotta gun!"

Via Tengrain of Mock, Paper, Scissors:

Blog sprinkles

4000 years of Choice:

4000 Years for Choice visualizes the ancestral traditions passed down for millennia by lineages of mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. The rediscovery of these practices is deeply transformative when one considers “the right to choose”, especially for those who have been exposed to the “abstinence until marriage” and “anti-abortion” rhetoric.

Our not-so-secret war in Pakistan: The Drone Wars. (With a cool interactive map to see how many people we've killed.)

Yes. We want their names:

The process needs to start with the full disclosure of the identities of the medical professionals who were involved in the torture system, especially within the CIA and Department of Defense. Americans need to know about the qualifications and experiences of the medical personnel who serve them, and that includes knowing how seriously they treat their professional ethics obligations.

Before the doctors and lawyers since back down into the ooze and flow quietly back into society... we want their names.

DarkBlack at SteveAudio's has a slightly NSFW pic of Bunning.....

It's like getting mad at Mom for not picking up your room fast enough after an all night party with your friends. Steve Benen at Washington Monthly:

CHUTZPAH WATCH.... David Kurtz ponders a thought this morning that I consider literally every day.

One of the truly galling Republican political maneuvers over the last 10 years is to go from squandering a huge budget surplus, wracking up trillions in debt, ballooning the deficit, and leaving the next Democratic administration with an economy in shambles -- then as soon as the Democrats are in charge refashioning themselves as budget hawks. You might even think they're setting the Democrats up to fail. I know, hard to believe.

Why Republicans aren't simply laughed off the stage at this point when they try to argue against budget deficits says a lot about Democratic ineptness, media collusion, and short political memories. But I still find it amazing.

I should be used to it by now, but I find it amazing, too. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) recently conceded when Republicans controlled the levers of power, "it was standard practice not to pay for things."

Think about that concession. Then consider that the very same GOP lawmakers who believed it was standard practice not to pay for things are now outraged that Democrats -- who aren't relying on deficit spending to finance their agenda -- aren't acting quickly enough to clean up the budget mess Republicans left for them.

The Night of White Sheets and Knives?:

SPLC's annual report sees explosive 244% growth in 'Patriot' extremism -- thanks to Tea Parties

JJ has bathing hedgehogs. Really.

Phila of Bouphonia discusses Mommy/Daddy issues.

Squirrel fight!! (h/t to Mahablog)



Who else can curse, stomp the floor, fight, AND eat sunflowers seeds all at the same time? I have to admit the damned squirrels have talent!

The good things about our health care

Are the doctors:

Another Puget Sound-area doctor is headed for Haiti - and expecting unimaginably horrendous conditions. Another local doctor already there says, "I will never be able to comprehend the full scale of this disaster."

Thank you, sir.

Wash your hands!

This doc says it better:



h/t to Steve Bates in comments.

When healers harm

From the CCR website:

Despite the health professions’ universally recognized duty to do no harm, doctors and psychologists have played a key role in the U.S. government’s policy of torture in its overseas prisons. They crafted and justified torture tactics, inflicted pain and oversaw abuse and enabled, covered up and turned a blind eye to cruel treatment. Yet, in the face of mounting evidence, government officials, licensing boards and professional associations defend their failure to act by saying “We do not have enough information.”

CCR disagrees. When Healers Harm presents the evidence for everyone, including those in institutional power, to examine.

It is time to hold accountable the healers who have harmed. Accountability is vital to survivors of medical torture and to health professionals, most of whom take seriously their commitment to do no harm. It is also necessary for the rest of us – as patients and members of civil society we have a right to treatment by health professionals who we can trust, and a right to a government that upholds the law.

Those in power have tortured in our name. We have an obligation to show them that America refuses to be a torturing society any longer. Join us in ensuring that those who choose to cover for torturers as a matter of political expediency come to see the pursuit of justice as a political necessity.

As I've said, we want their names. Before they slip unchecked back into our society. We want the names of those who thought torture was a good thing to do.

