Oh, yeah, and when I suggested to the nurse that I was being overly cautious by getting a tetanus shot for such a minor thing, she retorted, well, the doctor's seen only two people who actually got tetanus, and they both died.
Yikes.
100% of the patients that doctor has seen for tetanus died? You should ask for a different doctor.
Yech. I would have changed the channel. Just saying "The doctor really shouldn't force his political beliefs on us" as I did so.
That is, changed the channel, and then turned the TV off. So if someone turned it back on, the default would be the Westminster Dog Show or Pimp My Mom or anything else but that.
2: Was he not supposed to stick me with that rusty needle? He said it was for the best.
I mainly run into this problem in airports, which seem to all play CNN (which they may think is a neutral choice but for much of the day really isn't) at blaringly loud volume.
(Actually, I think what they're playing is a special airport network that's mostly CNN with some ESPN and other stuff thrown in, so I doubt there's anything anyone can do about it.)
5: The biggest difference beteen Airport CNN and regular CNN is the inexplicable absence of news about the day's plane crashes on Airport CNN.
But those TV's don't have channel switches or off switches so there's not a damn thing you can do.
Everyone should put one of these on their wish list for their next birthday/holiday involving gifts.
I would have walked over to the TV, put my hand on the volume button (I almost wrote "knob" 'cause I'm old like that), and said, "Would anyone mind if I turned this down a bit?" as I cranked it down to barely audible. Chances are no one would say anything.
Also, I guess I am a liberal fascist; I want to control the TV for the whole goddamned room, goddamnit.
I bet you wanted to hug everyone, too, you crypto-Socialist-Nazi-totalitarian-vegan.
his specific lesson plans for the "Battle of the Alamo" session
1. How the waterboarding of Mexican communists saved the Alamo (Discussion Group)
2. How the waterboarding of Mexican communists saved the Alamo (Hands-On Experiments) (Depending on sufficient # of Mexican-looking students)
3. Everyone Open Your Bibles To A Random Verse Of Revelation And Explain How it Predicted How FDR Lost The Alamo (2/3 of Course Credit)
4. Weeping For No Obvious Reason (20-30 minutes or until end of lesson or Rapture)
So are there pictures of Stanley giving birthgetting his shot, or what?
Faced with having to watch or listen to FOX, I ask to put on ESPN. If you get the fish-eye, you can always say "I want to see if the game's on." What game? Who cares?
Glenn Beck's tea party at the Alamo.
This is hilarious. The Alamo. I wonder who thought up that one.
Fox News is on in every medical waiting room, car repair customer lounge, fast food restaurant, and day care center (okay, possibly not the last one) here in Rural Red State. It's a reflection of the people, but then again it is a way to push people's already-existing tendencies into extreme territory. It is relentless propaganda. You are always correct to turn it off. If we ever get a liberal media, it will have to be not only a counter channel, but one that will speak with an inflection that would not sound like NPR to these red staters.
Maybe your doctor is trying to sell high blood pressure medication.
Man, we just got MH to see the light, and now rm shows up.
It's like there's some law of conservation of two-letter acronym people or something.
But let's focus on what's important: what did you do to yourself to earn a tetanus shot, Stanley?
17: I excercised less-than-appropriate caution while picking up an old drum stand that was sharding metal INTO MY THUMB. It's possibly the stupidest tetanus shot ever.
Did you know tetanus shots can now include a vaccine for whooping cough?
I suppose needing to cough whoopily while having lockjaw would be a pretty serious matter.
Depending on sufficient # of Mexican-looking students ogged's relatives.
M/tch, I'm a confirmed Only Occasional Drive-by, plus I resist this demand for individuality and a memorable personality. Blog commenting is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
19: I'm wondering what happened to the diptheria vaccine -- isn't that in the same package? Stanley's going to feel pretty silly when a membrane starts growing over his tonsils if he didn't get one.
21: I confess I've always read "rm" as a short form of Rainer Maria (the band, of course).
Blog commenting is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
T.S. Eliot felt the same way.
this pic -- in scientific american, which my dad read -- freaked me out as a kid: i wd get frantic if i grazed my knee and there was even a bit of mud nearby
13: It's even on in the Federal building where I work. (TV under control of the Army Corps of Engineers.)
It is nice to see Obama's portrait where the Bush/Cheney portraits used to hang, though. (The Biden portrait isn't up yet for some reason.)
When I got my shots for my China trip, I was told that it is possible to get too many tetanus shots, but I don't think I understood the explanation, because I don't remember it. (The old rule used to be once every10 years, and now it's something like 4 times in a lifetime.)
I was told that it is possible to get too many tetanus shots, but I don't think I understood the explanation
Loss of blood.
I often wonder when trapped in the waiting room if anyone really wants to watch "Judge Joe Brown" or what have you or if we're all just too polite/passive to ask if we can turn off the shouting and scowling.
Also, momentum makes my head ponderous and heavy.
I was told that it is possible to get too many tetanus shots, but I don't think I understood the explanation, because I don't remember it. (The old rule used to be once every10 years, and now it's something like 4 times in a lifetime.)
