action figures sold separately

michael moore (again) has hit the nail on the head:

A sniper suspect is now in custody — but yet, our children are still not safe. They have not been safe for some time. Every single day in America, at least eight children (19 years old and younger) are killed by gun violence in the United States. Every single day in America between 30 and 40 people are murdered by someone using a gun. Every single day in America another 40 to 50 people use a gun to kill themselves. None of this has created a panic. These 80+ deaths a day by gunfire do not lead off the evening news. We have, sitting in our homes, a quarter-billion guns. And, yet, not one of those guns would have saved anyone shot by the sniper. The sniper knows — “Your children are not safe.”

read the full piece at alternet.

during the last few weeks of changes and upgrades and other activities in the real world, i’ve neglected tons of news coming from the police abuse list. so just a few highlights (and of course more info can always be found in the links section):

• a seattle cop was arrested on drug charges
• two cops won’t face charges in the Louima torture case
• lots has been said of late about the notorius FBI “no-fly list”
• the feminist majority foundation is reporting on the LAPD whistle-blower who will likely do federal time for exposing and reporting LAPD domestic violence
• 2 texas cops are facing prison for drug deals
• DRCnet reports more drug war killings in the last week.

despite the bag-o-downers this post might bring, tons of folks mobilized last week to say no to police abuse of our communities.

if you live in Austin, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Cambridge, MA, Brookline, MA, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Oakland you have got to go see Eric Drooker’s new slideshow. (See “Appearances”) It’s to promote the release of his incredible new graphic novel, Blood Song. Eric’s insightful/inciteful work has fueled activists and artists alike for decades. He was here in Portland the other night. So good to catch up with an old pal and so good to be wowed and inspired and engaged by such a deeply committed and wise artist whose simple unpretentious nature and broad talent infect all those around him. We left feeling keenly aware of the long and bitter strains of so many power-over-hungry fools, and filled with a rooted sense, a sense of hopeful resistance. Thank you, and Go Eric!

From: eli
To: Dr. A and fellow/sister advocacy-minded docs

ahem. while i know you already know this at some level, i feel compelled to offer this small reminder: at various times in your career, you will be looking at what you know for certain to be a duck. you can tell by its obvious quacking and other striking waterfoul indicators. yet without doubt, there will be numerous people in positions of economic and political power who will vehemently deny this, asserting in the strongest terms that this is quite clearly a chicken. “Note the general clucking an other chicken-behaviors,” they will say. after months or years of effort, research, advocacy, committees, whitepapers, and no small amount of wasted taxpayer dollars, you may indeed get from them a “qualified acknowledgement of the possible existence of certain possible qualking behavior which could potentially indicate the presence of distinct quasi-duck characheristics” or some such hooey. and yet in the face of such madness you will persevere, just like those others whose science, despite the wall of denial from the EPA, is in the service of the people and not profit:

All the while, three key elements of the catastrophe have been largely overlooked. First, that it was a disastrous air pollution event not only for lower Manhattan but also for Brooklyn, home to some 2.5 million people, at least half of whom live in areas that, like Reeve on the Brooklyn Bridge, were cloaked in debris on 9-11. Second, a bona fide new disease seems to have emerged. Dubbed “World Trade Center Cough,” it appears to be caused by a combination of pollutants not previously known to produce human disease and thus not covered by Clean Air Act standards or subject to EPA monitoring.

recently made a mess of changes and additions around here which you will no doubt find useful:

• my public key is now linked to from above
• you can now choose a category archive page from that pull-down menu on the side, pretty handy (and MT users can contact me if you want to swipe the code, it’s pretty easy to implement, with a bit of back-end PHP.)
• the links pages now have up over 1,000 links which are much better organized than before, into 43 categories and sub-categories, including a whole new category called medstuff: “family practice, preventative medicine, radical docs, and much more.”
• some general cleaning and spiffing up, as well as the addition of the PetFinder featured adobtable pet finder over on the sidebar. i have an attitude about breeding dogs, since over 5 million are killed each year in this country. go to the pound, people!

ok so i was adding some cool stuff i’d seen of late to the blogbar here, and i saw something that blew my stereotypes of hollywood apart: this slamming site put together by wil wheaton. i had no idea. yes, the wil wheaton who was the crusher kid on star trek. he’s not just way smart, he’s super progressive:

