Awesome

Another Scene from Baby Class - Lamaze/Breathing Episode

Instructor (for the umpteen gagillionth time): Okay! Here comes another contraction!
Me (not very quietly): Shoot it!!

REM PLZ?

I understand that pregnancy can make you tired. I understand that pregnancy can make you frenetically wired to get the house in order. What I don't understand is how it can simultaneously make your mind race so badly that you feel you need to get up and do something at 3 am, and so tired that you nearly fall back asleep before you can open the bedroom door, so you say f*ck it and get back in bed. After using the restroom (AGAIN), of course.

Scene from Baby Class

The instructor is summarizing the relaxation and massage techniques we've reviewed during the session, and how they apply to labor and delivery. "Think of the contractions like waves on the sea. You CAN ride above them, almost like riding on a surfboard. These techniques will help you on that board . . . if you believe."

I look over at D to see how he's taking this, and notice him surreptitiously and silently clapping his hands in his lap. After a snort of laughter (rapidly suppressed) I join him: "I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!"

Bueller? Bueller?

The pre-birth class I've had to sign up for has us doing this "baby dance" thing, which supposedly helps shake the kid down (?!). Anyways, you’re to stand with your feet hip-width apart, hands on hips and rotate your hips in a circle. Naturally, as soon as I saw it I started doing the Time Warp.

Nobody got it. I also asked Don if I could have a Hippety-Hop instead of just sitting on a birthing ball.



Again, nobody got it. When asked what I was most looking forward to about the kid, I said: "It's all about the toys." Instead of laughing, the instructor asked me very seriously to recount a memory of a cherished childhood toy.

Jebus, don't these people have a sense of humor? They act as though we can flunk the course and not be allowed to give birth with the rest of the class.

It's going to be a looooooong six weeks.

Freaking Hilarious

While I'm sitting at home with this stupid bug, I thought I'd be productive and work up a tentative birth plan. Then I found a better idea from Let's Panic: a mad lib birth plan.

Adventures in Pregnancy - flu shot edition

So, I've done a bunch of research on flu vaccines recommended for pregnancy, since I definitely want to get one. I already feel like I can't freakin' breathe and don't want the flu - swine or regular - on top of it. After looking through the CDC and the FDA as well as the anti- vaccine sites and the anti-conspiracy sites debunking them, I come to the personal conclusions that: 1) Concerns about squalene are probably crap, and it's not being used in any US vaccines anyway, so who cares? 2) Concerns about thimerosal are likely also crap, but there's a thimerosal-free vaccine especially for pregnant people and young kids, so might as well take that anyway. I mean, if they can tell me "better safe than sorry" and blithely prohibit a bunch of things I really want to do with zero evidence it will effect this baby negatively, well, I can say it right back when it comes to dubious claims of medical risks that are probably crap. Can't I?

So I set out to call around and find a single-dose flu vaccine, the regular kind so I can get it out of the way by the time we can get around to the H1N1 - the sources don't seem to be able to make up their mind as to whether they can be taken contemporaneously. I call the local clinic first, 'cause it's right down the road. Here's how that went:

"I'm looking for flu vaccines."
"We have a clinic this Saturday from nine to noon, you can just walk right in."
"Great. Do you know whether they have the single-dose, mercury-free ones? I'm in the second trimester of my first pregnancy and I'm just trying to be extra careful."
"It's . . . they have the regular kind. Oh, or we could give you a nasal spray. That might be what you're looking for."
"But isn't the nasal spray a live vaccine? I thought you weren't supposed to get that when pregnant."
"Then it must be the other one then."
"Okay. Um, thanks. Bye."

I do presume that no doctor would have given me the spray after seeing my 'condition.' Still, that's a tad troubling.

Next I call Walgreen's in Iowa City. Not only does the pharmacist know what I'm talking about, she can tell me the brand and manufacturer of the vaccine, and yes it's Thimerosal-free. I've got a 2:30 appointment.

What a Coincidence!

(Blog Post) According to the website Think Progress, Chuck Grassley has stated that "I base my decisions not on polls but on town meetings and mail” when it comes to allowing a public option in health care.




So I went to his website to see when he's holding a meeting in my neck of the woods, so I can put my two cents in. Huh. Apparently there are no meetings in Eastern Iowa during this session break, he's confining himself to the very conservative counties out west. Perhaps this is because the polls show that 56 percent of Iowans favor a public option? Mr. Grassley: why don't you just give it up, place your fingers firmly into your ears and say "LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU?" It would actually be more subtle.

News Flash

(Blog Post) Going Vegan causes women to lose their bellybuttons!!



Geez, guys, couldya lay off the Photoshop? There's gotta be a support group.

Healthcare OpEd Fail. Hilarity ensues.

"Investors Business Daily", ran an editorial, on July 31, 2009, regurgitating several erroneous statements regarding the supposedly abysmal state of the UK healthcare system, and how the public option will mimic it by compelling seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years about alternatives for end-of-life care.

