I read Ayn Rand at 13 and followed that up with an overdose of Taylor Caldwell. For years, I saw conspiracies behind every tree. In light of that, the great comments on “Did you catch this?” lead me to some deeper speculation.

Jeff’s suggestion of using illegal immigrants isn’t that far from being feasible. Already those who hold green cards and do not come from a blacklisted country can enlist in the military (though they cannot receive security clearances).

From Today’s Military:

Citizenship Requirements
U.S. citizens or Permanent Resident Aliens (people who have an INS I-151/I-551 “Green Card”) may join the U.S. Military.

Non-citizens may enlist, but cannot reenlist (extend their enlistment beyond their first term of service) unless they become naturalized U.S. citizens. However, after service of three years, additional residency requirements for citizenship can be waived.

Fight and be rewarded with a shortcut to citizenship. It’s wouldn’t be much of a stretch to making signing up for the Civilian Reserve Corps a path to immigration amnesty for undocumented residents.

Another possibility is granting work visas to those in other countries in exchange for joining the Corps. Right now the requirement for a work visa is a shortage of American workers qualified to do a job. It’s currently used most often in technical fields, but there’s no reason that couldn’t be applied to soldiering, since we’ve already tapped out our volunteer army.

From the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services:

Temporary Workers

Overview

Employers who wish to hire foreign workers to temporarily perform services or labor or to receive training may file an I-129 petition. The I-129 is mainly used for nonimmigrant categories; thus, in most cases, workers who enter the United States under this petition must depart the U.S. when their maximum period of stay has been reached. Form I-129 may also be used to petition for an extension of stay or change of status for certain nonimmigrants.

Bluegrass Poet rightly identifies that this corps could become de facto mercenaries, whatever their origin. As non-enlisted personnel, they may not be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as has been the case with CIA interrogators and private security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those contractors have been guilty of abuse before and are protected from charges in the countries in which the abuse occurs.

From CNN:

The most likely option, under the rules crafted by the U.S. occupation authority, is prosecution in U.S. civilian courts. Although the victims of abuse were Iraqi, the civilian contractors will probably not be punished in Iraq. Under an order issued last year, civilian contractors enjoy protection from local criminal prosecution, even for crimes such as murder, torture, and rape.

Last Thursday, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the Justice Department had jurisdiction to prosecute civilians implicated in crimes in Iraq. But whether these prosecutions will actually take place is far from clear.

Then there is the case of Jonathan Keith Idema, caught running a private prison in Afghanistan.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Mr. Idema’s cloak-and-dagger world collapsed onto itself, as Afghan intelligence agents and police swarmed into Idema’s compound in a residential neighborhood of Kabul and placed him and two other Americans and four Afghans under arrest. What they found inside shocked them: a private prison, with eight Afghan prisoners, hung from the ceiling by their feet in makeshift torture chambers.

The arrest last week of Idema and the two other Americans - bounty hunters who passed themselves off as US special forces - comes at a difficult time for the Afghan government and for US diplomats here.

[snip]

The US embassy in Kabul has made intense efforts to distance itself from Idema, saying in a press release last week, “The public should be aware that Idema does not represent the American government and we do not employ him.” But the fact that both the US military and intelligence agencies make use of private contractors, increasingly so as America’s troop capacity is strained by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leads some to speculate that Idema’s case may not be isolated.

How many more of these abuses will we see if Bush’s program goes forward?

Then consider the role of the US military stateside. In event of an emergency or civil unrest, the National Guard may be mobilized to deal with the situation. Would the Civilian Reserve Corps also function in this capacity? Could Martial Law, complete with suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (which Attorney General Gonzales already claims is not a right at all), be declared with a private army to enforce it?

Each of these suppositions is more frightening than the one before it. We need to examine this proposal very carefully and fight it vigorously.

From (Long Island, NY) Newsday:

NYC official condom heading your way

Available soon from City Hall: an official New York condom in a jazzy wrapper, perhaps one printed with a colorful subway map or some other city theme.

New York City hands out 1.5 million free condoms a month in ordinary wrappers, and health officials figure people would be more likely to actually use them if the packaging were more distinctive.

“Brands work, and people use branded items more than they use non-branded items, whether it’s a cola or a medicine, even,” Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden said.

[snip]

City officials, who conduct an annual health survey, say a memorable package could also help them gauge how often people actually use the city’s condom.

