Dreading St. Patty's Day?

[conuly]

All that oddly colored booze getting you down?

Switch to St. Catty's Day! Cat ear headbands for everybody!

♥   =^.^=   ♥



There's Only One Surviving Blockbuster Left On Planet Earth

China sets aside crops for wild elephants to spare farmers

Lady Fishbourne's Complete Guide to Better Table Manners (Short cartoon from 1976)

As curling grows, it finds a new target: college campuses

Americans drinking more gourmet coffee than ever before: survey

40 Stories From Women About Life in the Military

Who Maps the World?

For Some Teens With Debilitating Pain, The Treatment Is More Pain (I don't think this article proves the point, but if you're desperate anything seems worth trying and might be.)

Long overlooked by science, pregnancy is finally getting attention it deserves

The Surprising Benefits of Serving Prisoners Better Food

The Manafort sentence is a lesson in white privilege, but the solution isn’t to inflate sentences for wealthy white men—it’s to reduce sentences for poor people of color.

Hunter High School Is 9 Percent Black or Hispanic. Why Isn’t It Part of the Diversity Debate?

How Teacher Training Hinders Special-Needs Students

Inspired by #MeToo, Serbian woman speaks out and fights back

Domestic Violence Doesn’t Always Look Like We Think

Ahead of court ruling, Census Bureau seeks citizenship data

Prison Gerrymandering Distorts Our Democracy in the Worst Ways

The Major Street Design Flaw That's Killing Americans (Video)

Whose Key West? Climate change is driving up the price of paradise.

Cars are killing us. Within 10 years, we must phase them out

People Need to Be Scared About Climate Change. They Also Need to Recognize That It’s Not Too Late.

Bold Plan? Replace the Border Wall with an Energy–Water Corridor

On U.S. border, fence meant as barrier becomes lure for migrants

Tijuana Is Overwhelmed by a Rush of Asylum-Seekers—Many of Them Women With Children

Two years after tragedy, can Guatemala rethink child protection?

More civilians leave Islamic State's Syria enclave, delaying final assault

Comments

[zyzyly]

Yes!

[thewayne]

Works for me. Anything that reduces the number of drunks.

[unfavorableinstigation]

Ah! I saw that comic today. So cute!

[greghousesgf]

I never liked Blockbuster, they routinely censored their copies of movies. They also had a tendency to completely ignore offbeat, cultish movies in favor of very mainstream stuff I had no interest in (one time, the second I walked in the woman working there tried to talk me into renting Three Men and a Baby, who the fuck knows why she assumed I would want to watch that)
I'm sure people who want to eliminate combustion engines mean well but when my appendix ruptured I'm glad I wasn't forced to walk to the hospital....

[conuly]

I'm sure people who want to eliminate combustion engines mean well but when my appendix ruptured I'm glad I wasn't forced to walk to the hospital....

Yes, let's just jump right off that slippery slope. Alternatively, we could fund other forms of transportation that don't require combustion engines, and still allow ambulances even as we limit personal cars.

a minor quibble but

[the_siobhan]

St Paddy's day, if you must. Our good Saint Pádraig is not abbreviated to "Patty".

[ratcreature]

None of the prison food effects from that article seem actually surprising. I mostly wondered how with dismal systems like that they are coping with vegetarian/vegan inmates, religious rules or even just inmates' food allergies and intolerances. Of course considering how dismal the US is with prisoner rights, I suspect they just don't...

Incidentally it seems really outrageous that prisoners are counted for representation proportions but then aren't even allowed to vote (in my country ever since a reform in 1969 you don't loose voting rights as a prisoner generally, except for a limited time for treason and election fraud convictions, though loosing the right to stand for election for five years is common if the sentence was more than a year in prison).

[gale_storm]

If it were a holiday, it might be known as St. Caddy's Day, with showings of 'Caddyshack' all day. Um, I think I'd much rather be in this world, though. :-D

Re: a minor quibble but

[conuly]

So now we're celebrating Caddy's day in lieu of?

[adrian_turtle]

The NPR article about pain hypersensitivity is seriously triggering. I agree with you that the article doesn't prove the treatment works, and that desperate people want to try something, anything.



My experience with PT was far less traumatic than what's happening to these kids. But I still have nightmares about it sometimes. A lot of my friends on twitter share my horror about that article, but just reading their reactions is triggering pain flares in a couple of my joints.

PT requires somebody to recognize the difference between pain and damage. If a doctor tells you, "Don't pay attention to how much it hurts, that movement is not damaging your hand. Do more of it," that's going to be a problem if the doctor isn't trustworthy. These doctors are not inspiring my trust. (WTF! A girl had an asthma attack and they wouldn't let her use her inhaler? Not even because they recognized this particular attack was not dangerous, but because they had made the decision up front that inhalers would be off limits.)

It looks like child abuse. They are deliberately putting the children through more pain than necessary, trying to teach them to dissociate enough to not feel it. (Or at least to SAY they aren't in pain, because they've learned it's forbidden to complain where authority figures can hear.) The beatings will continue until morale improves. Stiff upper lip, and all that. I need to be off twitter until the discussion fades, just because there's so much that's so upsetting, but before I left I saw a retweet from a woman who had been through Sherry's program in her youth. She learned to ignore the pain in her ankles as she DISLOCATED them. Wasn't she a good girl? She kept running and didn't complain.


Yes, desperate people do desperate things. I don't blame the patients for being willing to try. The doctors should know better. And NPR should have reported it far more critically. It looks like a seriously plausible new treatment, not "Crackpot doctor who tortures girls promises cure for rare disease." What's the podcast equivalent of clickbait?

[adafrog]

Love it!

[conuly]

1. I didn't mean to trigger you (or anybody) and I apologize.
2. Yeah, I was seriously concerned about the asthma attack too. Asthma isn't even pain, it's asthma.
3. Dislocating ankles? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE IN A MERCIFUL WORLD.

[adrian_turtle]

1) Triggering the ptsd isn't your fault. It's the fault of the NPR program.

3) EDS messed with her ligaments, so many joints are fragile. (I can't speak to how EDS is possible in a merciful world.) The doctors didn't recognize the EDS, or suspect it might contribute to some of the 'unexplained' pain she had been complaining about.

[conuly]

Oh, god, EDS. That seems to pop up all the time right now.

At any rate, ankle issues are never anything to play around with, as that whole part of the body is so delicately wired. Ankles and knees, no laughing matter.

[conuly]

They actually do provide kosher meals - I've posted a few links on that over the years. Kosher meals are very much in demand due to the perception that they are superior than the regular ones. They may actually *be* superior depending on the contractor.

But given that prisons sell food at jacked up prices at the commissary they certainly have a vested interest in shaving off every penny from the food they're required to serve!

[conuly]

People will still get drunk. And afterwards they'll talk of having a hair of the cat that bit them.