over at Abyss2hope. Go check it out.

• Stephen Kuusisto, whose new book Eavesdropping is now available, blogs poetically about “the stare.”

Years and years have gone by and I still can’t get used to all this staring. And then the talk. Talk like fruit dropped in crystal. The talk they have kept secret even from themselves.

• Dr. Lisa I. Iezzoni writes in the New England Journal of Medicine (as a doctor who uses a wheelchair) about the failings of nondisabled doctors in dealing with disabled patients.

• Gordon Rattray travels Ethiopia with lots of assistance from generous and friendly people.

• Penny at Disability Studies U, Temple Univ. offers an impressive round-up of recent disability blogging that puts my slumgullions to shame.

• Wheelchair Dancer spent a little time last weekend critquing the NYT and its lack of crip savvy in two particular articles, here and here. Excellent analyses of the nondisabled slant in mainstream media. She also writes with candor and delicacy about how the joys of imperfection do sometimes clash with a decided ambivalence about her disability. I hope to write a response to this soon, but it’s not to be missed on its own.

• Kari Brooks catalogues some of the responses she gets when it becomes known she’s a special education teacher in her post, “God loves alligators.”

• Nappy as I Want to Be writes about youth of color and mental illness. She provides lots of excellent links about specific racial groups and how vulnerability to both mental illness and lack of care can effect each when care is built focusing on the point of view and problems of mostly white males.

• Zilari at Processing in Parts comments on the case of the baseball coach who talks an eight-year-old into harming an autistic teammate in order to force him off the team.

Now, it’s a good thing I don’t engage in making mass judgements about nonautistic people based on the actions of a few. If I did, I’d probably be pointing to this incident as proof that we have a moral imperative to search for a cure for “non-autism”.

• Susan Schwartzenberg’s book Becoming Citizens: How Courageous Families Changed the World for People with Disabilities is also an historical exhibit at the Washington State Capitol Museum in Olympia, running from this Sunday through January 6, 2007.

Like the exhibit, the book traces the families’ efforts to find education, friends and support for their mentally disabled children - at a time when institutionalization was the social norm.

Through informal dinners and other get-togethers, the families became a political force, Schwartzenberg said.

“You learn about these remarkable moms,” Schwartzenberg said. “It’s a story about the women’s movement. It’s a story about civil rights. It’s a story about family collections. And it’s a story about disability as well.”

The families’ efforts culminated in the passage of the state’s 1971 Education for All law, which guaranteed every Washington child an education. The law was the predecessor to the federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975.

• In a FindLaw column from 2001, Sherry F. Colb discusses disability discrimination and her experience with the New York bar exam:

The exam was scheduled to begin at 9 AM, but the proctors in the “special” room did not hand out the test papers until closer to 10. I worried briefly that we might not get the full time allotted to complete the test, but no one seemed to be keeping an eye on the clock. The next morning, on Day Two of the exam, it appeared we would again be starting late. I asked one of the proctors whether perhaps we could begin our exam at 9 AM on that day. With a puzzled expression on her face, she asked why. I replied that everyone else was taking the exam at 9 AM, and that I did not know of any reason for us to be delayed. She smiled and responded slowly: “If you think you can take the exam with the normal people, why don’t you go ahead and try?”

• Kenyans in wheelchairs make money with mobile phone service. YouTube video here.

Crossposted on The Gimp Parade

Here’s a mini-sociology lesson. I found this article today, which includes the following quote:

Dr. Raoult Ratard took a unique approach to studying the suicide rate because there have been no reliable estimates of how many people have returned since the storm. Various sources have put the number at anywhere from fewer than 200,000 to around 250,000 out of a pre-Katrina population of just under 455,000.

So, Ratard looked at the number of deaths from October 2005 (when the city was reopened after the storm) through March 2006, and compared that total to the number of deaths of all kinds during the same period the year before.

The pre-storm death total was 2,507; post-storm, 1,024. That means the number of deaths was down by about three-fifths.

Then Ratard looked at suicides. The number of pre-storm suicides was 16; post-storm, 11. That means the number of suicides was down by only about one-third.

So, the suicide rate appears to have gone up. But the totals are too small to conclude that Katrina caused the increase, Ratard said. “They are not big enough so that you can say with certainty that it would not be due to chance,” he said.

There are a few important sociological issues that this brought up for me. First, I think, while innovative, the methodology is fairly weak. One of the problems is that we may also need to count Katrina evacuees in this as well. Of course, this is going to be damn near impossible to do, since the Katrina Diaspora is so dispersed across the US. Now we could argue that only people in the city limits over the entire year should be counted, but I think if a researcher wanted look at suicides that could be directly or indirectly related to Katrina, he or she needs to think well outside the city boundaries. The other methodological weakness is the small numbers. I think it is irresponsible to report findings that are not statistically significant as if they are. I certainly don’t blame the authors of the study for this, but I do worry that people are going to get the wrong impression of strength o the findings. The other issue that I’d like to bring up, is the distinction between correlation and causation. This data only shows a correlation between suicide and Katrina, and one that may not even be significant. One funny example commonly used in sociology to demonstrate the distinction between causation and correlation is the strong correlation between the amount of ice cream sold in stores and the murder rate. In the US the murder rate goes up when people buy more ice cream, and when they buy less ice cream the murder rate goes down. Now anybody with a lick of sense knows that ice cream doesn’t drive people into murderous rages. There is a correlation, but we know ice cream doesn’t cause murder or for that matter higher murder rates don’t cause people to eat more ice cream. So why is this? Well, the murder rates (especially in temperate climates) tend to be higher in the summer, and the warmer weather is also correlated with people eating more ice cream. In the study above, they probably could do case studies of the suicides and try to determine if Katrina played a role. The researcher does note this problem, but I worry that the average reader may not realize why this important.