I just got one and the recommendation here still seems to be every 10 years. They used to just give them willy nilly if you got puncture wounds. They did stop doing that.
It's possibly the stupidest tetanus shot ever.
How about stepping on a rusty nail while doing demolition work in flip-flops?
I confess I've always read "rm" as a short form of Rainer Maria (the band, of course).
I assumed it was "robert mcmanus".
the recommendation here still seems to be every 10 years
I was also told ten years, but the doctor also seemed pretty convinced that I was a seekrit member of the Dave Matthews Band, who had played in town the night before. "Oh, sure. Of course you're not," he kept saying with a sort of wink. Weird dude.
momentum makes my head ponderous and heavy.
Heh.
12:This is hilarious. The Alamo. I wonder who thought up that one.
Why, the same people who understand American Texas American history! They know that somebody won at the Alamo, so it is a most excellent setting for Thirteen Days to Tax Evasion. The question is: who do they think was the winning side? Do they think of themselves as the guys honkies that won one, so they are like totally down with the Clearly Honky Fruit Hat Guy? Or R R1 they down with the poor massa-creed honky honkies (which presumably, in their minds, does not include any not-honky honkies), which I assume, means they think they will be horribly (but perhaps valiantly) defeated?
In the former case, obviously they are keeping in touch with their Banana Republican roots; in the latter case, clearly they see themselves as sorta brave, but maybe kinda stupid souls. It's a mystery of Texas American history! I, for one won, am pleased as punch to have such a well-educated opposition party, and am ecstatically looking forwards to their future public education efforts at sites like San Jacinto.
max
['I'm certain they'll get there as soon as they find it on the map.']
1 Gratuitous reference inserted as a gift to Grover Norquist
7: SHUT UP. I"M OLD, OK?
A few years back I was in a car dealership waiting room where they were blaring FOX news. I had just reached some internal boiling point, where I couldn't take the nonsense any longer, when I heard someone say "uh-hun." I looked over and there was this woman, transfixed by the TV, nodding along with whatever the commentator was saying.
25: I've got tetanus where it counts.
Laydeez.
33: I can't believe the doctor implied that you sucked right to your face like that.
My barber generally has Fox on when there's no sports, so I usually make a point of commenting on the stupidity. He certainly had no problem calling Bush stupid, so I'm not entirely sure what the deal is. For at least a couple visits, he had CNN, but it was back to Fox last time.
40: It was Stanley's denial that made him certain: "Only a real member of the DMB would deny being a member of the DMB."
There is no smart way to need a tetanus shot, but of course it happens. I let an infected splinter fester, hoping it would heal on its own. The PA who treated me was pretty freaked out, until the test showed it was not the flesh-eating strep that kids are dying from around here. And he gave me a tetanus shot.
27
When I got my shots for my China trip, I was told that it is possible to get too many tetanus shots, but I don't think I understood the explanation, because I don't remember it. (The old rule used to be once every10 years, and now it's something like 4 times in a lifetime.)
See here .
... Although it is vital to be adequately protected against tetanus, receiving more doses than recommended can lead to increased local reactions, such as painful swelling of the arm.
As mentioned above, adults who received more than the recommended doses of Td vaccine can experience increased local reactions, such as painful swelling of the arm. This is due to the high levels of tetanus antibody in their blood.
There seems to be some controversy about recommended frequency. One problem of course is some people will lose immunity unusually rapidly.
25: I have a friend scarred for life by a SciAm pic of a dude with testicular elephantiasis who had to push 'em around in a wheelbarrow.
Oud, you don't need to hide be hind talk of "a friend." No one walks away from that photo unscarred, even people who do not themselves have testicles.
My science magazine scarring came from National Geographic pictorials of deep sea fish. You're flipping through the magazine hoping to see pictures of exotic naked people when BAM! Scary fish from hell!
32:I, probably stupidly, have not done such a thing on the web for over ten years. There are only a couple places where I use a pseudo, and the Asian schoolgirls never mind.
Re:Glenn Beck & the Alamo.
As a Texan, or just a hater, I have two histories in which the Alamo plays a part. 1) The Birth of the Texas Republic, after which the Alamo fell into decay and out of memory.
and 2) the Resurrection of Dixie in the late 19th century. The Jim Crow/Anti-Catholic/Anti-Immigration era which moved quickly to lynchings, very popular in Texas.
The Daughters of the Republic of Texas won an Ownership and Restoration Dispute with some Latino descendants of Alamo defenders, and much of the Mexican-Texan history was lost for decades.
I call "dog-whistle" on Glenn Beck.
i wd get frantic if i grazed my knee and there was even a bit of mud nearby
I don't really get this picture. Does he have lockjaw in his groinal regions or something?
