Prometheus 6

US deadlock in right-to-die case

The US Congress has delayed debating a bill that would force doctors to keep a brain-damaged woman alive against her husband's wishes.

Democrats objected to an informal vote on the case of Terri Schiavo, whose feeding tube was removed on Friday.

The House had been convened in a rare Sunday session, but immediately recessed. It is expected to meet again early on Monday.

President George W Bush had cut short a holiday to sign the bill if passed.

'Political precedent'

On Saturday, Congressional leaders said that they had reached a deal that would allow a federal court to review the Schiavo case.

Lawmakers had been expected to try and push through their compromise bill over the next few hours, says the BBC's James Coomarasamy in Washington.

Here we present a gentleman that sees the same connection between economics and race matters that I do...only he's got formal training and rigor and all that stuff I pretend to have.

His whole damn life story is in the NY Times. I think the story will convince most interested parties that he's at least worth attending to...it's surprisingly multidimensional but says little about his work...which I am genuinely interested in seeing.

I suggest you do as I have--read it to see if he seems to be the kind of guy whose opinion interests you then forget the whole story and see what comes of his work.

Toward a Unified Theory of Black America
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

Hospitals can end life support
Decision hinges on patient's ability to pay, prognosis
By LEIGH HOPPER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

A patient's inability to pay for medical care combined with a prognosis that renders further care futile are two reasons a hospital might suggest cutting off life support, the chief medical officer at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital said Monday.

Dr. David Pate's comments came as the family of Spiro Nikolouzos fights to keep St. Luke's from turning off the ventilator and artificial feedings keeping the 68-year-old grandfather alive.

St. Luke's notified Jannette Nikolouzos in a March 1 letter that it would withdraw life-sustaining care of her husband of 34 years in 10 days, which would be Friday. Mario Caba-llero, the attorney representing the family, said he is seeking a two-week extension, at minimum, to give the man more time to improve and to give his family more time to find an alternative facility.

I linked to an L.A Times editorial by Jervey Tervalon, and asked who it is that's actually scared.

Mr Tervalon gave me a very brief answer by email yesterday:

Just wanted to note that at the high school I taught at in Los Angeles, a girl was shot in the head by some fool who wanted to shoot someone else. In LA, like many inner cities people are scared of the police, gangs, all them fools with guns.

Fools with guns. Everyone agrees that's unacceptable. But what can you do about the fools or the guns?

Revenge of the Perturbed II: Readers Offer Tactics
By IAN URBINA

As it turns out, frustration - not necessity - may be the true mother of invention.

An article that appeared in The New York Times last week about the things people do to deal with life's many little annoyances spurred a flood of responses from readers offering their own tactics.

While providing a telling look at the banal things that bother people, these reactions also shed light on the lengths people go to extract retribution for mundane infractions. But most of all, they revealed the creativity in passive aggression.

Dena Roslan was sick of a co-worker who kept helping himself to her lunch cookies. So Ms. Roslan, 30, a clothing designer who works in Manhattan, bought a bag of dog biscuits that looked like biscotti. "My only remorse was not being able to see his face after he ate the bait," she said.

General Myers just said on Meet The Press that though recruitment has fallen short of goals, retention exceeds expectation. Rumsfeld made the same point earlier of This Week.

I'm sure those retention figures include those guys drafted through the back door. I really wonder what the retention rate looks like without them.

Rumsfeld on Iraq: If we'd gotten the 4th infantry into Iraq from the north, we'd have seen a smaller insurgency. He forgets that they allowed the soldiers to walk away, intentionally.

"We've only used like 40% of the Army Reserve."

Rumsfeld is taking the "I don't know" defense an awful lot.

McCain on Schaivo: The tort reform bill is precedent for moving a state concern to a Federal level! And he's hoping it doesn't turn political...when the very presence of the issue on the national stage is due to politics.

On steroids, he's suggesting a national standard drug testing program for all professional sports.

On the nucular option, he's against it but it's everyone's fault. Yeah, right.