Here’s what I think: I currently live in The Corporate States of America. George Bush was appointed CEO by the Board of Directors, and we, the people, are just the pesky shareholders. But we don’t even have the good stock, so they really don’t have to listen to us, and they rarely do. Waiting for your politicians to do something for you is like waiting for a junkie to kick on his own, without any support. It ain’t gonna happen. So here are some ways you can get involved, and make a difference…

from his activism links page. check it out.

over at residentblog, A has been breaking it down re her recent adventures in the hospital. on a rare morning off the other day, we were going over her work hours so she can submit them to a study being done to maybe do something about this, ahem, very controversial issue. basically, the deal is that a number of folks have made the entierly rational argument, for years, that docs don’t make good decisions or provide good care when they’ve been working for more than 24 hours straight, or after having done so several days that week. (i know, duh). for example, the council that accredits residency programs nationwide recently revoked the accreditation for yale’s surgery program (effective june 2003) for violation of already existing standards. (!)

now, of course, the older rich white boyz who either depend on the slave shall we say, “very affordable” labor of new docs and/or whose macho posturing bullshit makes this hazing ritual a dangerous imperative nationwide, would like to curtail any of these limiting efforts. [and here’s a pdf report of stories from docs who’ve had to deal with that bullshit]

the legislation about to be decided on, put up by new jersey demo. senator Jon Corzine, would limit the work hours to 80 per week and mandate one full 24 hour period off during the week. (um, like what about all those people who fought and died to bring us the 8 hour day and the weekend? oh right, captial still won that one despite the concessions. duh! oops.) one of the things i didn’t realize, but that the new england journal of medicine pointed out in their recent piece on the issue is that (prepare yourselves) the 80 hours only need to be averaged over four weeks. yes. so that means, that, for instance, after working three 66 hour weeks in a row, you might work a 122 hour week. no jive. after going over A’s hours, we figured out, as well, that as she actually works exactly 80 hours per week on average, her take-home pay is 25 cents less than OR’s minimum wage. super.

by the way- hey sweetie, you coming home soon? soups on.

over at lying media bastards jake is summing it up nicely:

If you are arguing in favor of the war- it’s fine for you to go on and on about Saddam Hussein’s atrocities and how the world would be a better place without him. But you must then justify the massive loss of innocent Iraqi life that is bound to come from an US invasion. And, for extra bonus points, explain why the US should invade Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people when those same people seem to oppose a US invasion (extras special bonus points if you find evidence that the Iraqi people actually do support an invasion).

while working on my revised pages for work (links above), i was inspired by the soul-quaking horns and insanely tight rhythm section soundings of Tower of Power. my bro and i chatted about it, cuz he saw them a few times back in the 70’s and every indication is that they still just rip it up. “Gotta put that stuff on loud,” he said.

“You can’t lay dead, to catch a groove / If you want to get funky, like a bow-leg monkey, tellin you / You got to funkafize,” i said. Damn, they aren’t coming to pdx any time soon but anyone who’s seen them recently could comment or point to reviews. Til then, i’m stuck with the zeroes and ones.

well, originally it was a ron & nancy thing, but the bushes took it on as much as they could, despite their drug and alcahol related convictions. given today’s news about noelle bush who was found with crack cocaine in a drug rehabilitation center, perhaps it should have been something more along the lines of “just say no, unless you happen to be part of the family, in which case we’ll mostly look the other way.

ug. it’s just so wrong and strangely comical and sad.

on my way home from salem today, where the CCB gave me the official okeydokey to work as oregon’s 153,160th licensed contractor (yay! finally!), i checked our mail and found waiting there your copy of American Family Physician. while having some of that yummy soup (which you poured out of the plastic before micro-nuking, right?), i read your favorite part, the Diary form a Week in Practice. This one was by Dr. John O’Handley who sees homeless patients in his Columbus, OH Mobile Outreach Program. i thought you’d find it pretty sweet:

Friday: Patients can often figure out ingenious ways to treat themselves when necessity forces their hand. Dr. O encountered a young woman today who has devised a treatment for acute shotness of breath. Her problem had been present for years and was brought on by hot weather, especially at night while lying flat. Activity in hot weather also seemed to precipitate the difficulty in breathing. She noticed wheezing at times and there was a family history of asthma. When Dr. O asked what she had been doing to make it better, she smiled sheepishly and asked, “You really want to know?” She had learned that when she feels as if she cannot draw another breath, she asks her boyfriend to blow forcefully into her mouth while holding her nose. This would “open her up” and provide several hours of relief. This was the first time Dr. O had heard of rescue breathing used for asthma. He provided the patient with a beta-agonist multidose inhaler for times when her boyfriend might not be available.