On another note, I do think there is a reasonable argument to be made as to why the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina could be related to an increase in suicides. This argument goes way back to one of the founder’s of sociology: Emile Durkheim. Durkheim is best know for his study on suicide. Durkheim identified various types of suicide, including anomie/anomic suicide. This type of suicide is related to conditions where social norms break down. The Durkheim website cited above describes the various types of anomic suicide as follows:

• Acute economic anomie: sporadic decreases in the ability of traditional institutions (such as religion, guilds, pre-industrial social systems, etc.) to regulate and fulfill social needs.
• Chronic economic anomie: long term dimunition of social regulation. Durkheim identified this type with the ongoing industrial revolution, which eroded traditional social regulators and often failed to replace them. Industrial goals of wealth and property were insufficient in providing happiness, as was demonstrated by higher suicide rates among the wealthy than among the poor.
• Acute domestic anomie: sudden changes on the microsocial level resulted in an inability to adapt and therefore higher suicide rates. Widowhood is a prime example of this type of anomie.
• Chronic domestic anomie: referred to the way marriage as an institution regulated the sexual and behavioral means-needs balance among men and women. Marriage provided different regulations for each, however. Bachelors tended to commit suicide at higher rates than married men because of a lack of regulation and established goals and expectations. On the other hand, marriage has traditionally served to overregulate the lives of women by further restricting their already limited opportunities and goals. Unmarried women, therefore, do not experience chronic domestic anomie nearly as often as do unmarried men.

I suspect this is the sort of theory that is guiding the study mentioned above. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know whether or not the suicide rate in New Orleans has truly increased. In spite of the sound theoretically argument that can be made about why the suicide rate should increase under such conditions, it is going to take a little more time and a little better methodology for us to determine whether or not Katrina cause a surge in suicides.

This was originally posted on both The Gimp Parade and Echidne of the Snakes in August 2006. Because it’s an election year, I thought it was appropriate to repost this now while I have a bigger audience than I usually have access to.

The first three links below are now inactive as Liz is taking a break while she focuses on her health. News about that here.

The fantastic Liz at Granny Gets a Vibrator has been blogging and slogging her way through a recent cancer diagnosis and all the medical, financial and existential fears that travel in it’s tumor-swollen baggage. (A quick and violent death to Brenda!) I can’t say enough good things about her writing and I wish her all the strength and luck she needs for this week and until this is over.

The medical worries are bad enough, but I keep thinking back to Liz’s recent rant about the financial concerns a medical crisis creates and adding her rants to the ones I work through daily in my head. (I’ve written just a little about them here.) Here’s Liz:

The system at the “charity” hospital is a total disaster, a massive fuckup, a guaranteed death sentence. Not just for me, but for 4,000 poor uninsured people who desperately need health care every month. I’m slipping through the system’s cracks: medically, there’s no continuity, I never see the same person twice, no one can figure out what’s going on, locate my records, or find out which doctor said what or why. And I’m slipping through the cracks financially: because I have a small amount of money left in my IRA, my “liquid assets” disqualify me from receiving free care, until every single penny I have is gone. Which at this rate could be in about three weeks….

And the struggle to figure out how to deal with the financial monstrosity. I deeply appreciate the Paypal offers, but you know, we’re talking about maybe $60,000 a month? Probably more. Astronomical. Impossible. Ruinous.

I’m not going into this all detail out of self-pity, or to whine about how it’s so unfair to me. This situation is not just about me. There are millions of people out there in the same sinking boat I’m in, with nowhere to turn. It’s just unimaginably horrible. I sat there and watched several hundred such people suffer today, and most of them looked completely defeated, thoroughly resigned. The tired dead-eyed hopelessness in their faces still haunts me.

It is impossible and ruinous. The health care system in America is just broken. If Bush and the international gratitude his actions create don’t kill us all, the health care crisis will destroy us economically as a country. And our independence one by one.

I was in hospital four months. Three different hospitals, actually. I’m unemployed now, but because I was insured as a baby before my impairments were evident or serious, and because I still ride on that insurance through my parents, who finance it, I have excellent insurance coverage.

Still. This hospital stay forced me to activate the full Medicare benefits I qualify for and apply for state aid for the disabled. I have no idea of the full cost of my illness and recovery, nevermind the current care I receive at home. The hospital bills exceed a half million, I know. But the paperwork goes round and round — employment of the circulators probably costs half what I owe. Medicare and my insurance company send me reports, the hospitals send me totals of various things, then they all request the others pay their share, and they all send me updates on how that’s working out. It usually isn’t working out, so it’s a self-correcting program where we go round again. I’m not sure anything has yet been paid.

There are the inevitable errors that slow this idiotic process down. At one point my medical supplier billed my insurance company, and the insurance company paid but inexplicably sent the check to some random trucking company with a slightly similar name. The trucking company cashed the check, which was a little over 20K. (Well, wouldn’t you?) The supply company demanded the money they never got, the insurance company insisted they’d paid it. Someone demanded a cancelled check. Someone refused. It got kind of pissy.

