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I found that especially funny because of these "dress like a slut, get treated like one" type of responses here.
I know, the word "slut" isn't nice and I'm not good a political correctness (I actually loathe it) but maybe the problem is not with the word but with our associations with it.
You see, the problem I have starts with the idea that there's something wrong with sluts. As a man (and therefore certainly a pig, at least in my case) I enjoy sluts tremendously. They are women who share, at least in general terms, my sexual morals and enjoy their sexuality as much as I do (theirs and mine). I see nothing wrong with that. Sure, I dislike STDs as much as anybody but being slutty doesn't mean automatically being careless, just more at risk. Maybe I just don't understand men who like their female sex partners to be well behaved little princesses. They either prefer very conservative sex (you know, when blowjobs seem kinky) or they are strangely rapey. Maybe it's just our manly discomfort of loosing control over female sexuality.
Then there is this notion of dressing "like a slut". Sure, there is unappropriate clothing. I wouldn't go to a funeral in my Spongebob Squarepants pyjamas. But why is it in todays times, in the western world that is covered in billboards full of women in bikinis, so wrong to walk the street dressed in your best "sexy hooker" halloween costume? Are these women on the billboards, the ones who strike sexualized poses to sell me beer, dressed like sluts too? Is a bikini "slutty clothing"? I'm pretty sure my mom once wore one and yours probably too. As long as the important parts are covered, it should be fine.
The real issue, though, is the idea that anybody has a right to comment on that. Loudly.
If I have a right to comment sluttly clothing, can I also comment on other clothing that isn't the percieved norm? Do I get to shout ghost and terrorism related jokes at women in burkas? Can I yell at cops to come and strip-search me because I have a thing for uniforms? Should I yell at anyone with unfortunate clothing choices? "Hey lady, don't shake that ass, it's too fat for these pants! I don't want the Blob to escape!"
No, it's only sexually provocative clothing that gets these reactions. And that's why I like the video above so much, because it shows what kind of comments you get. It's never "young lady, I disagree with your clothing choice and insist you put on something decent!" nor "What a beautiful skirt, is it silk?"
It is always amused, approving and at the same time disrespectful and sexually dominant. Often gleefull and too often actually misogynistic.
These are never positive comments and even if the words seem positive, they're harassment. It's nothing but sexual harassment. Otherwise these men would be yelling "Young lady, I disagree with your clothing choice and insist you put on something decent!"
Dress like a slut, get treated like one, that's just a lame excuse for men trying to control female sexuality.
Personally, I think if you dress like a slut, I should treat you with respect and kindness. Because I want sluts to like me. I'm a pig.

Unnati Silks Bengal Cotton Sarees Online has been added as a related post - related requested by chicchorea on that post.

Skyclad
Historically, Witches worked Naked, and there are many references to naked Witches standing on their clothes. In a few illustrations, the Witches are clothed in the clothing of their time, but examination of the drawings indicates that the artist rarely knew a real Witch.
Gardner introduced the term Skyclad into the Craft in the 1950's with the reference to "Witches worship naked which is called in the East (Indonesia), 'Skyclad'" and the term stuck as a poetic way to refer to ritual nudity. Witches worshipped Skyclad in 1950's and today, but in the 70s, the Welsh and American Celtic Witches began to wear robes, which became the standard way to worship for years. By the late '70s, the Feminist Witches began to experiment with Skyclad worship, so by the late 80’s about half of the American and European Witches worship Skyclad.
There are a number of reasons for nudity, the first being that in the Charge, which was written by Doreen Valiente from older sources, The Goddess said,
"And as a sign that ye be truly free, ye shall be naked in your rites."

This Charge is so beautiful that many Witches who reject the Gardnerian Traditions, retain the Charge as one of the few declamations that, if not directly from the Goddess, was unquestionably inspired by Her. Thus, the argument follows that we MUST worship naked because it is the will of the Goddess whom we love.

This argument is countered by a later version of the Charge that says,
"as a sign that ye be really free, ye shall be equal in your rites."
However, this is a later American version not as originally written.
A more convincing counter to the Charge is simply to reject the Charge outright.
Reject all Traditional and Gardnerian ideas, so it is then easy reject nudity as well.

A second reason for ritual nudity is the practical one. Witches all over the world often report that naked is safer.
In rites where I have been robed there have been accidents, incidents where a person stepping on the hem of another’s robe, and causes them to trip. In a nine-foot Circle, if one person goes down, usually all follow.  

Naked people are more aware of their surroundings, so you step more carefully and bang into the Altar and others less than clothed Witches.
You feel the heat of candles, as opposed to not detecting the heat until after your robe is in flames, so it is simply safer to be naked.
At Sabbat where we had three Covens worshipping together in Circle, some were from our Outer Court, so wore robes. During the rite, one woman stood too close to the West candle and set her robe on fire. She did manage to extinguish the flames with little disruption, but I did hear about the accident after the rite ended.