49: I think all of his muscles have seized up, not just his jaw.
what i remember from the caption to the article is that in a really serious tetanus spasm, your head will touch your heels, and then you die (my dad glossed this: "your head will touch your heels and the doctor can bowl you round the room like a hoop")
that poor guy was a wounded soldier at corunna, in the peninsular war in 1809: the condition was described for the first time by sir charles bell, and that picture painted by him (actually that's an ink copy of the painting)
i think it was a deep spear or lance wound, but after 41 years i am not 100% sure
(google books teased me that i was going to see the actual SciAm page again, 41 years on -- but in the end you don't actually see the page, just the info of the keywords that appear on it...)
Fox News blares away in half of the Pentagon's food court. (The other half of the food court has no TVs, thank goodness.)
Fox News used to play constantly on a kiosk (labeled Fox News) in the lobby of the Department of Labor. A few days after the inauguration it changed to CNN. The kiosk was also relabeled to CNN.
There was a sub shop in the suburban MA town in which I used to live that would blare fox news. I haven't been there for years on account of it. The pity is that I think they felt the need to put on Fox after 9/11 because they're lebanese. Also, they have a garish flag.
52: CNN isn't that much better.
The worst channel is CNBC. I've heard Fox Business is even worser, but I don't want to find out.
53: the most extreme right-wingers I've ever known have been Lebanese.
56: It would make me feel better if they were earnest; i.e. my neglect of their shop would thus be a matter of political distaste rather than aesthetic.
54: CNN is both much better and objectively terrible.
56: Counteranecdata: Ralph Nader and Casey Kasem are Lebanese-Americans, so.
(Bet you didn't know that Kasem was a peace activist.)
I knew somebody who got whooping cough. It wasn't fun. She broke one of her ribs coughing.
Everyone she lived with had to get the antibiotics.
60: Kidding aside, the doc said they've been seeing a bit of a resurgence of whooping cough, especially among young-ish children.
60, 61: My secretary at my last law firm had whooping cough while I was there. It was maddening (from my selfish perspective), because she was generally great, but it dragged on forever -- she'd be out, than back in, than out again, and so on -- so there were months where I couldn't count on her being around. And pretty rough on her too, but that's less important than my minor inconvenience.
1. The medical photos that completely traumatized me for life were the pre-antibiotics syphilis photos. They made me more sympathetic to the sexual repression of the past.
2. Wasn't it someone around here, CharleyCarp, say, who explained that airports sold their audiences to Fox or CNN, with the effect that it would be a breach of contract to allow members of the public to change the station? And even if I've got that wrong, I've come to believe it enough to suspect every establishment with a TV of being bought somehow.
3. For 24-hour news, I seriously wish people could subscribe only to the chyrons or install some sort of ticker tape. Maybe the chyron could march under images of puppies.
4. Now I'm all paranoid that I need to get a booster tetanus shot.
md 20/400 I haven't seen any TVs in any food locations, there. Oh, except at the cafe in the conference center.
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According to NPR, J.G. Ballard's last name is pronounced "buh-LARD". WTF? Is this standard in Britain?
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The Records Office at the Albuquerque Police Department headquarters plays Fox News at high volume apparently all the time. I only went over there a couple of times, but it was very irritating.
Also possible, of course. Maybe he was thinking about the seekrit cafetorium.
The airport CNN/Fox thing is my bête noire. So maddening and vile.
that is not standard in britain, except insofaras lots of people say their name strangely
(it may have been standard in his house, i never went there)
70: Yes. They need to let me drink in peace.
66/71: I've noticed that, in Britain, the "-ard" of -ard names is sort of more, uh, carefully pronounced, so even if it is not actually stressed, it seems so to my American ears. (Tom Stoppard's name falls into this category, too.)
ballard, standard brit pron: the stress is on the first syllable but the second syllable rhymes with "hard"
also the final d is bitten off, as are all final consonants on all words
Dr. Jacobian (damn, that works) the court is the on 2nd floor between corridors 7 and 8. It is the one with the McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins, Taco Bell, and Panda Express. (See what a GOP admin gets us?). The TVs are on the corridor 8 half (there is a wall that mostly divides the two halves.)
For others, yes there are multiple food courts in the Pentagon. It is like working & eating in a mall (we have two banks, a dry cleaner, a barbershop, the only CVS that is any good, etc.) and is probably as nutritious.
I took a tour of the Pentagon once. It felt very much like a mall.
Ahh, well--I only stumbled though that one. I was put off (beyond the selection) at how crowded it was. The one over between 3 and 4 is less zany.
Wasn't it someone around here, CharleyCarp, say, who explained that airports sold their audiences to Fox or CNN, with the effect that it would be a breach of contract to allow members of the public to change the station?
That was me, and yes, that's a real business practice of our friends at Time Warner. I don't know about Fox. Perhaps they come by their viewers the honest way: by pandering to their base prejudices.
My two most recent tetanus shots (I have stepped on way more nails in my lifetime than the actuarial norm for my demographic) ended in mild embarassment.
I stepped on a nail doing demolition work in Germany and got taken to the doctor. They told me they would give me a tetanus shot, so I rolled up my sleeve. The nurse shook her head sternly and informed me that tetanus shots were given in the buttocks, not the arm. I expressed surprise at this, having previously gotten several tetanus shots in the arm, but she insisted that tetanus shots were always and everywhere given in the gluteous maximus.