There was mention of going to court, where, of course, I would get named as the delinquent defendant. I swear this is all true. Meanwhile, I’m not speaking because I’m a lazy ass vent user and, frankly, I want some alone time from all this attention and being able to legitimately claim I can’t speak comes in quite handy sometimes. So, my father spent a week or two on hold. And because he has a talent for this, he eventually made someone see reason and they all grew up and fought this out without my needing to pay legal fees. I don’t know if the supply company actually got paid or if they agreed to add that bill to the merry-go-round again.

There was discussion while I was in the rehab hospital about whether or not my parents would need to spend down their assets to nothing so that I could receive the continuing care I need at home. My retired parents who have had the luck and good sense to cover their own aging butts as best as any upper-middle class couple in this broken system can were told they might need to give up everything so their 37-year-old daughter could live with them and get daily care. That’s a rockin’ deal for them.

The details of why this needed to be considered involve how I almost ended up in a very scary nursing home. I’ll write on that another day. A hospital social worker helped us navigate the system so that only I need to be poor. Currently I do live with my parents and have 24-hour nursing care because of the ventilator and the laws attaching to receiving aid at home.

In order to get funding for home care while using a vent, it has to be qualified nurses rather than just anyone trained as a personal assistant. Though, of course, my parents learned everything the nurses need to know for my daily care from the rehab hospital staff and they are allowed to help. Because this country has a nursing shortage, in fact, my parents were on duty half the hours of every week (84 hours shared between them, sometimes 48 at a stretch) for about a month before all my nurses were found and hired by the agency required to handle this for me. If I had enough family to be present round-the-clock without pay, no one would care they didn’t have medical degrees. (More on that, too, another day.)

In order to keep the funding that provides this constant professional care, I have to have less than $3,000 in total assets to my name. Constantly. Forever. I get a disability benefit each month. I’m not allowed to pay my parents rent and in these first few months I haven’t been out too much. So, ludicrous as it seems, it’s been a challenge to maintain my total poverty. I can’t invest. I pay for what I can around the house. And I do what is called a “spend down.”

Many disabled do it or something similar. My college roommate used to get her personal attendant funds and college funding in cash so it wouldn’t show in her financial records at the bank. And she was wicked generous with birthdays and Christmas because she couldn’t use any cash to, you know, build a future for herself.

One nurse told me of a man she used to help who had his home nursing cancelled because he had too much in the bank. He called the home health agency back a day or two later, said he’d been on a spending spree and they could come back now. He was poor again.

If I didn’t live with my parents, almost every cent of my disability benefit would go toward food and rent — or maybe just rent. I would be among the poorest of the poor at $760/month, or more likely be in that nursing home with no autonomy.

Anyone who could get hit by a bus tomorrow and need a ventilator would face all of this. Or anyone who has a tumor. Or is a soldier in the war. Because the system is broken, we’re all just that close to losing any hope of economic independence. Or life outside of an institution. Astronomical. Impossible. Ruinous. And a lurking threat.

On Monday, I wrote about a recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine¹ , which is intended to refute last year’s CDC study (published in JAMA² ) showing that “overweight” people live longer than “normal” weight people.

According to media reports, this new study proved that even a slight weight gain can be deadly. The AP wrote “Being a little overweight can kill you, according to new research that leaves little room for denial that a few extra pounds is harmful.” NPR wrote “being even a bit overweight can potentially kill you.” The Star-Ledger ominously asked “Those few extra pounds won’t kill you … or will they?”

The NEJM study, by Adams et al., is — frankly — a badly conducted study. It uses a non-representative sample (members of The American Association of Retired People, or AARP) with an incredibly low response rate of 18%. Even worse, height and weight were self-reported.

But for the study’s authors, who were determined to come up with a study proving that fat equals death, the data presented a much more serious problem: the people in the “overweight” category were longer-lived than the people in the “normal weight” category. How to spin data showing that overweight people live longer, into their desired message that fat is always deadly?

In Monday’s post, I quoted Linda Bacon extensively. Today I want to expand on one of her points:

…Let’s take a look at the data itself. The authors worked hard for their conclusion. They examined records from over a half million AARP members that had been surveyed over a ten year period. What they found was entirely consistent with the earlier JAMA report: “overweight” people had the lowest mortality risk. But that wouldn’t serve their purposes. NEJM’s press release wouldn’t look nearly as attractive with that headline.

So they subjected their data to numerous manipulations before finally arriving at a suitable conclusion. First they threw out data on people who were smokers or former smokers. Nope, still shows overweight as benign. They hid this with a sleazy method: using only the top (BMIs of 23 to 24.9) of the “normal weight” group compared to the whole of the “overweight” group.

Here’s a table of some of the relative risks reported in the Adams et al. study (if you have trouble reading it, click on the image for a larger version):

The yellow column indicates the relative risk of death for “normal weight” people (the heaviest set of “normal” weight people are used as the baseline; all other risk ratios on this table are in comparison to those folks). The red outlines indicate the areas where the relative risk of death is as low or lower for “overweight” people as it is for “normal weight” people.