The magickal reason for nudity is that anything worn upon the body will interfere with and change the energy given off by the body. This includes clothes, make-up, perfumes, jewelry, glasses, contact lenses and so on.
This argument is quite logically countered by stating, “energy that can pass through a wall, cover miles of distance, and influence another person would not be stopped by a layer of cloth. “ Consider the greater awareness of your surroundings, being closer emotionally and physicality to the others in the circle. Being able to raise energy without the distraction of avoiding stepping on robes or pulling your sleeve up to keep in out of the candle flame.
Think of the Coven body, mind, and spirit that must generate a tremendous amount of power to send that spell over that distance. Once the Cone of Power is sent the spell won’t be deflected, but it can be deflected at the source by a relatively little. In other words, wearing clothing or non-craft jewelry or non-consecrated materials can easily deflect or alter the power that leaves the Circle. The spell, when it reaches its target, may be different or it may even reach a different target.
Nudity is rarely sexual, after ten minutes the naked Witch becomes bored with seeing bare breasts and genitals and is then free to work. A woman wearing a robe that cuts low in the front and is slit up the side to her hips will introduce into the Coven an attitude of sexual desire to the men as they try to see a nipple or thigh that, by being hidden, is desirable but when revealed by nudity is simply another body part. The men, in this situation, may have difficulty concentrating on the work in an effort to see what is barely hidden. Similar things occur in the female mind when the situation is reversed, though women are often trained to deny these thoughts to others and even to themselves.
There are Psychological factors to Nudity are that the people must accept themselves as they are or change themselves. It is difficult to put on a facade when you are denied a girdle, bra, wig, make-up, deodorant, aftershave, codpiece or other enhancements to your image. Once naked, the individual with their sags, and bulges shines and, becomes themselves and not a mask. 
When working magik, it is vital to know yourself and accept your own good and ill, for to attempt the path with false illusions will cause trouble when your subconscious rebels and forces your work to conform to a hidden truth.
To be naked indicates freedom from conventional mundane thought. When clothed in a suit or dress, you conform to societies expectations and become what they wish you to become. Your style of dress and hairstyle are a reflection, not of your own desires, but of what your peers wish you to be.
Equality between class and gender is assured when naked, as the rich no longer have jewels to show their class worth, and Women must face men as equals, both showing their inadequacies and realizing that the other sex is just as physically imperfect as you are. With this barrier down, men and women can accept each other as equals.
Once naked, you are free to place your mind into a sphere of magickal thought. A place between the worlds where the God and Goddess are not symbols hanging on a wall but REAL DIVINITIES, where all is possible.
It is necessary to be clothed at times; in public or when outdoors in winter it may be necessary to be clothed to allow the mind to concentrate on the goal and not to be thinking that the body is slowly freezing to death.
When this is necessary to wear a robe, it should be one that interferes with magik and mind as little as possible. It is best to wear a plain robe that is exactly the same as all others. To make a personal robe will introduce ego and class or sexual differences into the rite.
There are some uses to wearing robes. The simple act of putting on a robe that is reserved only for Ritual use causes the inner mind to awaken and to develop the attitude that "Now the mundane world is behind me, it is time for the magickal world to appear." This can be very effective to your working and will counter some of the physical drawbacks of wearing robes. If all are wearing identical robes, the attitude of equality within, 'the group' is enhanced, for there is nothing different between the people or sexes.
The robe must also be of a natural material such as cotton or wool since synthetics cause a great deal of interference with the power. A simple list of materials which will interfere with magickal power when worn from the least to the greatest effect is as follows: cotton, wool, conductive metals from silver, gold, copper, iron, synthetic materials such as nylon, or rayon, and Silk though a natural material is a strong magickal insulator.
In today’s world, you will find Witches who work Skyclad, robed, in costumes and even in their street clothes. Street clothes however; bring into the Circle all the influences that have become attached to those clothes over the day. These influences will affect your workings as well as your mind because the subconscious will see no difference between the mundane and the magickal, and as we spend most of our time in the mundane world, it is easy to see which will win.


"Nudity establishes a closeness and honesty among conveners and 'is a sign that a witches loyalty is to the truth before any ideology or any comforting illusions.” Starhawk.

There was one of these items supposedly for sale on the Silk Road store on Tor.

course it went fast.

*promote the use of chemists and engineers to come up with some spider-silk repelling gloves...YESTERDAY!!

Read this story - http://gizmodo.com/6-500-silk-worms-spin-one-heck-of-a-cloud-510908939
Silk Pavilion consists of 26 silk polygons which act as the structure of the piece. Made of silk thread laid by a Computer-Numerically Controlled (CNC) machine, the polygons were a template on which to place 6,500 silkworms which produced natural, unprocessed silk patches. The silkworms worked until the whole structure had been covered.

The CNC used an algorithm that had analyzed the patterns in worm-generated patches of silk, and then produced the first level of structure. The silkworms themselves created the second level, working as a sort of natural 3D printer. This gets to the heart of the piece as an interplay between natural and digital construction. The next trend in interior design should definitely be loosing thousands of silk worms on your house and letting them redecorate.

I was curious about this question also. The strings are intriguing to me because wikipedia says the instrument traditionally uses silk strings, but they look like catgut and sound like nylon to me. My best guess is that they are actually nylon, so the pickups would have to be piezo/microphone type things instead of magnetic pickups like for an electric guitar.

A piezoelectric pickup (one of a few options for acoustic guitar amplification) just looks like a small disc, so that could be tucked away someplace not highly visible on her instrument which would explain why we can't readily see it. So, that's my best guess but I could easily be wrong.

