Smuggling Tunnel

Authorities in Oliver BC and Oroville WA have found and shut down a 200 meter long smuggling tunnel on the verge of completion. The tunnel, between two houses on either side of the border, has been under construction for months. Construction efforts have been closely watched closely, and the two men involved were arrested as they met in the middle.

Though not yet operational, the American house was filled with high-speed routers and fibre optic cables. Constable S. A. Tire, spokesperson for RCMP Detachment E, reported that these men were attempting to smuggle internet across the border.

“With the equipment they stockpiled, they could have shipped over 200 gigabytes of high-definition uncut American-Grade Netflix and Hulu every hour.

Additionally, we suspect they planned to act as couriers for Amazon Prime pushers.”

Both men have been charged with 38,000 misdemeanors.
There is no word on how the Canadians planned to pay for this premium product. Probably with weed.

Seriously? Seriously.

PETA’s in the news! That’s always good for a laugh. What ridiculous publicity stunt have they dreamed up now? Smashing beehives to free the insects? Chlorophyll body paint? Supporting torture?

Wait, that last one was supposed to be a joke. But it’s reality.

Pamela Anderson, PETA spokeswoman, has teamed up with Joe Arpaio, America’s Most Racist Sheriff to bring you compulsory vegetarianism!

You may recall Sheriff Joe from his ongoing (never-ending) search for Obama’s birth certificate. Or when he made prisoners wear pink. Or when he took away their insulin. Or when he stuck a woman in a cage to be roasted to death (don't click that link, you'll regret it). Or when he refused to investigate the rapes of immigrant children (you probably shouldn't click that one either).

Well, the latest innovation from the land of sunshine and happiness is across-the-board vegetarianism for prisoners. Arpaio pointed to the health benefits and cost savings, which are significant enough that he’ll be implementing the same new menu for himself and the guards. Right?

PETA’s always willing to stick up for animals. Including, evidently, racist ones.

Too Good to be True

I have this thing where I automatically distrust anything I hear that I agree with too much. Take this, for example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Presidential_IQ_hoax

That chain email you probably remember from 15 years ago was something I agreed with 100%. Almost as though it was perfectly constructed to match my biases… and as it turns out, it was.

Or this one, about how it’s almost impossible to find atheists in prison. Do you remember that one? Well, it’s true as far as it goes, but not for the reasons implied in the myriad thinkpieces devoted to it.

Or take for example Robert Altemeyer’s work on right-wing authoritarianism. It’s probably true, the research seems to back it up. But it so perfectly conforms to my pre-existing biases that I can’t help but think it will be disproved sooner or later.

The latest case of this is a radio show I listened to yesterday, on Orthorexia Nervosa. You may not have heard of that. If you have, it’s probably just in the past few years… it may or may not be a fad diagnosis, but it’s definitely a new thing. It’s all about clean eating gone too far… people who eat gluten free and soy free and low carb and raw and local and and and. It’s something that seems to be coming up a lot lately. And it would be so nice to think that all these people I have a little disdain for are actually crazy… that feeling makes me suspicious right off the bat.

Maybe I’m right to be suspicious. Apparently this diagnosis was invented by an alt-med practitioner, the radio show was unclear what flavour of alt. And it’s not in the new DSM 5. Why not? I don’t know. But my BS alarm is starting to beep, just a little.

I’ll probably do some reading into this and post a book review addressing the subject sooner or later. But for now… all of you out there, just try to take a second look when something seems at first glance to be confirming exactly what you thought all along.

Victim Blaiming

Well, here’s a fascinating headline: “Photos of allegedly uncooperative gang victims released by Surrey RCMP”.

The article is, well, pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Police are releasing victim’s pictures because they aren’t cooperating enough. Can I just say that this sounds like a terrible idea?

I mean, I’m not a big fan of releasing info on people accused of crimes. It seems like all it does is prejudice the jury pool… if those people are in custody, there’s no danger the public needs to be warned about. And of course, if the charges are dropped or the defendants acquitted, a lot of damage has been done.

But the victims? Come on. This is such a catastrophically bad idea it’s hard to believe it exists outside of fiction. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of such a thing happening, either… a rape victim in Washington was arrested last year for being insufficiently cooperative.

This sort of policing will keep victims from seeking help. It will keep victims of violence away from medical attention, it will keep victims of rape away from police. It will keep victims of domestic abuse from leaving their partners, because it will be harder to get a restraining order for anyone who is unwilling to press charges.

Police are frustrated that victims aren’t helping put criminals away. Fine. I get that. But burning bridges with victims only ensures that future crimes are unreported, and future criminals unimpeded.

Productivity and Procrastination

This blog started largely as a writing exercise. It’s not that I didn’t write before, but I that I didn’t write regularly. Writing, it seems, is one of those things that I either do every day or not at all.