So 10 or so years later I step on another nail, and find myself back at the doctor's office in the U.S. of A. The nurse tells me she needs to give me a tetanus shot, so I dutifully drop trou. She laughed and informed me that tetanus shots are always and everywhere given in the arm. FML.
60, 61: And my doctor in Australia told me recently that it is quite common for immune response to whooping cough to have fallen quite low by adulthood, and that they're now recommending that anyone who is going to have anything to do with a neonate get vaccinated again (ie, women should have a booster before pregnancy, others who will be helping with care before the birth). Apparently most unimmunised neonates who get it are catching it from their parents. So I'm not surprised to hear that elsewhere they're trying to immunise adults where possible.
I have only known of one person with tetanus, and she did indeed die. My understanding is that much of the problem is that the early signs aren't readily recognisable to doctors any more, and it gets diagnosed at the lockjaw stage, which is quite far along in its progression.
My FIL the M.D. saw a rash of whooping cough cases a while back. They all originated in a local DFH subculture that abjures childhood vaccination. Guess what, you fucking hippies, your free riding on the herd immunity of responsible parents can kill your children!
In 2005, I managed to slice off a goodly chunk of the inside of my right index finger at work. Either the emergency room was very busy or my self-diagnosis at the admitting desk of "sliced finger, hold the sides" (Kansas City joke) lowered their assessment of my imminent danger, but in any event I spent an hour and a half waiting for treatment, while I was forced to sit through Maury,(1) Fear Factor and Seinfeld, which was much worse than the effects of the wound.
The incredibly hot Indian(2) nurse wound up giving me a tetanus shot, which was the single most expensive part of the entire process. The best part was when she went to pull the paper towels I had wrapped around the wound off, expecting them to be clotted and hard to removed. They slid right off, and then we all watched as this tiny little fountain spurted a small stream of blood in time with my rather elevated pulse, as my mad choppin' skillz had managed to nick the artery.
(1) It was one of the "Who's the Baby Daddy?" episodes, and the main attraction was a woman who was making her fourth attempt to discern the possible father of the child in question (it wasn't that guy, either). An older African-American woman who was in the waiting room shook her head following the reveal and something like "Child, you should have been paying more attention in the first place!" She then paused, looked at the room and apologized. Everyone there told her she was absolutely right.
(2) "Dot, not feather," which is just so much less crude than the old "starving, not drunken," isn't it?
"Dot, not feather," which is just so much less crude than the old "starving, not drunken," isn't it?
I hadn't heard the latter before. Out here we would say "East."
Speaking of vaccines, remember the thread where we were appalled that parents were holding chicken pox parties when there's a vaccine in existence? Our pediatrician says that it's turning out that the vaccine wears off after 6-7 years, and is not such an obvious choice after all.
85: oh, I missed that thread. I would have dissented. We're not doing the chicken pox vaccine, I don't think.
Is the distinction truly necessary, given that you already said "nurse"? (/racist)
Out here we would say "East."
On account of India being to the west of you?
Regarding liberal fascists, there's nothing fascist about keeping shit out of the water supply. DeLong calls calling people out on rightwing bullshit "intellectual garbage pickup"; turning off Fox/Sky/the Sun/enter Murdoch product here is the intellectual equivalent of reporting a blocked sewer.
The version I recall growing up was "India Indian or Woo-woo Indian?"
89: On account of East Indians being much less common than the regular kind.
Speaking of vaccines, remember the thread where we were appalled that parents were holding chicken pox parties when there's a vaccine in existence? Our pediatrician says that it's turning out that the vaccine wears off after 6-7 years, and is not such an obvious choice after all.
Never having had chicken pox as a child, I got the varicella vaccine series in 2003 (when I was 28). Am I going to need to get a booster or something? I really don't want to get chicken pox.
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Did anyone hear Nina Totenberg on NPR this morning? There's a case being argued in front of the Supreme Court today about whether school authorities can strip search children if they suspect that they have drugs on them--illegal or over-the-counter.
This country is out of control.
The girl they did it too was a nerd who had never been in trouble before. (In its brief the school said that all that proved was that she'd never been caught. Well, yes that's true, but absent fairly specific allegations, on what basis did they suspect that she have drugs on her?)
I would be just as intellectually outraged if this had been another sort of kid, but the fact that it was a nerdy goody--two-shoes girl, i.e. someone like me, made me feel sort of violated as I heard the story this morning.
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BG: From the British NHS web site (NB last 2 paras.):
"The chickenpox vaccine is now licensed in the UK but it is not part of routine childhood vaccinations.
The vaccine against the varicella virus (which causes chickenpox) is not currently recommended for standard use in children.
In most cases it is a mild illness and around 89% of adults in the UK will develop immunity to the illness.
If the chickenpox vaccine were to be added to the list of childhood vaccinations, it is feared that there would be a greater number of cases of shingles in adults, until the vaccination was given to the entire population. This is because adults who have had chickenpox as a child are less likely to have shingles in later life if they have been exposed occasionally to the chickenpox virus (for example by their children). This is because the exposure acts as a booster vaccine."