I used to keep silk worms and moths.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20pacemaker-t.html?pagewanted=all

One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. “Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,” she said, using my father’s first name. I nodded, and my heart knocked.
Related

Upstairs, my 85-year-old father, Jeffrey, a retired Wesleyan University professor who suffered from dementia, lay napping in what was once their shared bedroom. Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain. The size of a pocket watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for nearly five years. Its battery was expected to last five more.

After tea, I knew, my mother would help him from his narrow bed with its mattress encased in waterproof plastic. She would take him to the toilet, change his diaper and lead him tottering to the couch, where he would sit mutely for hours, pretending to read Joyce Carol Oates, the book falling in his lap as he stared out the window.

I don’t like describing what dementia did to my father — and indirectly to my mother — without telling you first that my parents loved each other, and I loved them. That my mother, Valerie, could stain a deck and sew an evening dress from a photo in Vogue and thought of my father as her best friend. That my father had never given up easily on anything.

Born in South Africa, he lost his left arm in World War II, but built floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our living room; earned a Ph.D. from Oxford; coached rugby; and with my two brothers as crew, sailed his beloved Rhodes 19 on Long Island Sound. When I was a child, he woke me, chortling, with his gloss on a verse from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”: “Awake, my little one! Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry!” At bedtime he tucked me in, quoting “Hamlet” : “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

Now I would look at him and think of Anton Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904. “Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill,” he wrote, “there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death.” A century later, my mother and I had come to long for the machine in my father’s chest to fail.

Until 2001, my two brothers and I — all living in California — assumed that our parents would enjoy long, robust old ages capped by some brief, undefined final illness. Thanks to their own healthful habits and a panoply of medical advances — vaccines, antibiotics, airport defibrillators, 911 networks and the like — they weren’t likely to die prematurely of the pneumonias, influenzas and heart attacks that decimated previous generations. They walked every day. My mother practiced yoga. My father was writing a history of his birthplace, a small South African town.

In short, they were seemingly among the lucky ones for whom the American medical system, despite its fragmentation, inequity and waste, works quite well. Medicare and supplemental insurance paid for their specialists and their trusted Middletown internist, the lean, bespectacled Robert Fales, who, like them, was skeptical of medical overdoing. “I bonded with your parents, and you don’t bond with everybody,” he once told me. “It’s easier to understand someone if they just tell it like it is from their heart and their soul.”

They were also stoics and religious agnostics. They signed living wills and durable power-of-attorney documents for health care. My mother, who watched friends die slowly of cancer, had an underlined copy of the Hemlock Society’s “Final Exit” in her bookcase. Even so, I watched them lose control of their lives to a set of perverse financial incentives — for cardiologists, hospitals and especially the manufacturers of advanced medical devices — skewed to promote maximum treatment. At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims.

Things took their first unexpected turn on Nov. 13, 2001, when my father — then 79, pacemakerless and seemingly healthy — collapsed on my parents’ kitchen floor in Middletown, making burbling sounds. He had suffered a stroke.

He came home six weeks later permanently incapable of completing a sentence. But as I’ve said, he didn’t give up easily, and he doggedly learned again how to fasten his belt; to peck out sentences on his computer; to walk alone, one foot dragging, to the university pool for water aerobics. He never again put on a shirt without help or looked at the book he had been writing. One day he haltingly told my mother, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

His stroke devastated two lives. The day before, my mother was an upper-middle-class housewife who practiced calligraphy in her spare time. Afterward, she was one of tens of millions of people in America, most of them women, who help care for an older family member.

Their numbers grow each day. Thanks to advanced medical technologies, elderly people now survive repeated health crises that once killed them, and so the “oldest old” have become the nation’s most rapidly growing age group. Nearly a third of Americans over 85 have dementia (a condition whose prevalence rises in direct relationship to longevity). Half need help with at least one practical, life-sustaining activity, like getting dressed or making breakfast. Even though a capable woman was hired to give my dad showers, my 77-year-old mother found herself on duty more than 80 hours a week. Her blood pressure rose and her weight fell. On a routine visit to Dr. Fales, she burst into tears. She was put on sleeping pills and antidepressants.

My father said he came to believe that she would have been better off if he had died. “She’d have weeped the weep of a widow,” he told me in his garbled, poststroke speech, on a walk we took together in the fall of 2002. “And then she would have been all right.” It was hard to tell which of them was suffering more.

As we shuffled through the fallen leaves that day, I thought of my father’s father, Ernest Butler. He was 79 when he died in 1965, before pacemakers, implanted cardiac defibrillators, stents and replacement heart valves routinely staved off death among the very old. After completing some long-unfinished chairs, he cleaned his woodshop, had a heart attack and died two days later in a plain hospital bed. As I held my dad’s soft, mottled hand, I vainly wished him a similar merciful death.

A few days before Christmas that year, after a vigorous session of water exercises, my father developed a painful inguinal (intestinal) hernia. My mother took him to Fales, who sent them to a local surgeon, who sent them to a cardiologist for a preoperative clearance. After an electrocardiogram recorded my father’s slow heartbeat — a longstanding and symptomless condition not uncommon in the very old — the cardiologist, John Rogan, refused to clear my dad for surgery unless he received a pacemaker.

Without the device, Dr. Rogan told me later, my father could have died from cardiac arrest during surgery or perhaps within a few months. It was the second time Rogan had seen my father. The first time, about a year before, he recommended the device for the same slow heartbeat. That time, my then-competent and prestroke father expressed extreme reluctance, on the advice of Fales, who considered it overtreatment.