“If they describe our wrapper, then we’ll know that they would have used our condom,” Frieden said.

If they really want men to use them, wouldn’t they choose the Empire State Building?

I’ve always loved storytellers, and Jim Croce was one of the best. I’d been a fan ever since “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” came out, and when he was killed in a plane crash in 1973, I was crushed. On vinyl I still own original copies of all 4 albums — the 3 released under his name and the one country/bluegrass budget album he released in 1969 with his wife Ingrid.

Here he is with collaborator Maury Muehleisen, who was killed with him.

From the State of the Union address:

A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. And it would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.

That pretty much sums up the sorry state of the military — they’re so short of personnel that he wants to outsource as much as possible. How is this different from the lucrative contracts being handed out to Haliburton and others? Now they could be a private police force. Oh wait - they already are. This would just give them official status.

As for the average citizen, this looks an awful lot like a billion dollar company cutting costs by hiring disposable temp workers, fighting as soldiers without the benefits provided to the enlisted personnel. Beware.

Once upon a time, I used Microsoft Outlook for my email. Then, following an automated update, a phantom message appeared in my outbox and the application hung trying to send it every time I wanted to pick up or send mail. Repeated uninstalling/reinstalling had no affect. So I ditched it. I moved to Thunderbird and never looked back.

If you’re an early adopter, there’s a new beta release out today: Thunderbird 2 Beta 2. If you’d just like to shake off the Microsoft shackles, check out the last official release, Thunderbird 1.5. I love this thing. You might, too.

An estimated 214,640 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. Yet the treatment they receive may vary based on weight, income and education level. A new study from a University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, published in the January 20 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, used U.S. Census Bureau statistics and the women’s zip codes to assign each woman a median household income, poverty status and level of education. The patients’ actual educational level was also recorded.
The results suggests that:

…doctors were more likely to reduce the chemotherapy dose for heavier patients and those who were less educated, and lived in zip codes with lower median household income and higher levels of poverty. Severely obese patients were four times more likely to receive a reduced dose, and women with less than a high school education were three times as likely to have a dose reduction.

Why?

When it comes to obese patients, the researchers suggest that doctors reduce the chemotherapy dose because they do not want to give those patients the large dose that their weight would indicate. The motivation is to avoid potential severe and harmful side effects in their patients. For those patients of lower socioeconomic status, doctors may be anticipating the patient’s attitude toward treatment, the researchers suspect.

“We speculate that physicians have concerns about a patient’s ability to tolerate the side effects of chemotherapy and that the physician’s uncertainty about a patient’s tolerance increases with increasing social distance. One might just as well ask why we are willing to give full doses to someone with more education. It may be that negotiating side effects and continued doses of treatment is easier when there is more shared culture,” says lead study author Jennifer Griggs, M.D., MPH, associate professor of internal medicine at the U-M Medical School. Griggs was at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., when she completed this research.

Previous studies have shown a connection between obesity and reduced chemotherapy doses. Griggs’ work is the first to look at socioeconomic status.

Since chemotherapy dosing seems to be directly related to outcome, this is dangerous.

It’s true that lower income and less educated women have less access to mammograms and early diagnosis, resulting in later stage cancers at discovery. But wouldn’t this indicate the need for more aggressive treatment, not less? Griggs speculates that physicians consider poor, obese and less educated women less committed to treatment, justifying lower dosages. She says patients should specifically ask for full dosages and verbally state their dedication to recovery. Too bad nobody tells that to the patients, most of whom depend on their doctors for medical information and advice.

Personally, I’d hate to think that Medicaid, the major source of health care coverage for the poor, reimbursement rates might be an unconscious motivator. In most areas, those with private health insurance receive better care than those dependent on assistive funding, and I hope this isn’t another case.

Still, it bears thinking about.

From Medical News Today via Feministing

Women are roughly 50% of blood donors nationwide. However, under guidance from US blood banks, plasma extracted from women’s blood will be diverted into medical products rather than being used for direct transfusion. Why? Female plasma has been tied to transfusion-related acute lung injury,a condition in which a patient’s lungs fill with fluid, requiring temporary placement on a ventilator. There are 150 cases of TRALI a year nationally and 15 deaths, estimates Dr. Patricia Kopko, medical director of BloodSource, a California blood bank that made the male-donor shift Jan. 1.