The best part? This quote:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

PS - Professor Hawking pointed out that he is, in fact, a natural-born British citizen and "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," he told us. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." This prompted the Investors Business Daily to remove the sentence from the article and issue this informative correction:

Editor's Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.

Yep. 'Cause that was all that's wrong with the article . . .

Hey, at least they didn't refuse to believe his birth certificate.

PPS - I swiped the Double Facepalm from this comment on the issue in physicsforums.com, because it made laugh so hard water came out my nose.

Okay, Now I'm Getting Frustrated

I've really been trying not to politi-blog. Basically, being preggo means that whenever I get tense, I get an incredible stomach ache. So my "side notes" have mostly been focused on the alien in my stomach, or other daily trivia.

But . . . I hate misinformation. I hate blind sloganing - Two legs good, four legs baaaad! And I truly despise people of any political persuasion who knowingly spread false slogans and propoganda in order to confuse an issue. Our entire fucking democracy is dependent on informed, independent voters. So I'm going to suck it up, down a bunch of Tums, and blog.

To get an idea what I'm talking about go look at Politifact.org's healthcare page. Seriously, go. I'll wait for you.

On the first page alone, I count six "pants on fire," seven "false," one "half-true," three "mostly true," and two "true" statements. Thirteen outright lies, and only six statements with any level of truth in them. In fact, it weren't for one old guy from New Jersey who racked up one "true" one "half-true" and one "mostly-true," there would only have been three statements with any truth in them on the entire freaking page.

And these are not minor lies, either. They're flipping doozies. But before I go further, I have some bias I need to disclose. I've worked inside the insurance industry as a legal advisor. I've also worked for the government as an attorney. So I have some inherent knowledge of how each of these systems work, and some inherent biases formed by my experiences with each of them. Why is this relevant? Well, if you take away all the propoganda, we're trying to decide if we should rely solely on private insurance companies to supply health care insurance to the masses, or add a government option. That's the bottom line.

So let's look at some of this misinformation that's floating around. Palin's claiming that if we add a government option, there will be "death panels" who decide whether we get lifesaving treatment paid for, or are told to go screw ourselves because we're not productive enough. Let me think through what that might look like:

A roomful of high level bureaucrats discusses a claim, say a drunken high-school student who is rendered a quadriplegic in an auto accident. They'd probably discuss in cold terms how many wheelchairs and vans and meds this kid will need. Someone will point out that it would cost millions less if he'd just died. They'll examine the language of the coverage to see if there's any way to reduce his recovery - a loophole of some sort? It will be noted whether the kid got good grades before the crash - can he reasonably expect to get some kind of job? Or was he a blue-collar type that won't work in the future and just be a drain on society? Maybe we can work that angle? What if we can prove it was self-inflicted harm? Does that work?

Yeah, I can see it. Clearly. See, I've been in a room like that one, discussing a case like that one, and trying to convince insurance claims and underwriting VP's that we really do not have any loopholes and this kid is entitled to his benefits or the company will be in a shitload of trouble. On another case, I've had screaming middle-aged men in my face telling me they don't care what the law is, we never intended to cover that expensive of a loss. The best part? The company I worked for, which also had lots of good people who were NOT assholes and so I'm not going to name it here, is a NONPROFIT. Their policyholders were their owners. In theory, this gave the recipients control of everything, and should have acted as a check on this very type of behavior. Nice idea, in theory. Not so much in practice. The insurance industry is also regulated up to the eyeballs, and there are huge penalties for wrongful denial. And yet this continues. In a non-profit. I should note that the right prevailed in both my examples. But it was not certain and not easy. You wanna bet how much worse it gets in a for-profit company? Take a look at some of the bad faith verdicts handed down against insurers. You will see some of the most egregious behavior, on a par with big tobacco or any of the other industries that intentionally try to cover crap up in order to make a profit.

My point: Although Politifact correctly points out that Palin is lying, it calls her idea a "sci-fi scenario". I disagree. To some degree, it is very far-fetched. But in another sense, it is exactly what is happening now. Not with the public option, with private insurance. Because that's the way the industry is set up, folks. It is NOT DESIGNED TO ENSURE HEALTHCARE, but to INSURE.

Insurance as an industry started with just liability. Technically, it was people in China who shipped goods downriver who decided that if each of them put some of their goods onto ten different boats, instead of all onto one boat, they'd minimize their risk of loss. As a business, it is designed to provide coverage for uncertain, unusual events: a car accident, a lightning strike. If a bunch of people pay in premium during the many times when nothing is going on, there should theoretically be enough money to cover them when something wonky does happen. If you've got one guy who is being too risky - sending all his goods in boats with leaks - you want to exclude him out from the group because he'll always be getting payouts and never put enough in to cover it. It's branched out to auto, home, farm, and so forth, but the theory is always the same. A bunch of prudent people facing no known losses will put in premiums when they don't need to with the idea that if an unintended, rare, freak loss occurs, there will be enough money to cover it.