My father’s medical conservatism, I have since learned, is not unusual. According to an analysis by the Dartmouth Atlas medical-research group, patients are far more likely than their doctors to reject aggressive treatments when fully informed of pros, cons and alternatives — information, one study suggests, that nearly half of patients say they don’t get. And although many doctors assume that people want to extend their lives, many do not. In a 1997 study in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 30 percent of seriously ill people surveyed in a hospital said they would “rather die” than live permanently in a nursing home. In a 2008 study in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 28 percent of patients with advanced heart failure said they would trade one day of excellent health for another two years in their current state.

When Rogan suggested the pacemaker for the second time, my father was too stroke-damaged to discuss, and perhaps even to weigh, his trade­offs. The decision fell to my mother — anxious to relieve my father’s pain, exhausted with caregiving, deferential to doctors and no expert on high-tech medicine. She said yes. One of the most important medical decisions of my father’s life was over in minutes. Dr. Fales was notified by fax.

Fales loved my parents, knew their suffering close at hand, continued to oppose a pacemaker and wasn’t alarmed by death. If he had had the chance to sit down with my parents, he could have explained that the pacemaker’s battery would last 10 years and asked whether my father wanted to live to be 89 in his nearly mute and dependent state. He could have discussed the option of using a temporary external pacemaker that, I later learned, could have seen my dad safely through surgery. But my mother never consulted Fales. And the system would have effectively penalized him if she had. Medicare would have paid him a standard office-visit rate of $54 for what would undoubtedly have been a long meeting — and nothing for phone calls to work out a plan with Rogan and the surgeon.

Medicare has made minor improvements since then, and in the House version of the health care reform bill debated last year, much better payments for such conversations were included. But after the provision was distorted as reimbursement for “death panels,” it was dropped. In my father’s case, there was only a brief informed-consent process, covering the boilerplate risks of minor surgery, handled by the general surgeon.

I believe that my father’s doctors did their best within a compartmentalized and time-pressured medical system. But in the absence of any other guiding hand, there is no doubt that economics helped shape the wider context in which doctors made decisions. Had we been at the Mayo Clinic — where doctors are salaried, medical records are electronically organized and care is coordinated by a single doctor — things might have turned out differently. But Middletown is part of the fee-for-service medical economy. Doctors peddle their wares on a piecework basis; communication among them is haphazard; thinking is often short term; nobody makes money when medical interventions are declined; and nobody is in charge except the marketplace.

And so on Jan. 2, 2003, at Middlesex Hospital, the surgeon implanted my father’s pacemaker using local anesthetic. Medicare paid him $461 and the hospital a flat fee of about $12,000, of which an estimated $7,500 went to St. Jude Medical, the maker of the device. The hernia was fixed a few days later.

It was a case study in what primary-care doctors have long bemoaned: that Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all. The incentives for overtreatment continue, said Dr. Ted Epperly, the board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, because those who profit from them — specialists, hospitals, drug companies and the medical-device manufacturers — spend money lobbying Congress and the public to keep it that way.

Last year, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, medical-equipment manufacturers and other medical professionals spent $545 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This may help explain why researchers estimate that 20 to 30 percent of Medicare’s $510 billion budget goes for unnecessary tests and treatment. Why cost-containment received short shrift in health care reform. Why physicians like Fales net an average of $173,000 a year, while noninvasive cardiologists like Rogan net about $419,000.

The system rewarded nobody for saying “no” or even “wait” — not even my frugal, intelligent, Consumer-Reports-reading mother. Medicare and supplemental insurance covered almost every penny of my father’s pacemaker. My mother was given more government-mandated consumer information when she bought a new Camry a year later.

And so my father’s electronically managed heart — now requiring frequent monitoring, paid by Medicare — became part of the $24 billion worldwide cardiac-device industry and an indirect subsidizer of the fiscal health of American hospitals. The profit margins that manufacturers earn on cardiac devices is close to 30 percent. Cardiac procedures and diagnostics generate about 20 percent of hospital revenues and 30 percent of profits.

Shortly after New Year’s 2003, my mother belatedly called and told me about the operations, which went off without a hitch. She didn’t call earlier, she said, because she didn’t want to worry me. My heart sank, but I said nothing. It is one thing to silently hope that your beloved father’s heart might fail. It is another to actively abet his death.

The pacemaker bought my parents two years of limbo, two of purgatory and two of hell. At first they soldiered on, with my father no better and no worse. My mother reread Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Full Catastrophe Living,” bought a self-help book on patience and rose each morning to meditate.

In 2005, the age-related degeneration that had slowed my father’s heart attacked his eyes, lungs, bladder and bowels. Clots as narrow as a single human hair lodged in tiny blood vessels in his brain, killing clusters of neurons by depriving them of oxygen. Long partly deaf, he began losing his sight to wet macular degeneration, requiring ocular injections that cost nearly $2,000 each. A few months later, he forgot his way home from the university pool. He grew incontinent. He was collapsing physically, like an ancient, shored-up house.

In the summer of 2006, he fell in the driveway and suffered a brain hemorrhage. Not long afterward, he spent a full weekend compulsively brushing and rebrushing his teeth. “The Jeff I married . . . is no longer the same person,” my mother wrote in the journal a social worker had suggested she keep. “My life is in ruins. This is horrible, and I have lasted for five years.” His pacemaker kept on ticking.