• Note that for “all men” and “all women,” the risk of death is less for people who are slightly “overweight” than it is for people in the “normal weight” categories.
• Looking at where the red outlines are located, can anyone seriously argue that the take-away finding of this data is that being a little overweight is generally a killer?
• In nearly every category, being in the “normal weight” BMI ranges of 18.5-20.9 or 21-23.4 carries a higher risk of premature death than being in the “overweight” BMI ranges.
• In most categories, being slightly “obese” (BMI 30-35) is slightly less risky than being in the middle of the “normal weight” category (BMI 21-23.5). In many categories, being solidly “obese” (BMI 35-40) is slightly less risky than being at the thin end of the “normal weight” category (BMI 18.5-21).
• In order to produce the finding that “overweight” is less healthy than “normal weight,” Dr. Adams did a very dishonest statistical manipulation - he compared just one “normal” BMI range, representing the heaviest people in the “normal” range, to the entire “overweight” range. This is because the majority of people in the “normal weight” categories had a greater risk of death than the majority of people in the “overweight” category.
• Race and sex have a strong impact on these findings. The “fat equals death” findings that were reported in the media shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone, but black women especially would be well advised to ignore the reporting. This study actually found that black women, more than anyone else, have an elevated risk of death if they’re in the “normal weight” category, and live longer if they’re in the “overweight” category.
• The strongest association between “overweight” and increased mortality were for Latina women, and for the combined category of Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians (both male and female). However, the the sample size for these groups were significantly lower than the sample sizes for the other groups. For example, the finding that white men in the BMI range of 35-39.9 have a relative risk of 1.32 was based on the deaths of 1,862 white men in that BMI range; in contrast, the finding that Hispanic women in the BMI range of 35-39.9 was based on the deaths of only 10 Hispanic women in that BMI range. This makes these findings much less reliable.
• None of these risk ratios should be taken seriously. Why? Because they’re all very low³ — almost none of the risk ratios rise above two (for smokers the risk ratio of death by lung cancer, compared to non-smokers, is 23.3 for men and 12.7 for women⁴). Many of the risk ratios are so small (e.g., 1.07 - remember, 1.00 is a null result) that it’s impossible to imagine that they could have any realistic real-world significance to someone evaluating her own health.

  With very small risk ratios - especially in a study with poor data-gathering and many possible factors not controlled for, such as this study - determining causation isn’t really science; it’s guesswork. Maybe these differences are being caused by fat (even though at many BMI ratios fat people live longer); but the cause may also be one of the many factors this study did not account for, such as yo-yo dieting, use of weight loss drugs, body shape, discrimination, and socioeconomic class, to name a few.

So that’s one of the ways Adams and his co-writers twisted the data to produce their desired result. But they weren’t done yet, and so neither am I: watch for a future post on how they used retrospective data (i.e., asking people “do you remember what you weighed when you were 50?”) to twist their data further, and for what they actually found out (but didn’t report): Losing weight is deadlier than gaining weight.

1. Adams, K., et al., Overweight, Obesity, and Mortality in a Large Prospective Cohort of Persons 50 to 71 Years Old. New England Journal of Medicine, 2006. 355(8): p. 763-8. (back)
2. Flegal, K.M., et al., Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight, and obesity. Journal of the American Medical Association, 2005. 293(15): p. 1861-7. There are “Alas” posts discussing this study here and here. (back)
3. The sole exception is the 4.12 risk ratio for Hispanic women with BMIs of 40+. This finding — based on the deaths of just 16 women — is such an extreme outlier that it’s almost certainly statistical noise. (back)
4. The Surgeon General’s “Health Consequences of Smoking 2004,” chapter 7, page 881 (back)

All¹ the legitimate social science research on the subject has shown that children of lesbian and gay parents turn out fine. This is a finding that horrifies the gay-bashers in the so-called “marriage movement,” and they’ve been working hard to deny these findings. One such paper frequently cited by anti-equality activists is Professor Steven Nock’s affidavit for the Canadian case Halpern v. Canada.

Unfortunately, Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz’s excellent and thorough critique of Steven Nock - an affidavit from that same trial - has not been read nearly as often. I suspect this is because the Stacey/Biblartz affidavit, while available on the web via a single obscure webpage, has not been on the web in a format that search engines can read and index.

For that reason, and with Professor Stacey’s kind permission, I’m posting a more search-engine-friendly version of the Stacey/Biblarz affidavit, in both .pdf format and html format. Hopefully, this will help bring Stacey/Biblartz’s critique of Professor Nock to the attention of more readers.

I’m sure I’ll find reasons to link to and quote Stacey and Biblarz in the future, but for now I’ll just quote their conclusion:

Research in the most rigorously peer-reviewed journals in child development and sociology provide generally accepted social scientific evidence that lesbian and gay parents are as fit, effective and successful as similar heterosexual parents. Likewise these studies find that children of same sex couples are as emotionally healthy and socially adjusted and at least as educationally and socially successful as children raised by heterosexual parents. Research even provides some suggestive evidence that there may be certain hidden advantages that lesbian parents and their children seem to enjoy. There is neither theory nor evidence that leads in the opposite direction.

Therefore, it seems surprising, if not disingenuous, that Professor Nock, who elsewhere emphasizes the benefits of marriage to parents, their children and society, is unwilling to anticipate that the same benefits, or least some of the same benefits, and perhaps additional benefits, would apply to same-sex marriages and their progeny.

Finally we would underscore that the issue before the court concerns the impact of marriage on lesbian and gay parenting. Lesbian and gay people have parented for a long time and will continue to do so. The question is under what conditions. Is it preferable for them to parent under conditions of invisibility, conditions of discrimination, or conditions of equality? It is difficult to imagine how anyone could argue in good faith that it is preferable to parent without access to equal recognition, social and legal resources, and benefits that other parents and their children enjoy.

1. The word “all” here is used literally, not hyperbolically. (back)

Mayo Clinic researchers have designed a chairless classroom that they say may cut down on childhood obesity even as it helps children focus on learning and being happier in school.

