Category: Deeds

Eliot Gelwan of Follow me Here is pretty politically oriented these days, but I’d still kind of like to hear what he’s got to say about this weekend’s Boston Globe article sensationalizing teen suicides that may or may not be related to their depression treatment.

My impression: Everyone should have monitored her more carefully. Her parents should have been told more about the side effects of the medication. The hospital should have notified her parents of suicidal ideation, or kept her in-house longer (my guess is her insurance was up so they declared her ready to leave). The Globe was irresponsible in its failure to point out the fact that it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between deaths caused by the disease and deaths caused by the treatment, and also in the way that it hyped up the Zoloft connection and just barely mentioned that she was also on antipsychotics and may have had auditory hallucinations, indicating that her illness was more severe than the run-of-the-mill teenager with depression.

The question: if you don’t medicate the kid, and she dies anyway, whose fault is it?

I bet you could make a good business book out of the Gulag history I’m reading. A project to construct an 806-mile railroad and a port makes a good case study. You could talk about the planning mistakes, the stifling of dissent, whether and when the management team began to realize that their project had gone horribly wrong, and the political issues in that prevented them from quitting sooner — until, in fact, their boss had died. It would be a feel-good business hit, since everything is better-managed than the Gulag!

The decision to start building [the railway from the Vorkuta region to the Arctic Sea] was taken by the Soviet government in April 1947. A month later, exploration, surveying work, and construction all began simultaneously. Prisoners also began building a new seaport at the Kamenny cape, where the Ob River widens out toward the sea…
By the end of the summer… the surveying team had established that the Kamenny cape was a poor location for the port…. The Soviet leadership determined to move the site, and the railway, too… Construction proved nearly impossible in the Arctic tundra. As winter permafrost turned quickly into summer mud, track had to be constantly prevented from bending or sinking. Even so, wagons frequently came off the rails. Because of supply problems, the prisoners began using wood instead of steel in the railway construction, a decision which guaranteed the project’s failure. At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, 310 miles had been build from one end of the railway, 124 miles from the other end [out of 806 required]. The port existed only on paper. Within weeks of Stalin’s funeral, the entire project, which had cost 400 billion rubles and tens of thousands of lives, was abandoned for good.

Unfogged explains Limbaugh’s reasoning in blaming civil liberties and homosexuals for torture of prisoners in Iraq:

This is the elaborated Bad Apples defense– you know why they did it, those bad apples? They did it because they were allowed to look at porn. And you know what else? It’s because Clinton gayed up the military. Homoerotic. Maybe just for fun– or maybe other reasons. We know who to blame for that, don’t we? Goddamned right we know who to blame.

You’ve seen this picture by now, but note the comment halfway down the page by someone calling himself Graydon:

The grinning fellow with the thumbs up is wearing nitrile gloves.

Those are used for much the same set of purposes as latex gloves, only they’re physically much sturdier, and less likely to cause skin sensitivities in the wearer with prolonged use.

So they’re used in surgical applications to avoid the risk of sterility punctures from surgical instruments, or for a number of kinds of solvent based materials handling.

That fellow is wearing the lined, long-wearing kind; the cotton liners are flipped down over much of the glove cuff. He’s wearing them with the same degree of disregard wood finishers who wear them all day, most days, do, and with absolutely no regard for their sterility.

Anybody who wants to argue for it all being passive — for values of “passive” as would shame the devil to utter — psychological coercion is advised to think very carefully about those gloves.

Reminds me of a sad song from my childhood…

“We will never show weakness in the face of these people who have no soul.” Turning this into a crusade is among the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. Bob Woodward’s book is selling like hotcakes over at my favorite bookstore and it’s thanks to the megalomania and general blindness that Our Leader has exhibited, from day one. Even those who supported a war now say, had they known how it would be run, they would not have supported one done like this. (see Matt Iglesias and D-Squared for background).

On the other hand, it may be a popular mistake. I got a pre-recorded message about how the MA supreme court had gone against the will of God and we’d have to show up at the state house to remind them that church and state were meant to be unified, or something. Now, I know Mr. Meeks is an antidisestablishmentarianist, but I’m still in (polite) disagreement that the combination of the Anglican church with the British state has been any better than having the two of them apart. I mean, you’d still have nationalist upheavals, but at least they wouldn’t be religious and nationalist.

I admit I only added that last bit because I wanted to say “antidisestablishmentarianist.” Let history judge my love of big words as it may.

I have a clever girlfriend. She ran out to do errands and asked if I could just dust off this one cabinet in the bathroom. But having done that, I noticed a small area under the towel hooks, where condensation had stuck towel fibers to the wall, and then dust had gathered, and… well, I’ll be doing this all day until I’m satisfied or I give up. Time to mix up a bucket of Oxy-Clean and get out the step ladder.

I started working at Ximian four years ago today. I showed up and was only slightly worried that the whole job offer had been an elaborate April Fool’s joke.

Home Depot gets inspected and briefly shut down by fire officials after a meeting with city officials about policing in its parking lots did not produce the results the city wanted. Remember kids, selective enforcement is our friend, because it lets us punish people we don’t like, wihle still obeying the rules!

200 MB into the downloading of X11 and OpenOffice.Org for MacOS X, I’m definitely getting my money’s worth of bandwidth from the hotel net connection.

My back is killing me. I feel like an old man. Hell, I tried to go to bed at seven thirty tonight.

Need a new laptop. OS X was cute and all, but this hardware is way out of date and I need something I can work on, not just play. And that means SUSE 9.1, XD Unstable, OpenOffice 1.1, and most importantly Evolution 1.5. Mail.app blows chunks. I still haven’t figured out how to get it to display more than one folder.

Within two weeks of arriving at Ximian, in April 2000, I had pulled my first 36-hour shift, discovered the wonderful condition called “keyboard-face,” and spent nearly 100 dollars on high-caffeine beverages and diGiorno pizzas delivered to my door by the late lamented Kozmo.com.

I have never felt the kind of stress that I do now. My entire spinal column hurts, my head throbs, I can feel my gut clenched all day while I sit at my desk, and half a dozen times a day I feel my heart beat rapidly in my chest and find it difficult to breathe. I think Brainshare might be to blame, but I can’t really tell. With any luck I’ll feel better by April.