94: I've been following that case for a while. There is no justification for what was done to the girl. If I'd been her dad I'd have to avoid being in the presence of the principal, as I'm not sure I could refrain from punching him in the nose. Even as an uninvolved bystander I have nose-punching impulses towards that hideous little martinet.
as I'm not sure I could refrain from punching him in the nose
In that case I don't see any reason why you should refrain yourself. That principal deserves a good punch in the nose.
I can think of at least one occasion at school when a friend's father went down to the school and informed the teacher that he was in grave danger of a punch in the nose.
My own father told me to tell any teacher planning to belt me* to inform them that if they belted me they could expect him to come to the school and belt them.
* Scotland still had the leather tawse at the time.
I'm opposed to the chicken pox vaccine on the grounds that I had to suffer from chicken pox, so everyone else should also.
96: togolosh, Do you have any sense of how the Court might go?
Darn. I was hoping that for 100, Kobe would show up and comment "Whoop!".
92: Right. India, btw, is almost exactly on the opposite side of the world from here, so either east or west would work geographically. (I believe the exact opposite point is somewhere in Indonesia, so technically India would still be east.)
102: When my mom flew to the area recently, they flew over the north pole. So you could also say that it's north and then south of here.
103: Dude, you're blowing my mind.
104: Have you ever really looked at a snowflake? I mean, really, really *looked* at it?
Hawaii-Botswana, Mauritius-San Diego almost. Almost all of the US is antipodal to open ocean.
100
Do you have any sense of how the Court might go?
IANAL, but the doctrine of in loco parentis seems to cover it.
There's a case being argued in front of the Supreme Court today about whether school authorities can strip search children if they suspect that they have drugs on them--illegal or over-the-counter.
I'm amazed it's even being debated like this. She was thirteen! IANAL, but from a cop's perspective, it's bizarre.
If I want to book a juvenile into Youth Detention, I have to have a minimum three misdemeanor charges, or one felony charge. Otherwise Youth Detention will turn them away. If I arrest a juvenile under 14, I have to get permission from Juvenile Court before they can be photographed and fingerprinted. If I interview a juvenile under 14, I have to contact a parent/guardian first, and I have to give Miranda to both the parent and the juvenile.
The school, on the other hand, thinks they have the right to strip search on suspicion alone. Gah.
"Three misdemeanor" means the highest level of misdemeanor in whatever your home state happens to be? Seriously, that sounds about right to me.
108: I bet it makes you wish you'd gone into teaching instead of police work, huh?
Oh, no, I misread. You mean three distinct misdemeanor charges -- they were smoking pot and drinking in public and behaving in a disorderly fashion. I think.
109: I thought he meant three separate misdemeanors.
New Zealand = Spain
Mongolia = Patagonia
Java = Colombia
Peru = South China
My dad is a high school principal and I've argued with him now and then about students' rights and related issues, even though I wasn't much of a trouble-maker myself. Maybe it's teenage rebellion on my part, delayed. The thing is, though, this is a loooong ongoing trend. I'd be happy to be corrected by one of the actual lawyers around here and I know this is painting the issue with a broad brush, but as I understand it, you basically have no constitutional rights until you turn 18 and leave high school. All that stuff about Miranda rights and due process doesn't apply because school officials aren't law enforcement, and by the time law enforcement does come to a school, everyone's too worried about the safety.
I'll be surprised if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the girl who was strip-searched at 13, and I'll be totally flabbergastingly dumbfounded if they make any substantive change to civil rights for minors rather than just narrowly ruling that on this issue the middle school administrators were wrong only because they didn't dot their i's and cross their t's.
As casualties of the War on Drugs go, this is nothing. Seriously.
in loco parentis seems to cover it
Can someone call social services on them then?
100: Sorry to be so tardy, but these bastards expect me to work for my pay, which seems a bit much. Anyway, my bet is that the SC will side with the schools because the court is currently 5 to 4 in favor of powerful people's right to be flaming assholes.
I wonder if Clarence Thomas will break his long streak of silence on the bench to inquire about the possibility of viewing video footage of the strip search.
118: But 4th Amendment politics are very weird. Most cases pit powerful people's right to be flaming assholes (which conservatives love) against the state's ability to do things (which conservatives have, traditionally, hated). Now, the current court treats that last factor differently than have some past courts, because modern conservatives have decided they don't mind the state doing things as long as those things either hurt poor people or minorities or enrich large corporations. To the conservative mind, those are the two permissible categories of state action. So this isn't at all a clear-cut case: the principal's action doesn't have any obvious corporate benefit, and the girl was, I believe, middle-class and white. Thus the court will likely be torn between their desire to support powerful people's right to be flaming assholes and their desire to obstruct this illegitimate state action. I think they'll side with the school, but it's a tough call.
I think they'll side with the school, but it's a tough call.
You have to admire the ability of the ACLU to identify litigants with the most unbelievably favorable set of facts from which to argue the constitutional principle.