“We know that a major culprit behind obesity is a lack of physical activity,” says Dr. James Levine, a Mayo Clinic obesity researcher who has studied the connection between everyday movement and weight.

Levine wondered if a different type of classroom could encourage movement, and ultimately, reduce the risk of obesity. Earlier this year, Levine and Mayo Clinic colleagues put the notion to the test. They designed what they believe is the first classroom without chairs using a range of creative and mobile tools. Each student had a “standing desk” on wheels that could easily move around the classroom. Apple loaned wireless notebook computers and iPods, which students used in regular learning activities.

My high school chemistry class had high tables and stools for students to sit at. The experiments were done at these tables or at the high counters along the walls. Each student had a table and lab partner — except for me. I sat alone at the front of the class at a low table about a yard from the chalk board.

When we had experiments, I joined some duo, peering at what they worked on with the project at my eye level. There was no way I could participate hands-on, particularly when volatile chemicals were used. A few experiments I could do at my low table. Alone. Where I didn’t have the camaraderie of teamwork that the other students all enjoyed.

Similar to my chemistry classroom furniture, many restaurants now feature tall tables and stools for guests. Some busy lunchtime cafes even have wall-hugging counters with no chairs at all so workers can stand and eat — part of the hurried lunch break of American work culture. By law, these establishments have to provide accessible wheelchair seating. I don’t know what the exact occupancy ratio is, but frequently this means one or two normal-height tables in a corner somewhere for the likes of me — if the place is ADA-compliant. A similar problem exists in bars, and restaurants that have lots of booths.

When an environment is apportioned out so that, by furniture design, wheelchair users are excluded from most of the space and all that space creates a social environment as high or higher than the wheelchair user’s eye-level, the exclusion can be keenly felt. It’s spatial discrimination, really. There’s a place for you, but you can only stay in your place since the rest of the environment is designed in a way that is not usable.

It’s fundamentally different from seating at, say, a stadium or theater where wheelchair access seating must be integrated into the whole floor plan. It may not be optimum seating — in fact, it rarely is, since building owners can make more money keeping the premium seats wheelchair inaccessible — but there’s the potential for everyone present to be seated, more or less equally. (Nondisabled people standing at concerts and giving wheelchair users only butts to look at from their equally-expensive seats is another topic for another day.)

I like the idea of classrooms where the furniture is all mobile and teaching allows for movement and more dynamic and varied gatherings of students, but if classroom furniture begins to be designed for the standing student, the sitting ones will be even more excluded spatially. The mobile part would be excellent — more room for wheelchairs to get around. But furniture for standing students raises the plane of classroom conversation over the wheelchair user’s head.

The ADA doesn’t account for perceptual/conceptual discrimination of this kind so there would be no legal recourse, as far as I know. I’m all for making classroom learning a more comfortably physical experience. Perhaps there’s some way to copy what I’m told is a West Point custom: students who feel in danger of falling asleep during lectures are encouraged to get up and stand in the back of the classroom, promoting activity to focus attention. At least that’s voluntary.

Article via Amy Tenderich at Diabetes Mine

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade

UPDATE: See also (or see instead, really) this post.

Announcement: I’m not the owner of “Amptoons.com” anymore. I sold it a couple of months ago.

Five months ago, I was facing two problems. First of all, I was in real financial trouble - we were paying all our bills, but by a slimmer margin each month, and if things had kept on going that way it was only a matter of time before we’d come up short. Plus, one person in the house hadn’t been able to pay his rent in a long time, while another seemed on the verge of being unemployed (although as it turned out, that was a false alarm).

Second of all, I kept on having to beg my host not to shut down “Alas” for using too much server time - and in fact, “Alas” was briefly shut down more than once, and I was forced to remove a lot of functionality in order to reduce server load. My host kept on telling me that I needed a dedicated server, but the cost of that is well beyond anything I could consider.

Then a buyer approached me offering to purchase amptoons.com, so he could use it to improve search engine rankings for his clients (how that all works isn’t something I have any knowledge of). He offered a substantial sum of money - not enough to erase my money worries, but enough to ease the pressure for a while. Plus he offered to provide a free dedicated server for “Alas.”

The contract took months to wrangle, but here’s the bottom line: The new owner has absolutely no control over the content of “Alas.” However, “Alas” plus my cartoonist pages are the only parts of amptoons.com I have any access to or control over. The buyer also has the right to put in one or two inconspicuous links on “Alas,” positioned in a way that would make it unlikely that anyone but search engine robots would follow the link.

I was assured by the buyer that he would never host porn sites on “amptoons.com.” And I wrote into the contract that his link on “Alas” could never be a direct link to a porn site. But beyond that, I have no ability to control what the buyer does with his pages - the deal is that he has absolutely no say in what’s on “Alas,” but we also agreed that I have no say over what he does with his own property. And - as a couple of “Alas” readers have noticed - some pages I don’t own include links to porn.

I’m essentially in the same position as someone with a blog on “blogspot.com” - I don’t own the domain, and although I control what’s on my own blog, I don’t have any say over what’s posted on the domain other than my little piece of it.

I realize that some “Alas” readers will feel that I’ve sold out, or that this puts me beyond the pale. I’m genuinely sorry for that. For the record, I don’t feel I’ve been victimized (as one person suggested in email), nor do I feel like I’m a total sell-out. What I feel is this: I’ve made a compromise, one that I probably wouldn’t have made in a perfect world.

That’s all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled political rants.

(Comments are closed on this thread. If you want to talk to me about this, please drop me an email.)

