Still waiting for the facts?, its been nothing more than arguments from authority & the gun deaths chart is pure bogus, I.E. bee stings annually kill more US citizens than terrorism thus terrorism is not as important as stopping people getting stung straw-man argument. furthermore, alcohol is regulated, cars are regulated even medical practitioners are licenced - if you went into surgery knowing that your doctor may be one of 40% of unregistered practitioners would you feel safe in that knowledge?.

Here is how easy it is to twist this logic to suit your claim: Since the war began in Iraq there has been 4488 U.S. causalities, comparing this to 11,000 annual gun death's in the U.S. PROVES that being at war is LESS DANGEROUS than merely being at home. This example is how correlation does not equal causation (& if this girl in the video is indeed a psychologist she should know this).

Maybe one aspect of the Mexican gun rate is also the fact that the U.S. with 'the 'Fast & Furious law' actually allowed the trafficing of guns from the United States into Mexico right into the hands of drug gangs in the hopes of stopping the cartels. (But did she mention that?).

What are the stats for mass homicides?, rather than suicides compared to other countries?. and in one breath the speaker said that a gun is the most effective way of killing yourself, and later that regardless of guns the person will find a way to kill themselves regardless of guns which she just stated were the most effective other than hanging or jumping from a height. (& Japan is a collectivist culture with a high population, where the individual is expected to look after their entire family & the government is expected to ensure public safety hence strict gun laws - so it may in fact be due to feelings of being ashamed culturally rather than seeking attention & fame as in individualistic cultures like America.

a gun is not a 'tool', it's a weapon - it has no other purpose than to kill. it's like saying a harpoon is a 'tool'.

No-one is saying its just about A) whether being allowed to own a gun B) or not. it's about as stated in the opening of this video as stated in the 2nd amendment 'A well REGULATED militia or marketplace of guns' and the American gun lobby is definitely not said anything about wanting to strengthen the gun-laws I.E. waiting times, background checks, sales at gun-shows etc.

This video is wrong in all these areas listed from start to finish it has been nothing but misrepresentation calling them facts.

@drk421 You've been duped. That study isn't from Harvard.

It's from a student newsletter entitled. "Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy"

ABOUT HARVARD JLPP

The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy is published three times annually by the Harvard Society for Law & Public Policy, Inc., an organization of Harvard Law School students.

The Journal is one of the most widely circulated student-edited law reviews and the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.

The late Stephen Eberhard and former Senator and Secretary of Energy E. Spencer Abraham founded the journal twenty-eight years ago and many journal alumni have risen to prominent legal positions in the government and at the nation’s top law firms.

I've never heard of the Abbeville institute. Apparently it's a neo-confederate think tank with interest in secession according to wiki and the SPLC.

Abbeville Institute (wiki)

In 1998, Livingston was instrumental in the founding of the Abbeville Institute.[citation needed] According to its website, the Institute is "an association of scholars in higher education devoted to a critical study of what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition". Its principal activities are a summer school for graduate students and an annual scholar's conference.[4] It focuses particularly on issues of secession which are kept out of mainstream academia.[5] The Institute is named for the South Carolina hometown of John Calhoun, and a pre-Civil War hotbed of secession.[6]

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2004/winter/the-ideologues


As for the argument itself, I don't know what size has to do with democratic principles. Either you believe in them or you do not. As the world gets bigger, the need to work together is increased, not decreased, IMO.

Buying a couple of lottery tickets is fun. But I see people who clearly don't have much money buying buttloads of tickets, desperately hoping.

I buy lottery tickets myself. Every December. I buy them for my co-workers to scratch off at our annual Christmas dinner. I even buy one for myself, so I can join in the laughter. And I like that some portion of the proceeds goes to schools.

It is the desperate, low income buyers that I ... mourn for.

No need to panic-Hostess is in the process of liquidation of assets which surely includes some manufacturing equipment. My prediction: Their acquisition by a concern that won't let their massive brand recognition and 2.5 billion dollars in annual type-2 diabetes revenue go to waste!

Gah! Where can I download this ep? None of the torrent sites have it

Big Fat Quiz is one of the funniest annual shows ever put on television.

@notarobot "If it costs 1200 Euros (on average) to clear one mine, releasing 24 of these things to detonate ONE mine is still cheaper than other option."

Your math is based on some flawed assumptions. These things might detonate some landmines, that's it, and that's all. Mine clearance is about making safe zones where people can walk again with relative assurance that it's clear of mines.

Apples and oranges, but your apples are rotten, because they simply don't provide much practical use. Maybe it's possible one of these things might save a limb or a life, but as I pointed out earlier, it's equally possible they could cost a limb or a life. Without a dedicated research project nobody will ever know for sure whether these things effectively reduce the number of landmine related injuries.

Also, regarding the cost of mine clearance (well below your 1,200 euro spitball) http://www.un.org/cyberschoolbus/banmines/units/unit1c.asp I'll give the full quote because there are other sobering statistics there.

"A landmine that brings a vendor $3 in revenue, costs the international community between $300 and $1,000 to clear. At a minimum, the 110 million landmines currently buried worldwide will cost approximately $33 billion for clearance alone. In 1994, roughly 100,000 landmines were cleared. However, in that same period 2 million more landmines were laid, leaving the international community with an annual “de-mining deficit” of some 1.9 million mines, adding another $1.4 billion to the cost of clearing the world's landmines."

By the way, one of the big reasons for the wide range in clearance costs is density of the minefield, it takes almost as much work to clear one square metre of space without mines at all as it does to clear one square metre of space with a mine in it, so these doohickys will do little to bring down the cost of clearance in that regard.