120: This morning I would have agreed, this Court does sometimes get the Fourth Amendment right (in fact they handed down a pretty good Fourth Amendment decision this morning). I figured at worst they'd side-step the constitutional question with a qualified immunity holding.
But from what I heard from a couple colleagues who were there for the argument, it was pretty clear that fear of teh drugs was going to prevail.
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Petition for Obama to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Bush II torture program architects.
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Just attempted to friend a SCOTUS clerk with whom I have a passing acquaintance. Eagerly looking forward to hearing inside dirt at some point.
And it turns out that they were looking for a prescription drug, not something that is always illegal.
The right for schools to undress students follows inevitably from giving them the right to set dress codes. Can't have one without the other. We just rely on administrators' discretion and the threat of public outrage to avoid getting dress codes we wouldn't like.
it turns out that they were looking for a prescription drug
It wasn't even a prescription drug. It was ibuprofen.
Cyrus, I know that it's a long-standing trend. First they decided to test athletes for drugs, then anybody who participated in extra curricular activities.
Anyway, it totally sucks. And I'm not sure how to stop it. I just don't understand why people even think that this is sensible.
127: Prescription strength ibuprofen, the little hussy.
Petition for Obama to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Bush II torture program architects.
Couldn't we call them something else?
I'd be fine with "torture program engineers."
Prescription strength ibuprofen
Which is stupid in and of itself. Prescription strength ibuprofen is a 600-mg pill. What you buy at the grocery store is a jar of X number of 200-mg pills. Swallow three and you're at prescription strength.
You mean three distinct misdemeanor charges -- they were smoking pot and drinking in public and behaving in a disorderly fashion.
This reminds me of the time that my HS buddy and I snuck into a (nominally) private club to fish in their lake after hours. He had beer, we were (obvs.) trespassing, we had no fishing license, and, worst of all, we were fishing with corn, which is for some reason illegal in NJ. The joke, of course, was that we'd be OK, because we hid the can of corn behind the beer.
The cops did in fact come, and we ran, but I think mostly because that was the point. I don't think they were looking for us as such.
Canadian Motrin comes in 400mg tablets. That's what she was carrying.
133: How does one fish with corn?
Weird laws like that remind me of when I worked in educational book publishing. We had a long list -- provided by the state of California -- of things which could not be illustrated. So, a kid riding a bike had to be wearing a helmet and kneepads. Fine. But there were very strange ones, like we couldn't show Asians fishing in international waters.
My official position is that we should neither indict nor otherwise antagonize the Ringworld engineers. Investigation would be interesting, however.
137: Put the kernels on the hook! Duh.
And I bet you were always cleaning up sneaky illustrators who'd try to get Asians fishing into books, am I right? Fucking racist illustrators.
We once hired a very, very accomplished and painterly children's illustrator to do a two-page spread illustration of African children listening to a griot. We get the painting back and it's lovely, but some of the moron editors complained that some of the children were "fat" and African children would never be at all so. My boss and I stomped our feet and called them RACISTS -- What? Oh, they should all be starving?
I think you throw the corn in the water like chum?
141: They weren't fat, they just had distended bellies. Don't your editors watch Save The Children infomercials?
121
You have to admire the ability of the ACLU to identify litigants with the most unbelievably favorable set of facts from which to argue the constitutional principle.
Of course this is somewhat vitiated if the girl's lawyer is going to argue it wouldn't have made any difference if they had been looking for meth.
124: Just attempted to friend a SCOTUS clerk with whom I have a passing acquaintance. Eagerly looking forward to hearing inside dirt at some point.
So are we! Apparently Ginsburg was rather pissed off today at some male justices' cavalier attitude about stripping.
140: I noticed that one too. The basic message of the antipode map seems to be that the Pacific is fucking huge.
146:
"Did they do a body cavity search?" the justice asked, licking his lips and leaning forward toward the witness.
148: That kind of thing doesn't happen on the Supreme Court, John! This is serious! We are (well, they are) arguing points of law, establishing precedent. Can authorities require a 13-year-old girl to show her titties and hold out her panties because you think she's dealing extra-strength ibuprofen? Be fucking serious about this.
(Seriously, it's not funny at all.)
Everyone has probably seen this, but I'll link in case not. There was discussion of the relative "ick factor" involved in a girl hiding ibuprofen in her underwear vs. her bra, and also Justice Breyer's shocking confession that people frequently used to stick "things" in his underwear.
Jesus, Souter and Breyer were horrible, and they're supposedly good guys.
It would be terrible if a meteor hit the Supreme Court and Obama had to replace the whole bunch of them. Hopefully Ginsberg and Stevens would be home that day, but you know, omelettes.
150: I hadn't seen that. This is a wonderful line:
This led an annoyed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to dissent in a recent case that the court was peddling "nightmarish images of out-of-control flatware, livestock run amok, and colliding tubas" to justify drug tests for any student with a pulse.
Much as I like Stevens, I was dismayed to read recently that he was an Oxfordian.
Holy crap, that's more appalling than I could have imagined.