On Social Security, nuthin' new. Same old "to say that we should do nothing" nonsense when no one has said that...

Quote of note:

When surveys ask students which is more important, to be honorable and get a low grade or to cheat and get a high grade, she said, more students choose the A. "The parents will say 'no, no, no,' but the message they're sending says the opposite."

The use of performance enhancing drugs reflects a society where stress and striving have become the national pastime. Ms. Pope calls it the "credentialism society," exemplified in her book through a high school student who describes life as a quest to get the best grades, so you can get into the best college, so you can get into the best graduate school, so you can get the highest-paying job, which brings you happiness.

The Difference Between Steroids and Ritalin Is . . .
By KATE ZERNIKE

Beyond the Bullets and Blades
By MARC LACEY
Published: March 20, 2005

...The younger Innocent, just 12, was from another village overrun by tribal fighters, albeit several years ago. He got out in time to avoid injury. But ever since, this Innocent has lived in a camp, huddled together with other displaced people. Still, his survival is in doubt. His arms are covered with mosquito bites and his blood is full of plasmodium parasites. Malaria kills if left untreated, which it often is in war zones like eastern Congo.

This Innocent will likely survive for now because he made it to a hospital. But he will get malaria again, and the wars that surround him will continue, and who knows if he will have access to a doctor then? And if it is not malaria that kills him, maybe it will be meningitis or measles or AIDS. Those scourges already kill far too many Africans, even in tranquil areas where a fragile social order holds together. Add war to that picture, and the death toll rises calamitously.

That is the second way of death in Africa's wars.

Quote of note:

"If I think rationally," he said, "I know I have to prepare myself to go, because it might happen. But the irrational side is causing me to freeze in my place and take no action. Something could happen, some outside event - who knows? My wife and I try to talk about it; she looks at me and she doesn't have to ask."

Please, think rationally. It's the irrational side that made you start the illegal settlements in the first place.

Jews in Gaza Recoil at Idea of Expulsion
By STEVEN ERLANGER

NETZER HAZANI, Gaza Strip - The green tanks in their berms and the protective walls around the Israeli settlements here are surrounded by yellow daisies and deep pink oleander. But this is probably the last spring for the Jews of Gaza.

Visiting Korea Base, Rice Sends Forceful Reminder to the North

By JOEL BRINKLEY

COMMAND POST TANGO, South Korea, Sunday, March 20 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stepped off her airplane in Seoul on Saturday evening, boarded an Army Black Hawk helicopter and immediately flew to this underground command bunker from which military commanders would direct any war against North Korea.

"I wanted to come here to thank you for what you do on the front lines of freedom," she told more than 100 service members in the war room, carved deep inside a mountain south of Seoul. "I know you face a close-in threat every day."

'DRAGONS': Mythical beasts come to life
- David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, March 19, 2005

Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real: 5 p.m. Sunday, Animal Planet.

Animal Planet says it's expanding its "family-friendly programming" with its big-deal "Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real" on Sunday night, but if the kids watch the show -- and they'll want to -- be prepared to tell them that sometimes television tells falsehoods.

While "Animal Planet" viewers are used to seeing all sorts of critters that look as if they were invented by either Dr. Seuss or George Lucas, those creatures are either alive now or used to be. The dragons profiled in Sunday's 90-minute show have sprung almost entirely from the minds of producers Charlie Foley and Kevin Mohs, scientific adviser Peter Hogarth and a team of superb animators. That said, the framing of the show, which purports to depict the discovery of a centuries-old frozen dragon corpse in the Carpathian Mountains, so skillfully replicates an actual documentary, it's wise to listen carefully to narrator Patrick Stewart's warnings that it's all scientifically informed fakery.

Two Years Later, Iraq War Drains Military
Heavy Demands Offset Combat Experience

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 19, 2005; Page A01

Two years after the United States launched a war in Iraq with a crushing display of power, a guerrilla conflict is grinding away at the resources of the U.S. military and casting uncertainty over the fitness of the all-volunteer force, according to senior military leaders, lawmakers and defense experts.