When bioethicists debate life-extending technologies, the effects on people like my mother rarely enter the calculus. But a 2007 Ohio State University study of the DNA of family caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease showed that the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, had degraded enough to reflect a four-to-eight-year shortening of lifespan. By that reckoning, every year that the pacemaker gave my irreparably damaged father took from my then-vigorous mother an equal year.

When my mother was upset, she meditated or cleaned house. When I was upset, I Googled. In 2006, I discovered that pacemakers could be deactivated without surgery. Nurses, doctors and even device salesmen had done so, usually at deathbeds. A white ceramic device, like a TV remote and shaped like the wands that children use to blow bubbles, could be placed around the hump on my father’s chest. Press a few buttons and the electrical pulses that ran down the leads to his heart would slow until they were no longer effective. My father’s heart, I learned, would probably not stop. It would just return to its old, slow rhythm. If he was lucky, he might suffer cardiac arrest and die within weeks, perhaps in his sleep. If he was unlucky, he might linger painfully for months while his lagging heart failed to suffuse his vital organs with sufficient oxygenated blood.

If we did nothing, his pacemaker would not stop for years. Like the tireless charmed brooms in Disney’s “Fantasia,” it would prompt my father’s heart to beat after he became too demented to speak, sit up or eat. It would keep his heart pulsing after he drew his last breath. If he was buried, it would send signals to his dead heart in the coffin. If he was cremated, it would have to be cut from his chest first, to prevent it from exploding and damaging the walls or hurting an attendant.

On the Internet, I discovered that the pacemaker — somewhat like the ventilator, defibrillator and feeding tube — was first an exotic, stopgap device, used to carry a handful of patients through a brief medical crisis. Then it morphed into a battery-powered, implantable and routine treatment. When Medicare approved the pacemaker for reimbursement in 1966, the market exploded. Today pacemakers are implanted annually in more than 400,000 Americans, about 80 percent of whom are over 65. According to calculations by the Dartmouth Atlas research group using Medicare data, nearly a fifth of new recipients who receive pacemakers annually — 76,000 — are over 80. The typical patient with a cardiac device today is an elderly person suffering from at least one other severe chronic illness.

Over the years, as technology has improved, the battery life of these devices lengthened. The list of heart conditions for which they are recommended has grown. In 1984, the treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology declared that pacemakers were strongly recommended as “indicated” or mildly approved as “reasonable” for 56 heart conditions and “not indicated” for 31 more. By 2008, the list for which they were strongly or mildly recommended expanded to 88, with most of the increase in the lukewarm “reasonable” category.

The research backing the expansion of diagnoses was weak. Over all, only 5 percent of the positive recommendations were supported by research from multiple double-blind randomized studies, the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. And 58 percent were based on no studies at all, only a “consensus of expert opinion.” Of the 17 cardiologists who wrote the 2008 guidelines, 11 received financing from cardiac-device makers or worked at institutions receiving it. Seven, due to the extent of their financial connections, were recused from voting on the guidelines they helped write.

This pattern — a paucity of scientific support and a plethora of industry connections — holds across almost all cardiac treatments, according to the cardiologist Pierluigi Tricoci of Duke University’s Clinical Research Institute. Last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Tricoci and his co-authors wrote that only 11 percent of 2,700 widely used cardiac-treatment guidelines were based on that gold standard. Most were based only on expert opinion.

Experts are as vulnerable to conflicts of interest as researchers are, the authors warned, because “expert clinicians are also those who are likely to receive honoraria, speakers bureau [fees], consulting fees or research support from industry.” They called the current cardiac-research agenda “strongly influenced by industry’s natural desire to introduce new products.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that I also discovered others puzzling over cardiologists who recommended pacemakers for relatives with advanced dementia. “78-year-old mother-in-law has dementia; severe short-term memory issues,” read an Internet post by “soninlaw” on Elderhope.com, a caregivers’ site, in 2007. “On a routine trip to her cardiologist, doctor decides she needs a pacemaker. . . . Anyone have a similar encounter?”

By the summer of 2007, my dad had forgotten the purpose of a dinner napkin and had to be coached to remove his slippers before he tried to put on his shoes. After a lifetime of promoting my father’s health, my mother reversed course. On a routine visit, she asked Rogan to deactivate the pacemaker. “It was hard,” she later told me. “I was doing for Jeff what I would have wanted Jeff to do for me.” Rogan soon made it clear he was morally opposed. “It would have been like putting a pillow over your father’s head,” he later told me.

Not long afterward, my mother declined additional medical tests and refused to put my father on a new anti-dementia drug and a blood thinner with troublesome side effects. “I take responsibility for whatever,” she wrote in her journal that summer. “Enough of all this overkill! It’s killing me! Talk about quality of life — what about mine?”

Then came the autumn day when she asked for my help, and I said yes. I told myself that we were simply trying to undo a terrible medical mistake. I reminded myself that my dad had rejected a pacemaker when his faculties were intact. I imagined, as a bioethicist had suggested, having a 15-minute conversation with my independent, predementia father in which I saw him shaking his head in horror over any further extension of what was not a “life,” but a prolonged and attenuated dying. None of it helped. I knew that once he died, I would dream of him and miss his mute, loving smiles. I wanted to melt into the arms of the father I once had and ask him to handle this. Instead, I felt as if I were signing on as his executioner and that I had no choice.