(The ADA, for those who don’t know, is the “Americans With Disabilities Act.”)

From the Disability Law Blog (thanks to Blue for emailing me the link!):

This morning, the Sixth Circuit issued its decision in EEOC v. Watkins Motor Lines, Inc. The EEOC had brought suit on behalf of a worker who claimed he had been fired because of his morbid obesity (he weighed up to 450 pounds). The Sixth Circuit held that the worker did not have a “disability” for purposes of the ADA, because he did not show that his obesity had a “physiological cause” and therefore qualified as a “physiological disorder.” Although the EEOC had shown that the worker’s weight was more than 100% greater than the norm (sufficient for a diagnosis of morbid obesity under the traditional definition), they failed to show that the weight was “the result of a physiological condition.”

This decision seems to me quite confused, though it’s a confusing area so I cut the court some slack. What does it mean to say that morbid obesity has a “physiological cause”? All of our behavior has some physiological cause, if only from hormones and brain activity. And there’s lots of reason to believe that brain proteins that alter appetite and activity levels, not to mention genetics, are substantial contributors to morbid obesity. More broadly, every fact about our body is by definition physiological. And morbid obesity, being a condition of one’s physiology, is by definition a “physiological condition.”

So the problem can’t be that the worker’s morbid obesity had no “physiological cause” or was not a “physiological condition.” The problem has to be that he had no physiological “disorder.” But what does that mean? The theory of “disorder” can’t be a condition that has some identifiable organic etiology, or most “syndrome”-type conditions would be ruled out. We often just don’t know what the etiology of a particular condition is, even when doctors diagnose it, recognize that it calls for treatment, and treat it. For it to make any sense, I think “impairment” has to be defined medically — according to what are the conditions that are the basis for recognized medical (and psychological, since the statute includes both physical and mental impairments) diagnoses. On that score, morbid obesity that meets clinical criteria should always be an “impairment” — which doesn’t mean it will always be a “disability,” as the plaintiff will still have to show actual or perceived substantial limitation of a major life activity.

The Court’s decision can be read here (pdf link). I think they made the wrong decision, but maybe making the wrong decision is the right thing to do at this time. Basically, they argued that for an obese person to qualify for ADA protection, the obesity must have a “physiological cause.” But it’s a little tricky to support that interpretation based on the text of the ADA itself. The relevant section of the ADA reads:

Any physiological disorder, or condition, cosmetic disfigurement, or anatomical loss affecting one or more of the following body systems: neurological, musculoskeletal, special sense organs, respiratory (including speech organs), cardiovascular, reproductive, digestive, genito-urinary, hemic and lymphatic, skin, and endocrine.

So the court is in the position of arguing that obesity has to be shown to be a physiological “disorder” and not a “condition” to qualify for ADA protection - even though the ADA’s own definition clearly includes physiological conditions. To see how finely they had to chop their arguments, consider this: Judge Gibbons, in her concurrence, concedes that a “literal” reading does not support the Court’s position, but argues that a missing comma which existed in an earlier piece of legislation the ADA took its language from should be the controlling authority.

I think that fat acceptance and disabled rights, while not identical, have significant areas of overlap - both literally, in the bodies of people who are both disabled and fat, and philosophically. In the end, both movements are about the idea that there is no one correct form that all human beings are obliged to fit into, or to work to become; and that all human beings, regardless of how their bodies differ from the average, are deserving of equal dignity and equal rights.

Perhaps the biggest difference between anti-disabled bigotry and anti-fat bigotry is that disabled people are not seen as responsible for their “condition,” whereas fat people are by and large blamed for being fat. I think this underlying prejudice is the unstated logic driving the Sixth Circuit’s decision. While obese people who can prove that their obesity is not their fault may be covered by the ADA, obese people in general are to blame, and thus must not be covered by the ADA.

So why did I say “but maybe making the wrong decision is the right thing to do at this time”? Because I think that when Congress passed the ADA, they probably didn’t intend for it to apply to most “morbidly obese” people, because the Representatives and Senators probably share the idea that most obese people have only themselves to blame and can reasonably be discriminated against by employers. I worry that if the Courts found that the ADA covered all “morbidly obese” people, the result would be a backlash against the ADA and the Courts, at a time when the ADA itself is still very controversial and not totally secure. Probably more work needs to be done to change the “hearts and minds” of the American population about obesity; court victories based on the ADA might not be sustainable until the fat acceptance movement has achieved at least a small degree of mainstream acceptance.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

I’ve just been reading a 2001 study by David Mustard, of the University of Georgia, called “Racial, Ethnic and Gender Disparities in Sentencing: Evidence from the US Federal Courts.”¹ Mustard’s study appears better-designed than other sentencing studies I’ve read. His sample is large and comprehensive: he essentially includes every federal sentence handed down for three consecutive years (1991 through 1993) in his analysis. Rather than focusing only on sex or on race, he simultaneously controls for the effects of race, sex, U.S. citizenship, and class on federal sentencing. (Legally, none of those four factors are supposed to have an effect on what sentence a judge hands down.)

The results aren’t pretty. Especially for drug crimes and for bank robberies, being white is a big advantage if you’re being sentenced for a federal crime:

Bank robbery and drug trafficking exhibit the largest black-white differentials. Blacks receive 9.4 and 10.5 months longer than whites in bank robbery and drug trafficking, respectively. The percentage difference is greatest for those convicted of drug trafficking, where blacks are assigned sentences 13.7 percent longer than whites. The aggregate Hispanic-white difference is driven primarily by those convicted of drug trafficking and firearm possession/trafficking, the only two crimes with significant Hispanic coefficients. For these two crimes, Hispanics receive 6.1 and 3.7 additional months compared to whites, or 8.0 percent and 7.0 percent longer in percentage terms.