(I knew you’d also like the one about a guy’s acute abcess, but that’s one i don’t really need to share with the group.) See you soon! hey does anyone know what happened to nonharmful.com? where’d it go? whaa!

movmentbuilding.org will soon release its long-awaited activist’s reader Confronting Classism in the Movement, a useful compilation of pieces by folks who have grappled with these issues for years. A sexism-in-the-movement reader would also be a good idea. ’til then we can make good use of:

• via the chock-full-o-the-thought-provoky alas, a blog, a piece by von blue titled Leftist Techies and Patriarchy asserts that “Discussions about patriarchal structures are always substantial. I mean that in two ways. First on the level of the group: people yell at each other, groups split, friendships break apart. Second on the individual level: the gender antagonism hits us personally. It is our fellow activists, friends and lovers, who hold up patriarchy… We can not throw paint bombs at them like we might do with racist politicians.”
• Dan Spalding’s open letter to other men in the movement, Shut the Fuck Up is also an interesting read.
• and there’s more good stuff on our feminism, women’s rights, and grrl power page.

Kerri’s blog some grrls started up in May and i want to catch up on some of what i missed. Also, the new but super prolific blog by Les Dabney, Testify! seems to be sporting a quality mix of the funny, the furious, and the fight-like-hell (and you know i’m just a sucker for the red n black).

ok, enough staring at the damn screen. there’s work to do and dogs to walk and outdoors to enjoy before the deluge.

in case you missed em, there’s a couple more things we can look to when jamming the war machine.

• The NYT story on how the C.I.A. Warns That a U.S. Attack May Ignite Terror.
• stop the war against iraq, a site devoted to just that.
• and peacerallies, via the steamrollingest leftyblog out there, RuminateThis. check it.

you’ve seen them as punk rock kittens, as the mighty viking kittens doing led zepplin, and now they are at it with a pub rock cover of Destiny’s Child. not only is joel veitch talented and funny with the kittens, though. he’s also generated incredible silliness in the series of blode. check it all out at rathergood.

for my sweetie amanda, actually being a doctor in real life means that she went in to work at 6 in the morning saturday, got exactly 5 minutes sleep that night, and got off work sunday afternoon only to have to go back in this morning, monday for another call, where she gets out at around 11 or midnight. yow. she brings back these amazing stories of babies and big people in crisis or who are just going through interesting hard stuff and of all the healing work and social advocacy she’s doing for them. plus, she gets to work with some of the coolest folks i’ve ever had the honor and pleasure of knowing. yo pdxfp, you rock!

for my little cousin jamie, on the other hand (um, ok he’s a good foot taller than me and fairly buff, but still he is my little cousin), being a doctor on tv (he plays the new dr. boone on nbc’s third watch) means we got to laugh heartily, as he, on national television, calls out orders during an emergency while stradling a patient on a moving gurney. but actually, also, of course, we get to be very impressed with his obvious acumen. his best work, say lots of us in the family, is on the stage, but catch his great performances on the box anyway! (you might also catch him on the odd soap opera or beer commercial.) go jamie!!

hey folks, we are still working on the layout. it seems that some of you, using certain browsers on certain platforms, are not seeing the calendar, links and pix showing up here on the right, alongside these posts as they should be but rather below all the posts. any reports are most welcome in the comments section as we continue to troubleshoot this problem. please include browser and version and what OS you are in. thanks! Update: fixed! (right?) — any other geeks wanting the behind-the-scenes info should see the comments for more.

i’m sure i could go on for quite a while on this subject, now that we’ve got it all set up. one very cool feature i’d like to point out, though, is that the “recent entries” block on the side there is context-sensitive. so, for example, when you are looking at the category arcive page for the politics category, it shows the recent entries in that category, not just recent entries overall. how cool is that?

with the big move from blogger to MT that is.

there’s just no comparison to Moveable Type. it’s goin to be just so great i may spit. the search feature alone will be so useful.

lisa, and missy, i know you have been moving in that direction. well, i can’t recommend it highly enough to all ya’ll out there. stay tuned. everything will be up very soon.

amanda is making me sicky soup from the how it all vegan cookbook. (no david, I have the coolest girlfriend.) ;->

um, i think that putting teachers in jail for being on strike is at least proto-facsict. and way way stinky.