Over the next five months, my mother and I learned many things. We were told, by the Hemlock Society’s successor, Compassion and Choices, that as my father’s medical proxy, my mother had the legal right to ask for the withdrawal of any treatment and that the pacemaker was, in theory at least, a form of medical treatment. We learned that although my father’s living will requested no life support if he were comatose or dying, it said nothing about dementia and did not define a pacemaker as life support. We learned that if we called 911, emergency medical technicians would not honor my father’s do-not-resuscitate order unless he wore a state-issued orange hospital bracelet. We also learned that no cardiology association had given its members clear guidance on when, or whether, deactivating pacemakers was ethical.

(Last month that changed. The Heart Rhythm Society and the American Heart Association issued guidelines declaring that patients or their legal surrogates have the moral and legal right to request the withdrawal of any medical treatment, including an implanted cardiac device. It said that deactivating a pacemaker was neither euthanasia nor assisted suicide, and that a doctor could not be compelled to do so in violation of his moral values. In such cases, it continued, doctors “cannot abandon the patient but should involve a colleague who is willing to carry out the procedure.” This came, of course, too late for us.)

In the spring of 2008, things got even worse. My father took to roaring like a lion at his caregivers. At home in California, I searched the Internet for a sympathetic cardiologist and a caregiver to put my Dad to bed at night. My frayed mother began to shout at him, and their nighttime scenes were heartbreaking and frightening. An Alzheimer’s Association support-group leader suggested that my brothers and I fly out together and institutionalize my father. This leader did not know my mother’s formidable will and had never heard her speak about her wedding vows or her love.

Meanwhile my father drifted into what nurses call “the dwindles”: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better. He fell repeatedly at night and my mother could not pick him up. Finally, he was weak enough to qualify for palliative care, and a team of nurses and social workers visited the house. His chest grew wheezy. My mother did not request antibiotics. In mid-April 2008, he was taken by ambulance to Middlesex Hospital’s hospice wing, suffering from pneumonia.

Pneumonia was once called “the old man’s friend” for its promise of an easy death. That’s not what I saw when I flew in. On morphine, unreachable, his eyes shut, my beloved father was breathing as hard and regularly as a machine.

My mother sat holding his hand, weeping and begging for forgiveness for her impatience. She sat by him in agony. She beseeched his doctors and nurses to increase his morphine dose and to turn off the pacemaker. It was a weekend, and the doctor on call at Rogan’s cardiology practice refused authorization, saying that my father “might die immediately.” And so came five days of hard labor. My mother and I stayed by him in shifts, while his breathing became increasingly ragged and his feet slowly started to turn blue. I began drafting an appeal to the hospital ethics committee. My brothers flew in.

On a Tuesday afternoon, with my mother at his side, my father stopped breathing. A hospice nurse hung a blue light on the outside of his hospital door. Inside his chest, his pacemaker was still quietly pulsing.

After his memorial service in the Wesleyan University chapel, I carried a box from the crematory into the woods of an old convent where he and I often walked. It was late April, overcast and cold. By the side of a stream, I opened the box, scooped out a handful of ashes and threw them into the swirling water. There were some curious spiraled metal wires, perhaps the leads of his pacemaker, mixed with the white dust and pieces of bone.

A year later, I took my mother to meet a heart surgeon in a windowless treatment room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She was 84, with two leaking heart valves. Her cardiologist had recommended open-heart surgery, and I was hoping to find a less invasive approach. When the surgeon asked us why we were there, my mother said, “To ask questions.” She was no longer a trusting and deferential patient. Like me, she no longer saw doctors — perhaps with the exception of Fales — as healers or her fiduciaries. They were now skilled technicians with their own agendas. But I couldn’t help feeling that something precious — our old faith in a doctor’s calling, perhaps, or in a healing that is more than a financial transaction or a reflexive fixing of broken parts — had been lost.

The surgeon was forthright: without open-heart surgery, there was a 50-50 chance my mother would die within two years. If she survived the operation, she would probably live to be 90. And the risks? He shrugged. Months of recovery. A 5 percent chance of stroke. Some possibility, he acknowledged at my prompting, of postoperative cognitive decline. (More than half of heart-bypass patients suffer at least a 20 percent reduction in mental function.) My mother lifted her trouser leg to reveal an anklet of orange plastic: her do-not-resuscitate bracelet. The doctor recoiled. No, he would not operate with that bracelet in place. It would not be fair to his team. She would be revived if she collapsed. “If I have a stroke,” my mother said, nearly in tears, “I want you to let me go.” What about a minor stroke, he said — a little weakness on one side?

I kept my mouth shut. I was there to get her the information she needed and to support whatever decision she made. If she emerged from surgery intellectually damaged, I would bring her to a nursing home in California and try to care for her the way she had cared for my father at such cost to her own health. The thought terrified me.

The doctor sent her up a floor for an echocardiogram. A half-hour later, my mother came back to the waiting room and put on her black coat. “No,” she said brightly, with the clarity of purpose she had shown when she asked me to have the pacemaker deactivated. “I will not do it.”

She spent the spring and summer arranging house repairs, thinning out my father’s bookcases and throwing out the files he collected so lovingly for the book he never finished writing. She told someone that she didn’t want to leave a mess for her kids. Her chest pain worsened, and her breathlessness grew severe. “I’m aching to garden,” she wrote in her journal. “But so it goes. ACCEPT ACCEPT ACCEPT.”