I’ve found quite a lot of thing are like that. Though it’s easy enough to get through the routine of daily living, anything that is irregularly tacked on to that routine can too readily fall to the wayside. Over the last year and a half I’ve made great strides in adding things to a daily routine, such that I do them obsessively rather than occasionally. Things like, for example, making strides.

I still miss things occasionally…  all too often I find that it’s just too late in the evening to get done everything I want to do. The writing is one of those things in the not-quite-perfect category. Tonight, for example, I’m working. I have five hours left to post this and if work gets busy I might not finish at all.

“Perfect is the enemy of good” - Voltaire, paraphrasing someone else who has been forgotten.

I’ve heard a lot of things about procrastination over the years. Obviously, it could be laziness. Most of my procrastination probably comes in that category. Another cause of procrastination is apparently being too perfectionist… that’s a nice, flattering interpretation. I have heard that part-time MBA students whose degree is paid for by their employer are told to not get good grades… if they do, they are wasting too much time when they could be working.

“Don’t waste time getting ‘A’s” - Me, paraphrasing someone else who has been forgotten.

Perfectionism isn’t my failing, generally. But it certainly can become so when it comes to things that get seen in public, like this writing. Having a regular habit, that forces me to put something on the blank screen even when I have no idea what to say, helps break that mental block that says “this isn’t good enough to post”. It helps that I don’t write about any subjects I have any sort of expertise in… when all I’m saying is “this is what I think, probably, I guess, don’t quote me” that takes a lot of the pressure off.

Anyway, I’ve managed to pry a 15-minute break out of work to get this down. I think I’d better hit ‘publish’ before anything goes wrong.

We are never giving drugs in the ER

I was suffering for lack of inspiration tonight, but then I thought, surely there must be something to get angry about. I wrote a rant about rounding pennies, I can write a rant about anything. Anything can be outrageous if you overthink it enough.

Take this cute video…

http://www.ems1.com/drugs/video/2089706-Taylor-Swift-parody-highlights-ER-drug-abuse-/

A very well done parody of a Taylor Swift song that I’m not familiar with. It’s about prescription drug abuse. Starts off with a shocking statistic (opioid prescriptions increased by 2.77 times from 1991 to 2010) and a shocking graph (opioid overdose deaths approximately tripled from 1999 to 2010). OK, it would be nice if those dates matched, but that’s being unnecessarily pedantic.

Unnecessarily pedantic is a different set of rants.

This video is from the United States, the statistics are most likely from there. That becomes important when you dig a little deeper.

The song is about refusing to prescribe opioids in the ER. A laudable goal, you might think. What better way to reduce overdoses than to keep such drugs the domain of PCPs, so that a patient’s history is known when they try to refill!

Well as it turns out in the United States the ER is the only form of health care for a shockingly high number of people. You see, they are required by law to provide medical care to anyone who reaches their doors, even if that person can’t afford to pay.

About 50 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2012. That number is down now, perhaps by as much as a third, though I couldn’t find any hard numbers. Still, over ten percent of the population doesn’t have access to the sort of physician that this song would recommend be the sole source of painkillers.

Pain is a medical problem with devastating effects, and chronic pain - the pain that might require an opioid prescription to take home - can be a profound disability. Pain is under-treated in every medical system. In part because it’s hard to measure, in part because the effective treatments are dangerous. Those parts of the problem are beyond current technology to deal with. But this isn’t… this is a political issue. I would hate this to be another way for lives to be worsened by a callous disregard for anyone unable to get a regular doctor.

We're All Mad Here

There was an unnerving news story in March about Kam Brock, a woman who was involuntarily committed to an asylum. I have no way of knowing what the reasoning was for that… her medical records have not been made public. What is public, though, is that she is now suing New York for false imprisonment.

One part of their justification for keeping her was that she made the ridiculous claim that Barack Obama followed her on twitter… ridiculous, that is, until you find out that he actually does.

It seems a little strange that something so easily refuted would be used in a case against her… did no one bother to check? If she asked to prove it to them, did they refuse her? Hopefully more news will emerge as the case progresses.

I’m getting some deja-vu this week, because something eerily similar is happening in South Africa…

Last month South African author Zainub Priya Dala stated that she liked Salman Rushdie’s novels, and was attacked by a mob in retaliation... In retaliation for stating that she liked some novels, she was attacked by a mob... There’s no way I can phrase that that makes it sound sane, is there?

Well, she has just been involuntarily committed. She went to the hospital due to trauma she suffered in the attack. But when she arrived was committed when she refused to renounce her statement, denounce Rushdie, and vow loyalty to Islam.

There is now growing outrage from all around the world. Much of it is coming from PEN, a nonprofit free-speech advocacy group, which you may remember from it’s appearance on Harper’s charity hit list last year.

There’s just no end of things to get mad about in these stories.