I know this seems like remedial insurance 101, but it's important to remember: INSURANCE IS NOT DESIGNED TO COVER CERTAIN, REGULAR, KNOWN, AND SURE LOSSES. Like getting old, getting sick, having babies, and dying. We are looking to Insurers to Ensure our healthcare is there whenever we need it. That is not what they do. You are asking a bear to be a duck.

Why are there "death panels"? To exclude people who are, in a sense, medical leaky boats. Get them out of the group. This is true even if you are a nice, middle-class, responsible person who pays large premiums, because you can't possibly pay enough premium to make up for the losses paid out. And, no, the companies don't care if you've been a loyal customer for twenty years, and always paid on time, and (blah-blah-Ginger). There's sixty gagillion more people who are also regular payers, so don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Besides, by the time they get done denying your behind, you've probably missed more than your alloted sick days, so unless you qualify as disabled under the Americans with Disabilities Act and you can prove a reasonable accomodation can be made to allow you to work, well, you're fired. Say buh-bye to "Middle class."

My very long point is that having worked for both Government and Insurance, and not having an incredibly high opinion of either, it is a no-brainer to me that the public option is necessary in healthcare. We can't keep asking Insurance to be what it isn't.

I will address other concerns later, this post is already too long. But to short-cut it:

1) A Public Option will bankrupt private insurers! Like public universities have bankrupted all the private colleges? Like public buses have bankrupted taxi services? I can go on and on with this one.

2) It will make waits too long! Do you want to wait eight hours for simple care? You do realize that what you're essentially saying is that if poor people can go to the same docs you may have to wait your turn? I don't take well to snobbery.

3) If they can't make a big profit, Doctors will leave! Yeah, in droves. They'll all move to Europe. No, wait, Canada. Erm, Mexico? Seriously, here's the point: lots of lawyers do public defender work. We don't get paid jack compared to the bigshots in large firms. But we're paid much better than most of you working at lower-level white collar jobs. We're not going anywhere. If they did the same to the docs, they wouldn't go anywhere either. And BTW, it's not necessarily the dregs of the profession, either. I pulled a B average, but I'm not in a big ass firm. I want a life, thanksverymuch.

4) Economic principles will cover this in a market system! Healthcare costs are naturally limited by what people can afford to pay! Medicaid picks up the slack! Holy crap, are you out of touch. Firstly, free market only works on non-essentials. Take food, for example. In an absolutely regulation-free market, if there were a serious shortage there would be no limit to the price of food that vendors could charge. Prices would go up and up, and the number of people who could afford food would shrink and shrink, until eventually everyone else had died off and a surplus was re-established that way. Even if one of the stores tried to take a larger slice of the market by dropping prices, they'd eat through their supplies in a heartbeat and go under. Competition be damned, there's no limit to price. Medical aid is a similar commodity. If you're dealing with serious diseases, it is not optional, but essential. People will pay whatever they have to in order to stay alive, until they can't afford it and die. There is no free market.

I'll take my Tums and go off to my hearing now.

Remind me again why I feed you?

My cat disappeared last Friday, then casually came back last night - just when I'd finished notifying the shelters. She eats, purrs a bit, then tries to sneak right back out again. Now she's all like: "What? I just want to go hang with my friends! You never let me do anything! I hate you!" Then the dog looks at me like: "WTF? I get punished for just barking at the mailman! She gets away with everything!"

Anthropomorphized teenage angstiness abounds.

I did slightly better then 6

I was tagged on this by my niece . . . I think I read too much.

BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other" Book Nerds".

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X

Total: 10

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( 1/2 credit - only some of them, I've not read the sonnets, etc.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faul
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 6 1/2

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X

Total: 6

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma-Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

Total: 7

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X

Total: 7

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon X
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
Total:6

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X

Total: 4

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill BrysonX
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X

Total: 4

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X (And all the others, so do I get extra credit?)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 5

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

Total: 6

Grand Total= 61 and 1/2

Guess what we made?

According to the technician, it's a boy. I think it looks like Skeletor, myself. Or perhaps a Rorschach test. But they kept pointing at blobs and telling me what organs they were, so apparently they did find all the bits they were looking for.

Happy Fourth of July!

The Arizona Strip Search Case is Up

Strip searching a 13-year-old girl without "any indication of danger posed by drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose" the child was carrying the drugs in her underwear is a violation of the girl's constitutional rights.

Dear Google:

Your directions suck:

What she said

Dalia Lathwick has an awesome article regarding the oral arguments in Safford School v. Redding, the "let's strip-search a 13-year-old girl, 'cause another 13-year-old we just caught with contraband said she might have ibuprofen" case. Apparently the old dudes on the bench have completely forgotten what it's like to be in junior high, with Justice Breyer saying stuff like "I'm trying to work out why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym, they do fairly frequently, not to -- you know, and there are only two women there. Is -- how bad is this, underclothes? That's what I'm trying to get at. I'm asking because I don't know." (p 45). Clue to the clueless: it's bad. Really bad. I'd've dropped out of school over it at that age (which apparently Ms. Redding did).

I'm Sure You've Already Seen This, But

It's soo freaking cool