Last August, she had a heart attack and returned home under hospice care. One evening a month later, another heart attack. One of my brothers followed her ambulance to the hospice wing where we had sat for days by my father’s bed. The next morning, she took off her silver earrings and told the nurses she wanted to stop eating and drinking, that she wanted to die and never go home. Death came to her an hour later, while my brother was on the phone to me in California — almost as mercifully as it had come to my paternal grandfather. She was continent and lucid to her end.

A week later, at the same crematory near Long Island Sound, my brothers and I watched through a plate-glass window as a cardboard box containing her body, dressed in a scarlet silk ao dai she had sewn herself, slid into the flames. The next day, the undertaker delivered a plastic box to the house where, for 45 of their 61 years together, my parents had loved and looked after each other, humanly and imperfectly. There were no bits of metal mixed with the fine white powder and the small pieces of her bones.

Katy Butler lives in Mill Valley, Calif., and teaches memoir writing at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

>> ^Jinx:

Its not just the cute fluffy mammals which are crucial to ecossytems and possible hold the keys to further discovery. I don't feel sorry for the spider, I have no empathy towards it at all but we still have a responsibility to at least study it and its habitat BEFORE we build a road over it and possible extinguish any chance of discovery for good. The road can wait a little longer when concerning an organism that took millions of years to evolve.
Who knows, one day when we're building things out of spider silk you might be glad we took the time to study this rare arachnid


Precisely. Let's not assume that a species is useless only a few seconds after realizing that it existed at all. Moreover, one should not make assumptions when one has zero biological background whatsoever.

You don't know what it eats. You don't know what eats it. You don't know its importance to its ecosystem. It could be a keystone species, an indicator species, an endemic species, or one of a hundred other important parts of a complex network of organisms. Do your research and then make conclusions. Not the other way around.

Its not just the cute fluffy mammals which are crucial to ecossytems and possible hold the keys to further discovery. I don't feel sorry for the spider, I have no empathy towards it at all but we still have a responsibility to at least study it and its habitat BEFORE we build a road over it and possible extinguish any chance of discovery for good. The road can wait a little longer when concerning an organism that took millions of years to evolve.

Who knows, one day when we're building things out of spider silk you might be glad we took the time to study this rare arachnid

Sweet! I copied the embed code from that, and it seems to work!!
Thank you so much for your help!

In reply to this comment by lucky760:
Is this the original video?
http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/silk-soy-milks-disgusting-ad-updated


In reply to this comment by seltar:
That is absolutely correct :

#2 was a spoofed ad with the Silk logo, sapia coloring, timeshift, different music, and some text.
#1 is the original source used for the spoof video.

#2 was dead at the time, so they just assumed, based on the thumbnail or not seeing the other video.

Thank you so much for your help! :

In reply to this comment by lucky760:
So, this video should be restored because it's correct:
#1 - http://videosift.com/video/Milk-in-her-face?noredirect

And this video should be *dead because the actual embed is unavailable and it was incorrectly given the above video's embed:
#2 - http://videosift.com/video/Strangely-erotic-milk-ad

Is all that correct? Let me know and if so, I'll undo the dupeof on #1 and I'll make dead #2.

Also, was #2 very obviously a different video than #1? In other words, was it an egregious and obvious error that those two members falsely agreed it was a dupe? Or was #2 just dead at the time, so they were just guessing it was a dupe?


In reply to this comment by seltar:
This might be the wrong place to ask this, but how can I undupe a video?

http://videosift.com/video/Strangely-erotic-milk-ad

That link was to a spoof ad, whilst the version that was wrongly duped was the original source.
The original source was all I could find after the spoof ad died, and it was quite different to the spoof ad - different music and no text, overlays, logos or branding.
So I decided to sift it separately, hoping that one day the spoof ad would resurface.

Is this something that should be handled in a Sift talk, or what?

Thanks for you input.

Thanks, Lucky. Will do! Sorry for my mixup.
In reply to this comment by lucky760:
This type of thing has been an issue since *dupeof was introduced. The response 100% of the time to an invalid killing has always been to strip the invocation from the invokers. (This is for the reasons I mentioned in my PM to you.)

The original video was quite different because it had different editing and visual effects and was presented as a commercial for Silk.

Given your appeal, I'll reinstate your *dupeof/*isdupe privileges because it seems you did watch both and genuinely considered them duplicates, which can be understandable since the two were so similar.

In the future, if they aren't actually identical, which was the case here, please opt to *discuss the issue in Sift Talk instead of just killing.

Thanks!

In reply to this comment by Fusionaut:
Wait a second. I saw both videos before the first one died. It seemed like a dupe to me. @<a rel="nofollow" href="http://seltar.videosift.com" title="member since June 11th, 2006 @ 13:55:42" class="profilelink"><strong style="color:#f875ff">seltar assumed that I had not seen the first video posted but I had. If there was any difference in the videos it is slight.

I've had videos that were deemed dupes of dead videos before and I've seen other videos where a similar situation happened. Why is this the first time this has become an issue? There is nothing in the rules/FAQ regarding this:

"A duplicate video is one which contains content already wholly available on VideoSift in a published, queued, personal queued, or dead/deadpool video submission. Minor changes in content, like a few additional insignificant seconds of video or alternate background music, will still be considered dupes. The only exception to this is if the change in audio makes a significant difference to the video content.