Staple your name to your forehead

ATLANTA – Scrawl on the patient with a permanent marker to show where the surgeon should cut. Ask the person's name to make sure you have the right patient. Count sponges to make sure you didn't leave any inside the body. Doctors worldwide who followed a checklist of steps like these cut the death rate from surgery almost in half and complications by more than a third in a large international study of how to avoid blatant operating room mistakes.

The results — most dramatic in developing countries — startled the researchers.

Oh great. This is so reassuring...

We won't help you live a little longer

But we will help you die faster:

The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay.

What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.

This occurred in early summer of this year. Her doctor was able to arrange giving her the medicine for free. In googling her story, it seems that she has since died.

It's taken how many years?

Because this is the end of the Bush administration and legal protection will disappear? Or because we are demanding the names of the people who thought torture was interesting, intriguing, something to study? Why has it taken five effing years to realize that shit splatters?

Members of the American Psychological Association have voted to prohibit consultation in the interrogations of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or so-called black sites operated by the Central Intelligence Agency overseas, the association said on Wednesday.

The vote, 8,792 to 6,157 in a mail-in balloting concluded Monday, may help to settle a long debate within the profession over the ethics of such work. Psychologists have helped military and C.I.A. interrogators evaluate detainees, plan questioning strategy and judge its psychological costs. The association’s ethics code, while condemning a list of coercive techniques adopted in the Bush administration’s antiterrorism campaign, has allowed some consultation “for national security-related purposes.”

Do you really want to be treated by someone who was involved in torture? Don't you think you'd want to know your doctor thought torture was a good idea? Would you trust being treated by someone who was involved in torture? We want to know who these 'professionals' are before they sink back into anonymity and become our lawyers, our doctors, our psychiatrists, our pediatricians.

We want their names.

Do you think they have feelings of shame and guilt?

Or is it more just the reaction like cockroaches have of scuttling back into the dark when the light goes on?

I've been having more than a few Washington D.C. ips click on my post of Harper's magazine discussion with Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side. But what I think worries/ scares/ confuses/ angers/ concerns them about the post is when I wrote this:

We want names. We want the names of those in the legal [and medical] profession who assisted in this horror. We want to know who they are and why they thought this was a patriotic thing to do. Or worse yet, why this would be an intriguing thing to do.

We won't let them sink quietly back into American society, becoming the lawyers who do our trusts or the doctors who prescribe pills to our children. They have participated in the torture of prisoners and it has brought shame to our nation and fury and revulsion to its citizens.

We want to know who they are.

Interesting, don't you think? That they might just begin to realize that there is a demand for accountability from those who helped the Bush adminstration break the Constitution, destroy the law, bomb the high road, go for the throat, empty the treasury, gut the Geneva Conventions, lay low our nation's integrity and honor.

If this is what is making loyal Bushies break out in a sweat, I'll say it again:

We want their names.

We want their names.

Harper's magazine talks to Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side. Read it if you want to see where the United States lost its soul: (my bold)

In a series of gripping articles, Jane Mayer has chronicled the Bush Administration’s grim and furtive dealings with torture and has exposed both the individuals within the administration who “made it happen” (a group that starts with Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington), the team of psychologists who put together the palette of techniques, and the Fox television program “24,” which was developed to help sell it to the American public. In a new book, The Dark Side, Mayer puts together the major conclusions from her articles and fills in a number of important gaps. Most significantly, we learn the details on the torture techniques and the drama behind the fierce and lingering struggle within the administration over torture, and we learn that many within the administration recognized the potential criminal accountability they faced over these torture tactics and moved frantically to protect themselves from possible future prosecution.

About the doctors who helped the torturers:

A physician was called in for consultation—one of many instances in which health professionals have played truly disturbing roles in this program. (I personally feel that the medical and psychological professionals who have used their skills to further a program designed to cause pain and suffering should be a high priority in terms of accountability. It has long been a ghastly aspect of torture, worldwide, that doctors and other medical professionals often assist. The licensing boards and professional societies are worthless, in my view, if they don’t demand serious investigations of such unethical uses of science.)