From the Seattle PI:

No one knows exactly what causes TRALI. But certain immune cells carried by women who have been pregnant are emerging as a chief culprit, cells called antibodies that mothers-to-be produce in reaction to their fetus’ foreign father cells.

The antibodies do no harm to mother, baby or the vast majority of people who encounter them in a transfusion. To get TRALI requires what Celso Bianco of America’s Blood Centers calls “a horrible coincidence” in which the transfusion recipient has white blood cells that just happen to recognize and clash with the donor’s antibodies.

It would seem to me that cutting the available plasma in half is overkill. Wouldn’t it be better to just screen out women who’ve been pregnant?

Women, don’t let this keep you from donating. Your whole blood is still acceptable for drug making.

Dear Miriam Parker, Online Marketing Specialist, Hachette Book Group USA (Formerly the Time Warner Book Group),

No, I’m not interested in reviewing “a new legal thriller” for you. If you had checked out my site, you’d know I don’t do book reviews. Instead, it looks like you just bought an email list and sent out blanket “invitations.” That’s called spam. It does not make me want to buy your author’s book — it doesn’t even make me want to read it for free. As a matter of fact, it would make me determined to avoid your entire company were I not opposed to penalizing authors for the publisher’s marketing department.

It’s obvious you don’t have a clue. Please get one if you intend to do publicity on the internet. Spam just pisses people off.

Sincerely,
Me

I went to a rock concert last night. Or rather, a Rawk concert, where my son’s band was playing in an elimination competition. Beaf beat out 4 other bands by a landslide and moves on to play in the Final Four competition next month. I was one of the few oldsters in the room, but that’s ok. My folks never once heard me play–they preferred to pretend the band didn’t exist–so I try to show up and voice my support whenever asked. In this case, he wanted me there to vote.

The original single they cut for the compilation album is November Never Sleeps. I can’t get page embed to work, so you can either hear it from the link or right-click download it. They classify themselves Modern Screamo - to me it’s old school industrial punk. Either way, I think it’s pretty damn good no matter what age they are.

The awesome flying bass you hear is Tony.

From the Washington Post:

Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are leading an effort to forge dozens of small and medium-size, black and white Baptist organizations into a robust coalition that would serve as a counterweight to the conservative Southern Baptist Convention.

The giant SBC, with more than 16 million members, has long dominated the political, theological and social landscape among Baptists, often spawning resentment among smaller Baptist groups. It has also been closely aligned with the Republican Party.

The new coalition, which is Carter’s brainchild, would give moderate Baptists a stronger collective voice and could provide Democrats with greater entree into the Baptist community. But Carter and other organizers are trying to walk a fine line, insisting that the alliance is not directly political while touting its potential to recast the role of religion in the public square.

“We hope . . . to emphasize the common commitments that bind us together rather than to concentrate on the divisive issues that separate us,” Carter said. “There’s too much of an image in the Baptist world, and among non-Christians, that the main, permeating characteristic of Christian groups is animosity toward one another and an absence of ability to cooperate in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood.”

Could this finally be the birth of a Christian Left, or even a Christian Moderate position? In 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention barred women from serving as pastors and called for wives to “submit graciously” to the leadership of their husbands. That decree left a lot of moderate churches out in the cold. Carter stopped calling himself a Southern Baptist that year and Clinton attended a Methodist church during his years in the White House.

One of the main organizers, William D. Underwood, president of Mercer University in Atlanta, said the covenant’s members will spend the coming months identifying joint projects to undertake in international aid, domestic poverty relief and missionary work.

“We’re not against any other group of people of faith,” he said. “We’re against the fact that 100,000 people died last month of malaria. We’re against the fact that hundreds of thousands of Africans face starvation each year.”

….

(Rev. William J. Shaw, president of the Nashville-based National Baptist Convention USA) said broadcast evangelists such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson, along with the Southern Baptist Convention, have “downsized the moral message” of the Bible “so that the dominant question has to do with sexuality.”

Black Baptist churches, he said, are saying that “sexuality is not the only dimension of morality. The whole business of social justice, of a fair prosecution of offenders, caring for the environment, immigration, even the morality of our foreign policy, are things that really need to be put into the debate.”

It’s time for the voice of social justice and compassion to be heard. Too often the SBC is considered to speak for all Christians. They don’t. They don’t even speak for all Baptists. Now there will be an alternative.