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.

oh willard

10,000 dollar bet when income is ~26,000 annual for a lot of people.

http://www.workers.org/2011/editorials/struggling_1110/

*quality

..and tomorrow, check for potato soup contest w/'prizes~
1st VS Annual Cooking Channel Cuntess™

Sunday's incident took place on North 5th Street, near Lehigh Avenue, during what police described as a street party that takes place after the annual parade.

The department had no immediate comment on the video, which depicts a police officer hitting the woman while she is walking away from a group of officers. The officer apparently thought the woman threw beer at police.

City Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez, a central organizer of the parade, said she spoke with Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey this morning, and that Ramsey was particularly upset because the incident involved a commanding officer.

"He was very concerned," Sanchez said. She noted that this year's parade theme was "The Puerto Rican Woman."

The lieutenant will be assigned to desk duty while the incident is investigated, police said.

Sanchez said she had met with police commanders before the parade in the hope of avoiding conflicts between police and paradegoers.

"It's unfortunate that this happened because we just talked about it before the parade," said Sanchez.

The woman, who is not identified, is shown falling to the ground, her face bloodied. In the seconds before the punch, the woman had been walking around a group of people and police officers. Someone near her in the crowd can be seen throwing some liquid into the air, toward the officers.

It appears in the video that she had sprayed silly string from a can.

The woman was taken into custody and issued a citation for disorderly conduct, police said, then released.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20121001_Video_shows_Philadelphia_cop_punching_woman_at_parade.html

This is all good fodder for discussion, but it is clear from the dishonest way in which this video was put together that the Kochs are more interested in creating a political hit piece than fostering any kind of discussion.

They claim Obama signed an executive order to kill American citizens, but they provide no context and erroneously use the plural (citizens) when in actuality it's just one guy. I'm not sure if it could have been avoided. I'm not sure how many lives it saved, if any. I'm not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing. In context, it exists in a very debatable grey area. But we see no attempt to understand any of this in this sanctimonious sermon.

As far as NDAA, it was not a bill designed to indefinitely detain prisoners, it was, (is) an annual military budget bill. John McCain attached a rider to the 2012 NDAA that allows for indefinite detention, for reasons I don't understand, because indefinite detention was already permissible under other existing clauses. Obama asked for it to be removed, but no action was taken, and it was voted in with a veto proof majority.

As to why the court case was appealed, I don't know. It might have something to do with Obama's executive order to shut down Guantanemo and provide trials for the prisoners. Congress vetoed the order by prohibiting funds to try the prisoners, leaving them in a kind of limbo. Does this clause give him more time to shut down Gitmo and give trials to the prisoners under a new and improved congress? I don't know. The point is that while it might be fun for the Koch's to drop some provocative soundbites, they do it in a superficial way that does little to further the conversation. If you want depth, read Chris Hedges, who has written some great stuff on the subject.

You could say that Reason is being superficial on purpose to mirror the Jackson video, but none of the videos they produce ever approach any level of depth.

Beyond all that, right wing libertarianism is not a viable alternative to a consensus guy like Obama or even a complete disaster like Romney. They are at the bottom of the barrel as far as our choices go. Their backwards and luddite view of economics disqualifies them from serious consideration from anyone with even a cursory understanding of economics.

Obama has kept his promises of ending combat in Iraq, getting us a healthcare system and signing an executive order to shut down gitmo (even if congress stopped him from doing it). I'd love to elect Noam Chomsky as President, but that's not going to happen, and he probably wouldn't get much done if somehow he were miraculously elected. There are many factions in this country pushing and pulling, and frankly, I can't remember a time when regular citizens had more pull. Change is slow in a democracy.

>> ^aimpoint:

This stuff really depends on the freeway. A curvy highway in an urban center is definitely not ideal for higher speeds but in emptier areas where there are less cars and straighter pathing, controlling a vehicle at higher speeds is a lot easier. The one thing I would like to know is the accident statistics for highways like that and how many involve significant highspeeds.


The annual fatality rate (2.7 per billion km in 2009) is consistently lower than that of most other superhighway systems, including the US Interstates (4.5 in 2009). Furthermore, a 2005 study by the German government found that Autobahn sections without speed limits had the same accident rate as those with speed limits.

http://www.gettingaroundgermany.info/autobahn.shtml

>> ^Nexxus:

Did she say approx 88 women a day get pregnant from rape? That can't be right.
It seems reasonable to assume the rate of pregnancy is roughly the same with rape or consensual sex, or about 5%. From there it should be a simple matter of extrapolating from rape statistics, but that's the problem - rape statistics are all over the place. The FBI's numbers put it at around 60,000/yr, but it's been suggested that as many as 80% of rapes go unreported.

So, it could be as "few" as 8-10 rape-related pregnancies a day, or as high as 40 or more.
88 per day would represent over 600,000 rapes annually.

False, the court has ruled many times that the sixteenth amendment grants the federal government the right to collect a direct income tax. Arguments to the contrary have been routinely ruled as frivolous resulting in additional frivolity fines for wasting the court's time. That's how dumb these arguments are.

The IRS is just a bureau of the treasury. The treasury doesn't need a law telling it how it can organize itself. So long as it operates within the scope of its powers, it can create any bureaus it wants. Congress passes income tax rates any time they pass a tax bill, often with the annual budget (with the powers granted to it by the sixteenth amendment to the constitution). The IRS is part of the executive and thus is charged with enforcing congress' laws. It's as simple as that. These arguments hold no water whatsoever.

>> ^MonkeySpank:

I agree!
I know of the Snipes story. It's sad.
I would value everyone's opinion with regards to this, but personally, I think this is a non-law that is strictly enforced.
>> ^skinnydaddy1:
Right. Ok As nice as this sounds if you try not to pay you could end up in jail. There have been thousands of people who have tried it and thousands are now having to deal with the consequences of that stupidity. Wesley Snipes is one such person.