The unexpectedly heavy demands of sustained ground combat are depleting military manpower and gear faster than they can be fully replenished. Shortfalls in recruiting and backlogs in needed equipment are taking a toll, and growing numbers of units have been broken apart or taxed by repeated deployments, particularly in the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve.

Pentagon Strategy Aims to Block Internal Threats to Foreign Forces
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 19, 2005; Page A02

A new national defense strategy issued by the Pentagon calls for greater U.S. military efforts to keep foreign nations from becoming havens for terrorism or being undermined internally by such additional threats as insurgency, drugs and organized crime.

While U.S. forces have long helped to bolster foreign militaries through a variety of assistance programs, the new emphasis on aiding them against internal threats marks a significant departure from the traditional focus on guarding against potential cross-border aggression.

Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking

PASADENA, Calif. - By decoding signals coming from neurons, scientists at the California Institute of Technology have confirmed that an area of the brain known as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vPF) is involved in the planning stages of movement, that instantaneous flicker of time when we contemplate moving a hand or other limb. The work has implications for the development of a neural prosthesis, a brain-machine interface that will give paralyzed people the ability to move and communicate simply by thinking.

By piggybacking on therapeutic work being conducted on epileptic patients, Daniel Rizzuto, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Richard Andersen, the Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, was able to predict where a target the patient was looking at was located, and also where the patient was going to move his hand. The work currently appears in the online version of Nature Neuroscience.

A New Screen Test for Imax: It's the Bible vs. the Volcano

By CORNELIA DEAN

The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen.

Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film's bottom line - or a producer's decision to make a documentary in the first place.

The Do-Nothing Conspiracy

By DAVID BROOKS

If you want an image that captures what American politics will be like over the next few decades, imagine two waves crashing down upon us simultaneously, each magnifying the damage caused by the other.

The first wave is the exploding cost of the entitlement programs. The second wave is the ever-increasing polarization of the political class. The polarization will make it impossible to reach an agreement on how to fix the entitlements problem. Meanwhile the vicious choices forced on us by entitlement costs will make the polarization even worse.

Quote of note:

REP. DAVE WELDON: And to me, it all is sufficiently suspicious that to at least allow the same level of federal review, you know, we're using the civil rights law called the Removal Act in the House version of this bill which was to protect people's civil rights during, you know, the period of the civil rights movement in the United States.

I think it was a very plausible legal approach for us and ultimately the federal court could conclude that the state court had acted appropriately in this.

Remember that.

Last night Congressman Dave Weldon of Florida was on The News Hour talking about the subpoena they issued to a lump of meat.

Roxie at Rox Populi opened a door that Travis at Prolix and Michelle at A Small Victory stepped through.

Do not fuck with the folks that are working this out.

I got shit to do, so I'm going to quote me.

The armies of the Culture Wars are suiting up. People are listening to pundits extrapolate from admittedly flawed polls about their own nature, and the nature of the other. We, the armchair footsoldiers, choose up sides and lambaste each other mercilessly for the words of the leaders of our parties.

Before we get lost in the frenzy, though, I have a request. Something I'd seriously like you to do.

Forget about politics and racism and economics and high principle for a while. Think about your everyday life. People you know, things you do, places you hang out 

just
regular
stuff.

Think about it in ideal terms. What would you like your everyday life to be like?

Hold that ideal in your mind for a while because that is what you should be fighting for. Not a political party, not a social policy or sense of personal outrage. Certainly nothing as petty as a sense of personal triumph or despair over someone else's actions.

You should hold that ideal strongly enough that you don't forget it when choosing a tactic. Strongly enough to remember it every time you make a promise. You should attend to the real concerns of your life and let the political games take place in whatever time is left.

I want you to do that because in the end I'm confident that the world that will support what I need, will support what you need too. In fact, I'm confident that our needs will coincide and our desires nearly so. We will differ in how we pursue our desires because we have different knowledge and learned different techniques.

But we want the same things. And I want you to take a long, clear look at those things, understand clearly what you need and want. And from there you can take the conversation wherever you like.

Dave Winer can be a dick.