Wow; I really hadn't caught much overall reporting about the Supreme Court proceedings in this. Is it really the case that the court is about to go in favor of the school? I admit I'm a little shocked. I'm going to have to backtrack and understand a bit more about the legalities, try to get over the obvious absurdity of it all. I'm always apologetic when my outrage exceeds my attention to the details.
If the Supreme Court rules the wrong way, I'm going to call my wingnut congressperson and ask him what he's going to do about a Court that thinks public schools have the right to molest my daughter.
156: Had that happened to either of my kids I'd have killed the fuckhead. I'd have waited a few months, planned carefully, and blown his brains out. Laws, rules, and civilization be damned.
So, we can get some more women on the Supreme Court any time now. Or, they don't have to be women. Just some civil libertarians. That's 'cause I'm a feminist.
158: I sort of think they have to be women.
But mostly, wow, what 154 said. And 157. If this comes down wrong, I'll be completely stunned. Principals cannot possibly have or require the same leeway to conduct strip searches as prison guards....
Di, I feel the need to insist that they don't have to be women. Sexist.
159.2: Principals cannot possibly have or require the same leeway to conduct strip searches as prison guards....
But the legalities involved? Well, if nothing else, the court will have to provide arguments. Which will be interesting to see.
Honestly, and God this is going to sound trollish, but I'm serious!! I think women bring different experiences and perspectives to lots of issues, but especially one like this, that are important and that men do not have. Diversity is important for more than just the kumbayah warm fuzzies of it. So I think we need women on the bench. Women civil libertarians would be good. And if we could have some women civil libertarians of color, even better.
161 gets it right. I am prepared to find out just how many of my friends are douches when I suggest to them that if Ginsberg goes, the Supreme Court should be required to have more than zero women on it.
I can see a non-insane argument that this is an issue better addressed by local or state lawmakers, rather than judges. I don't like it, bodily integrity and no searches without just cause are really important rights, but there's enough fig leaf there to probably offer five justices something to suage their consciences.
161: Nobody can argue with a call for diversity. In this case, though, there seems to be an age factor in play. The guys (that'd be some of the male Supreme Court justices) seem to be a little behind the times in their sensitivity training, and in their, uh, sexism. I'm generally thinking that a slightly newer generation of men might be able to see their way clear to a better balance between civil rights and the greater public good.
I'm not sure if what I'm saying here is that we may not yet be able to hope for more female members of the Supreme Court, so maybe what we need to do for the moment is to insist on civil libertarians. I find it slightly painful to say that, but sometimes you get tired of demanding what's just very unlikely to happen.
161: Nobody can argue with a call for diversity.
Most people I know are reflexively suspicious of the concept of "diversity", but I think I can convince them that having the female point of view in this incredibly important institution is more important than most instances of the word.
165: Couch the argument however you need to, Ned.
I endorse 161. Also 157 would be my first impulse if this had happened to anyone I know. Zero tolerance policies seem perfectly calculated to empower petty authoritarians and encourage school employees to adopt the authoritarian mindset.
I'm outraged by the outrage. What's so surprising about all this?
Principals cannot possibly have or require the same leeway to conduct strip searches as prison guards....
I think this attitude is the problem. They can and do have the same leeway, and once you take into account greater protections of minors*, they should! If inmates can be freely subjected to this stuff, then why not high school students?
I hate slippery slopes and arguments by analogy as much as anyone who argues on the Internet, but it's quixotic to say that some rights don't apply to some people but others do. I hesitate to use the phrase "seamless garment" because apparently the phrase already belongs to anti-abortion people, but it seems apt. It's very, very hard to pick and choose civil rights**.
* I mean, it should be harder for prison guards to strip-search minors than adults and it probably is. It should also probably be harder to strip search adult inmates than it is, but no one cares about that because there are so many far bigger problems with prisons. Likewise, in some hypothetical situation where a high school was full of adults no longer dependent on their parents but otherwise perfectly normal, strip searches of the students would be much less objectionable, or at least, objectionable for different reasons.
** Allowing for exigent circumstances, of course, and even theoretically-absolute rights could be limited as part of a quid pro quo social compact situation, and so on...
168: I think this attitude is the problem. They can and do have the same leeway, and once you take into account greater protections of minors*, they should! If inmates can be freely subjected to this stuff, then why not high school students?
Because inmates have been convicted of crimes, rendering them on average assumed to be more dangerous than ordinary people, while high school students haven't done anything wrong by virtue of being enrolled in school.
Seriously, what?
re: 169
What 169 says. Except LB left out 'the fuck' from the last sentence.
I'm outraged by the outrage. What's so surprising about all this?
A 13-year-old was taken out of class and ordered to take off her clothes because of a baseless accusation involving a common household painkiller, in front of authority figures she encounters every day and without a parent so much as informed about the situation. The male members of the court, and a great many other commentators besides, are not only completely unable to understand the humiliation inherent in the situation, they go so far as to argue that the Constitution allows it. That's the outrage.
Just remember the whole time Justice Thomas is hearing this case, he is sitting quietly and thinking: "Why isn't there a bill of responsibilities for young girls like this? Does she even appreciate how magical her dishwasher is?"