We want names. We want the names of those in the medical profession who assisted in this horror. We want to know who they are and why they thought this was a patriotic thing to do. Or worse yet, why this would be an intriguing thing to do.

After interviewing hundreds of sources in and around the Bush White House, I think it is clear that many of the legal steps taken by the so-called “War Council” were less a “New Paradigm,” as Alberto Gonzales dubbed it, than an old political wish list, consisting of grievances that Cheney and his legal adviser, David Addington, had been compiling for decades. Cheney in particular had been chafing at the post-Watergate reforms, and had longed to restore the executive branch powers Nixon had assumed, constituting what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the Imperial Presidency.”

Before September 11, 2001, these extreme political positions would not have stood a change of being instituted—they would never have survived democratic scrutiny. But by September 12, 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney were extraordinarily empowered. Political opposition evaporated as critics feared being labeled anti-patriotic or worse. It’s a familiar dynamic in American history—not unlike the shameful abridgement of civil liberties represented by FDR’s internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. One of the strongest quotes in the book, I think, comes from Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, former counselor to Secretary of State Condi Rice, and a historian who teaches at the University of Virginia. He suggests in time that America’s descent into torture will be viewed like the internment of the Japanese, because they happened for similar reasons. As he puts it, “Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.”

We want names. We want the names of those in the legal profession who assisted in this horror. We want to know who they are and why they thought this was a patriotic thing to do. Or worse yet, why this would be an intriguing thing to do.

We won't let them sink quietly back into American society, becoming the lawyers who do our trusts or the doctors who prescribe pills to our children. They have participated in the torture of prisoners and it has brought shame to our nation and fury and revulsion to its citizens.

We want to know who they are.

This also explains how torturers can be indifferent

To the suffering they are causing:

CHICAGO, Sept. 27 A study suggests physicians shut off the portion of their brain that helps them appreciate the pain their patients are experiencing.

Instead, the University of Chicago research indicates physicians activate a portion of the brain connected with controlling emotions during such patient encounters.

Because doctors sometimes have to inflict pain on patients as part of the healing process, they also must develop the ability not to be distracted by the suffering, said Jean Decety, a professor of psychology and psychiatry and co-author of the study.

"They have learned through their training and practice to keep a detached perspective; without such a mechanism, performing their practice could be overwhelming or distressing, and as a consequence impair their ability to be of assistance for their patients" said Decety.

The research that included the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans shows for the first time that people can learn to control such a response.

I've said before, we need to know who the 'doctors' are who are 'assisting' in the torture at Gitmo and Abu Gharib. They will melt back into our society and continue their work among us. How would you like to be one of their patients?

America's disease of Insurancitis Indifferencious

Makes us accept the bloated paperwork process and casual denial management. We've gotten used to being told no.

In response to Moore's Sicko, Bryan of Why Now? discusses the single payer system and what it would do to the swamped 'system' we have going in this country:

Every medical procedure has a code, or multiple codes, and those codes are different for each insurance company. To get paid by the insurer the health professional has to file a claim using the forms and codes of that particular insurance company. If a patient is on Medicare and has “gap” insurance, two forms will have to be filled out using two different sets of codes.

There is an entire industry, medical billing, that has sprung up to take care of this paperwork, and specialized software [the reason I was involved] to allow a clerk to enter the patient information and have the proper forms produced. If you don’t use the software, you need a supply of forms for each insurance company, and a listing of each company’s codes.

Some companies group procedures under a single code, while others require you to enter multiple codes to describe the same actions. The software knows this, and takes care of it. A billing clerk would have to read the procedures for each of the companies to figure out what that company wants.

Single payer, means a single form, with a single set of codes. It might make it possible for doctors to once again have the old style office with a nurse/receptionist. These days, doctors are forming group practices to share the cost of billing, and the billing may come from a company in an different state.

Paperwork is a major cost of the American health care system that would be radically cut by a single payer system, and would have no impact at all on the quality of care. This is something that the insurance companies could have done decades ago, but chose not to, and just made it worse. Confusing billing procedures delays payouts, and that is one of the reasons they do it, no matter what they tell you.