If a newer submission's video is a clip of content found within an existing post, it will be considered a duplicate unless it meets both these criteria:

The original post is at least 15 minutes in length
The original post is at least 3 times longer than the clip
If a duplicate cannot adequately be considered an exact or reasonable replacement of the original, it should be * discarded.

Otherwise, instead of * discarding, privileged members may invoke * dupeof on a video that is a duplicate. This invocation will kill the dupe, transfer its votes to the original, and add the duplicate embed code as a backup to the original post. A duplicate video may have * dupeof invoked on even if it has been discarded, so such votes may still validly be transferred to the original video."

It takes two sifters to declare a dupe so that a video is not wrongly duped and in this case two sifters thought that Seltar's vid was a dupe of his one. You're taking Seltar's version of events without even asking me or the the other duper. I don't exactly invoke "dupeof" all that often so a punishment after a first offence seems a bit overkill.


In reply to this comment by lucky760:
Your *dupeof/*isdupe privilege has been revoked for invoking against a video that was clearly not a duplicate or that was dead at the time (which means you could not possibly have known whether or not it was a dupe).

Your action caused a great deal of lost time on the duped post, which cost it all of its hotness and any chance at the Top 15, and a lot of wasted effort was required to undo your mistake.

In reply to this comment by Fusionaut:
oh and *isdupe

This type of thing has been an issue since *dupeof was introduced. The response 100% of the time to an invalid killing has always been to strip the invocation from the invokers. (This is for the reasons I mentioned in my PM to you.)

The original video was quite different because it had different editing and visual effects and was presented as a commercial for Silk.

Given your appeal, I'll reinstate your *dupeof/*isdupe privileges because it seems you did watch both and genuinely considered them duplicates, which can be understandable since the two were so similar.

In the future, if they aren't actually identical, which was the case here, please opt to *discuss the issue in Sift Talk instead of just killing.

Thanks!

In reply to this comment by Fusionaut:
Wait a second. I saw both videos before the first one died. It seemed like a dupe to me. @seltar assumed that I had not seen the first video posted but I had. If there was any difference in the videos it is slight.

I've had videos that were deemed dupes of dead videos before and I've seen other videos where a similar situation happened. Why is this the first time this has become an issue? There is nothing in the rules/FAQ regarding this:

"A duplicate video is one which contains content already wholly available on VideoSift in a published, queued, personal queued, or dead/deadpool video submission. Minor changes in content, like a few additional insignificant seconds of video or alternate background music, will still be considered dupes. The only exception to this is if the change in audio makes a significant difference to the video content.

If a newer submission's video is a clip of content found within an existing post, it will be considered a duplicate unless it meets both these criteria:

The original post is at least 15 minutes in length
The original post is at least 3 times longer than the clip
If a duplicate cannot adequately be considered an exact or reasonable replacement of the original, it should be * discarded.

Otherwise, instead of * discarding, privileged members may invoke * dupeof on a video that is a duplicate. This invocation will kill the dupe, transfer its votes to the original, and add the duplicate embed code as a backup to the original post. A duplicate video may have * dupeof invoked on even if it has been discarded, so such votes may still validly be transferred to the original video."

It takes two sifters to declare a dupe so that a video is not wrongly duped and in this case two sifters thought that Seltar's vid was a dupe of his one. You're taking Seltar's version of events without even asking me or the the other duper. I don't exactly invoke "dupeof" all that often so a punishment after a first offence seems a bit overkill.


In reply to this comment by lucky760:
Your *dupeof/*isdupe privilege has been revoked for invoking against a video that was clearly not a duplicate or that was dead at the time (which means you could not possibly have known whether or not it was a dupe).

Your action caused a great deal of lost time on the duped post, which cost it all of its hotness and any chance at the Top 15, and a lot of wasted effort was required to undo your mistake.

In reply to this comment by Fusionaut:
oh and *isdupe

That is absolutely correct

#2 was a spoofed ad with the Silk logo, sapia coloring, timeshift, different music, and some text.
#1 is the original source used for the spoof video.

#2 was dead at the time, so they just assumed, based on the thumbnail or not seeing the other video.

Thank you so much for your help!

In reply to this comment by lucky760:
So, this video should be restored because it's correct:
#1 - http://videosift.com/video/Milk-in-her-face?noredirect

And this video should be *dead because the actual embed is unavailable and it was incorrectly given the above video's embed:
#2 - http://videosift.com/video/Strangely-erotic-milk-ad

Is all that correct? Let me know and if so, I'll undo the dupeof on #1 and I'll make dead #2.

Also, was #2 very obviously a different video than #1? In other words, was it an egregious and obvious error that those two members falsely agreed it was a dupe? Or was #2 just dead at the time, so they were just guessing it was a dupe?


In reply to this comment by seltar:
This might be the wrong place to ask this, but how can I undupe a video?

http://videosift.com/video/Strangely-erotic-milk-ad

That link was to a spoof ad, whilst the version that was wrongly duped was the original source.
The original source was all I could find after the spoof ad died, and it was quite different to the spoof ad - different music and no text, overlays, logos or branding.
So I decided to sift it separately, hoping that one day the spoof ad would resurface.

Is this something that should be handled in a Sift talk, or what?

Thanks for you input.