Rob, 172 is awesome.
All: I e-mailed the bitch collective asking them to put up a post about this. I also e-mailed NOW asking them to organize demonstrations and possibly a bracelet/arm band campaign.
I think that it might be possible to get the Supreme Court to see how outraged people are by this--probably even a lot of right wingers--that they'd catch on a bit to widely understood standards of privacy. (That's probably a pipe dream.)
But it could start a campaign to get legislators to pass laws banning this sort of conduct if the Supreme Court goes the wrong way.
168: Cyrus, you know I visit a guy in prison, and I don't have any right not to be searched when I go there, because my visit is a privilege and not a right. (The only people--at least according to the sign posted-- who have the right to go into the prison are the Governor, the Commisioner of Prisons and lawyers for prisoners.) I have been searched when the clasps on my sports bra set off the metal detector. The female prison guard who did the search was a lot less intrusive than these school officials.
171: Yeah, that was stupid of me. If nothing else, I should have known better than to quote a Republican referring to torture. Outrage is appropriate. However, being surprised by this isn't.
As for 169/170: thinking.
174: Is it possible you were misled by your father's expertise as a high school principal? I'd have to do some reading to remember what the standards are, but you appear to think that high school students have essentially no civil rights, and that's just not true. They have limited free speech rights in school, and being minors complicates stuff, but they're not non-persons.
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Today is Secretary's Day? Fuck.
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176: don't worry, just change the title to "administrative assistant" and you're clear.
176: Double fuck. Shit, when I was in a law firm we got warnings about this stuff. Isn't it usually Administrative Professionals Week?
Double fuck. Shit, when I was in a law firm we got warnings about this stuff.
You mean fucking the secretaries?
Hey, when I worked as a secretary, no one ever mentioned anything like 179 for Secretary's Day.
I hear that administrative assistants have some limited rights to free speech, too!
181: Yeah? I'm not convinced.
(/shearer)
I don't have an assistant, but reflecting on today, I should have known those muffins weren't there for everybody.
Because inmates have been convicted of crimes, rendering them on average assumed to be more dangerous than ordinary people and have been deprived of their liberty after the full due process of the law.
Tinker v Des Moines may have, unfortunately, been a high point. After Bong Hits for Jesus I think that invoking the magic incantation "drugs!!!" allows anything up to, and including, waterboarding of kindergarteners.
when I was in a law firm we got warnings about this stuff.
Heh, I actually called a young friend this a.m. to warn him. This is his first office job and I was pretty sure he wouldn't know about it.
His response? "No, I didn't know. [pause] You mean just office administrators, right? Not system administrators?"
Of course, I'm spoiled because there is a flower shop practically next door to my office. It's pretty hard to forget when you have to walk past the giant sign several times a day.
Prescription strength ibuprofen is a 600-mg pill.
Oddly enough, 650 mg ibuprofen suppositories are OTC.
On the strip search case, I'm generally not wild about making school discipline a matter of constitutional law. There are a whole lot of idiots in the world. Many of them end up as high school principals, but many others end up as loose-cannon parents, and the balance of power between those two groups of idiots would be difficult for the Supreme Court to get right even if they were trying. But this case is so egregious that it damn well should be an easy 4th Amendment call. Also seems like a garden variety assault for which both a lawsuit and criminal charges should be brought against the principal and the teachers who did the search.
Comparing the case decided yesterday with this case is making me crazy. Cops can't search the car of an arrested person because that would violate the 4th amendment, but school officials can strip search a student on random-ass suspicions? How is that consistent?
The police can still search the cars of people they arrest for driving without a license. They just can't introduce the cocaine they find as evidence of possessing cocaine. It's not like he got the drugs back, nor did the girl get her sense of bodily integrity and privacy back.
It's necessary to give schools a lot of leeway in how they teach children to be responsible members of a democracy, with right protected by a written constitution and defended by an independent judiciary against unreasonable government action. The child wasn't convicted of posessing drugs, so it's not the same at all.
And if what I said makes the slightest bit of sense to you, you're eligible for membership in the Federalist Society and an autographed 8x10 glossy of Anton Scalia, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas.
and an autographed 8x10 glossy of Anton Scalia, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas.
What would they be doing in this picture?
NHP in 187: Also seems like a garden variety assault for which both a lawsuit and criminal charges should be brought against the principal and the teachers who did the search. (bold emphasis mine)
I totally agree about the criminal charges. Even if it's constitutional it ought to violate laws for sexual assault. I hope that somebody will file criminal charges.
185
Because inmates have been convicted of crimes, rendering them on average assumed to be more dangerous than ordinary people and have been deprived of their liberty after the full due process of the law.
I think that's more like what I was trying to say, thanks for doing my job for me. Somewhere along the line - the war on drugs gets blamed for this, but I don't see how it could have created the problem out of nothing - "on average assumed to be more dangerous" became sufficient cause for lots of stuff that theoretically supposedly is only possible after the full due process of the law. And, again, this is definitely outrageous, but this it's not surprising.