Note that Mustard’s analysis only compared felons who were convicted for the same crime. So the above sentencing disparities do not include the infamous disparities caused by the much harsher sentences given for crack cocaine possession (usually a Black crime) than for powder cocaine possession (usually a white crime).

Being a woman is an even larger advantage for bank robbers:

The female-male difference is statistically significant for all six categories, the largest of which is for bank robbery, where females receive 21.6 months less than males.

Although the bank robbery differential was largest, women received a break on sentencing compared to men across the board.²

I was particularly surprised that controlling for dependents didn’t significantly alter the male/female difference - so the sentencing disparity is apparently not being caused by judges taking mercy on single mother defendants.

Class made a significant difference, but mainly for the very poor. That is, people who earned less than $5,000 a year get fewer breaks in sentencing than people who earn more than $5,000 a year; but there doesn’t appear to be much difference in the sentences given those who earn $10,000 a year and those who earn $50,000. An exception was sentencing for fraud: “Those with incomes greater than $50,000 receive significantly shorten sentences for fraud.”

Finally, being a U.S. citizen leads to lighter sentencing across the board.

Having no high school diploma resulted in an additional sentence of 1.2 months. Income had a significant impact on the sentence length. Offenders with incomes of less than $5,000 were sentenced most harshly. This group received sentences 6.2 months longer than people who had incomes between $25,000 and $35,000. Those with U.S. citizenship receive lower sentences by about 1.7 months, perhaps because they take advantage of their greater knowledge about the court systems and legal representation. Age is positively related to the sentence length. […]

The income and education results could be generated if people with higher levels of education and income use their resources to obtain more favorable sentences. However, if offenders utilize education and income to reduce their sentences, the impact is limited. The marginal productivity of income in hiring legal resources diminishes quickly after income hits a minimum threshold, because individuals with the highest incomes do not receive reductions in sentence length.

According to Mustard’s analysis, most of the sentencing disparities are caused by judges departing from the official sentencing guidelines; when judges decide to take mercy on a felon and offer a very light sentence - or to not sentence the felon to prison at all - they are significantly more likely to do so if the felon is not poor, is white, is female, and is a U.S. citizen.

Feminist readers are likely to take particular note of the harsher sentences given to men, compared to women convicted of the same crimes. Mustard suggests that this may be caused by sexist paternalism among judges; women are seen less as full adults, and as being less capable of being responsible for their own actions, and as a result judges depart from sentencing guidelines to give women lighter sentences. Although I can’t know if that’s true or not, it certainly seems plausible to me, and also compatible with feminist analysis of how women are treated and viewed by society.

Another study, by Max Schanzenbach of the Northwestern University School of Law,³ looked at sex disparities in sentencing according to the sex of the judge. He found that, for serious crimes, female judges did not give harsher sentences to men, but male judges did:

The greater the percentage of female judges on a district’s bench, the smaller the gender disparity. These results are hard to square with the suggestion that unobserved accomplice status or blameworthiness is behind the gender disparity. At the very least, male and female judges view the dangerousness, accomplice status, or blameworthiness of female offenders differently.

The female offender/percent female judge effects […] were not evident at all in the category of less serious crimes. (There was some evidence in the case of less serious crimes that more Democratic districts treated men and women alike when granting downward departures.) However, paternalistic views about the dangerousness or blameworthiness of female offenders may well be most evident in the case of serious crimes.

Schanzenbach also found that racial and ethnic disparities were only slightly decreased, or not decreased at all, in districts with more black and hispanic judges. However, he argues that this finding does not prove a lack of racial and ethnic bias in sentencing, only that if such bias exists, it’s not dependent on the race or ethnicity of the judge.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where moderation is light and frothy and tickles your nose. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

1. The Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 44, no. 1, pages 285-314. Pdf link. (back)
2. Mustard’s report didn’t include a discussion of the death penalty, but it appears that women are less likely to receive the death penalty than similarly-situated men. See, for example, Victor L. Streib (2006), “Rare and Inconsistant: The Death Penalty For Women,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol 33 pp 609. (back)
3. Max M. Schanzenbach, “Racial and Gender Disparities in Prison Sentences: The Effect of District-Level Judicial Demographics” (April 2004). American Law & Economics Association Annual Meetings. American Law & Economics Association 14th Annual Meeting. Working Paper 4. Pdf link. (back)

Late last month, a National Cancer Institute study published in the New England Journal of Medicine was given a lot of unskeptical press coverage.

This report, from the AP’s Alicia Chang, is typical in its gloom-and-doom prognosis:

Being a little overweight can kill you, according to new research that leaves little room for denial that a few extra pounds is harmful. Baby boomers who were even just a tad pudgy were more likely to die prematurely than those who were at a healthy weight, U.S. researchers reported Tuesday.

Fortunately for overweight people, the NEJM study is pretty awful, combining bad methodology with dishonest interpretation. The results of this NEJM study, if honestly reported, show that overweight people on average live as long or longer as “normal” weight people; and that the one group of overweight people who did seem to have a significantly elevated risk of mortality, were overweight 50-year-olds who lost weight.

Expect multiple “Alas” posts criticizing this NEJM study. Starting us off is a commentary by Linda Bacon, quoted here with her kind permission.