Hipparchia in Bryan's comments suggests googling 'denial management'.

This explains the awful health care experience we had when my MIL broke her arm. All we saw was paperwork and insurance forms and kickbacks between suppliers and doctors....

Update: Go check out mapaghimagsik's latest:

The greatest country in the world's health care system

Texas hospital calls 911 because no doctors were available to help a patient dying after spine surgery.

Update: (Via Karen McL at Peripetia)

Losing the minds of the next generation

By killing them in the halls of learning:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A suicide bomber triggered a ball bearing-packed charge Sunday, killing at least 41 people at a mostly Shiite college whose main gate was left littered with blood-soaked student notebooks and papers amid the bodies.

Witnesses said a woman carried out the attack at the business school annex to Mustansiriyah University, but Interior Ministry officials said they were still investigating those reports. The school's main campus was hit by a string of bombings last month that killed 70 people.

And chasing away doctors:

According to a December 2006 report by the Washington-based Brookings Institution, 34,000 physicians were registered in Iraq before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Since then, about 12,000 have fled and 2,000 have been killed, it said.

At al-Jarrah, two doctors have been kidnapped and killed. Two were kidnapped and released. Three have left Baghdad. Thirteen remain on staff.

"It's a campaign to drain the country," said Aviad Najeed, a surgeon at al-Jarrah. "A very, very well-organized one. We don't know who's behind it."

Sitting in their lounge, a windowless room with lockers and leather chairs, four doctors at al-Jarrah talked about the hope they had after the invasion. They recalled buying oranges and flowers to greet U.S. troops. They thought the Americans would bring the best technology and medicines.

And professionals:

(01-16) 04:00 PST Washington -- Iraq is in the throes of the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948, a mass flight out of and within the country that is ravaging basic services and commerce, swamping neighboring nations with nearly 2 million refugees and building intense pressure for emigration to Europe and the United States, according to the United Nations and refugee experts.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which appealed for $60 million in emergency aid last week, believes 1.7 million Iraqis are displaced inside Iraq, whose prewar population was 21 million. About 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing inside Iraq each month, the United Nations said, and 500,000 have been displaced since last February's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. These figures are as of January 2007.

The Bush administration and the governments of Jordan and Syria, the nations that accept the bulk of the refugees, have been reluctant to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis, experts said.

"I think everyone at this point is in denial about the human consequences of the war," said Kathleen Newland, director of the Migration Policy Institute, who is familiar with the State Department's views.

The Iraqi health-care system was once considered one of the best in the Middle East, with the most up-to-date equipment and well-educated doctors. Iraqis could get basic health care free, and each town had at least one hospital. That changed when the U.N. Security Council imposed an embargo after Iraq invaded Kuwait, leading to the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Medical instruments and drugs used to be shipped from Germany, France, Japan and Switzerland. Now, hospitals buy cheaper supplies from Egypt, Jordan and India, the doctors said.

One good way to ruin a secular country right in the middle of the Middle East and Asia is to gut it of the people who love it enough to try and save it. Nice job, Bush.

Put that book down and play those video games, dammit!

How else will you make it in this life?!

Playing video games appears to help surgeons with skills that truly count: how well they operate using a precise technique, a new study says.

There was a strong correlation between video game skills and a surgeon's capabilities performing laparoscopic surgery in the study published Monday in the February issue of Archives of Surgery.

Laparoscopy and related surgeries involve manipulating instruments through a small incision or body opening where the surgeon's movements are guided by watching a television screen.

Video game skills translated into higher scores on a day-and-half-long surgical skills test, and the correlation was much higher than the surgeon's length of training or prior experience in laparoscopic surgery, the study said.

Out of 33 surgeons from Beth Israel Medical Center in New York that participated in the study, the nine doctors who had at some point played video games at least three hours per week made 37 percent fewer errors, performed 27 percent faster, and scored 42 percent better in the test of surgical skills than the 15 surgeons who had never played video games before.