New Weight Scare Based on Faulty Analysis

by Linda Bacon, PhD, Nutrition Researcher and Professor, NAAFA member

At least 400,000 Americans die of overweight and obesity every year, making it soon to surpass smoking as the leading cause of preventable death [1]. At least that’s what the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) told us.

But an updated federal report, published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association (and reported in the Late Spring 2005 NAAFA Newsletter), acknowledged that the previous analysis suffered from computational errors [2]. In fact, obesity and overweight only result in an excess of 26,000 annual deaths, far fewer than guns, alcohol or car crashes. And separating overweight from obesity reveals further interesting information: “overweight” people live longer than “normal” weight people.

The data weren’t surprising to those of us who study these issues. This is not an anomaly, but consistent with many other investigations. That it came from the CDC and got published in JAMA were the real astonishing facts.

We waited for the backlash. Fear-mongering about weight is worth billions to industry and is consistent with government policy. Few stand to gain from the news that overweight is benign, if not beneficial. The backlash has been slowly building, and recently came out full force in a highly publicized study published in the August issue of the New England Journal of Medicine [3].

The front page leader in my local paper loudly proclaimed: “Just a few extra pounds is bad for you” and the article title reinforced the message: “Study finds risks for the barely overweight.” Turn to the original report, and you find a consistent conclusion in the abstract: “excess body weight during midlife, including overweight, is associated with an increased risk of death.”

But before you dust off those diet books, let’s take a look at the data itself. The authors worked hard for their conclusion. They examined records from over a half million AARP members that had been surveyed over a ten year period. What they found was entirely consistent with the earlier JAMA report: “overweight” people had the lowest mortality risk. But that wouldn’t serve their purposes. NEJM’s press release wouldn’t look nearly as attractive with that headline.

So they subjected their data to numerous manipulations before finally arriving at a suitable conclusion. First they threw out data on people who were smokers or former smokers. Nope, still shows overweight as benign. They hid this with a sleazy method: using only the top (BMIs of 23 to 24.9) of the “normal weight” group compared to the whole of the “overweight” group.

Then they found an even more creative trick. When they asked participants - some of whom were in their 70s - what they had weighed at the age of 50, they hit paydirt: at last, overweight - at midlife - was associated with increased risk, albeit modest. This will grab the headlines. No need to highlight that we had to whittle our data down to about 5% of the original sample to get this result! (That 40% of the participants chose to leave the question on recalled weight blank should give some indication of the ability of people to accurately report this information.)

Their paper is weak for many other reasons: they had a very low response rate (18%) from a sample that is not nationally representative; their data is based on self-report, which is known to be inaccurate; adjustments for potential confounders were weakly conducted; the list goes on. And they neglected to note another important conclusion: weight loss is associated with a significant increased risk of death for middle-aged “overweight” people.

Come on, New England Journal of Medicine. We expect scholarship, not propaganda.

References

1. Mokdad, A.H., et al., Actual causes of death in the United States, 2000. Journal of the American Medical Association, 2004. 291: p. 1238-45.
2. Flegal, K.M., et al., Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight, and obesity. Journal of the American Medical Association, 2005. 293(15): p. 1861-7.
3. Adams, K., et al., Overweight, Obesity, and Mortality in a Large Prospective Cohort of Persons 50 to 71 Years Old. New England Journal of Medicine, 2006. 355(8): p. 763-8.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where even the anteaters are covered in chocolate. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

This week’s letter comes via Sokari over at Black Looks. I think Sokari has said it well enough, so here are her words:

The horrific events taking place in Uganda should be a wakeup call for everyone. People may think that they are safe from harassment and arrest because they are heterosexual. Not so, a witch hunt affects everyone irrespective of their sexuality. Your neighbour takes a disliking to you and before you know it you are being accused of being gay or a lesbian. People may think this is not their problem because they are not Ugandans. Think again, it happened in Cameroon, its happening in Ghana right now and with the new laws in Nigeria it may soon happen there. The fundamental human rights of African citizens are slowly being eroded in Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Cameroon as religious extremists and repressive governments join in a pact against freedoms.

Today Red Pepper went ahead with the threat to out Ugandan lesbians.

“Give us the name of the lesbian in your neighbourhood and we will shame her”

All over the blogosphere I read the talk, the theories of this that and the other on race, on gender, on sexuality, on feminism. The human rights violations that are taking place in Uganda and elsewhere are not theory but reality. A reality that has today destroyed the lives of men and women in Uganda and in whose name? Religion and Repression - homosexuality is touted as being unAfrican but Chrisitainity, Islam, Repression and Bigotry are?

Some background into the present gay hunt taking place in Uganda.

For close to two years, Human Rights Watch said, officials have regularly threatened and harassed lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Ugandans. In October 2004, the country’s information minister, James Nsaba Buturo, ordered police to investigate and “take appropriate action against” a gay association allegedly organized at Uganda’s Makerere University.

State-owned media have repeatedly called for stronger measures against homosexual conduct. On July 6, 2005, a writer in the government-owned New Vision newspaper urged authorities to crack down on homosexuality, saying, “The police should visit the holes mentioned in the press, spy on the perverts, arrest and prosecute them. Relevant government departments must outlaw or restrict websites, magazines, newspapers and television channels promoting immorality – including homosexuality, lesbianism, pornography, etc.” Later that month, local government officers raided the home of Victor Mukasa, a lesbian activist and Chairperson of Sexual Minorities Uganda. They seized documents and other materials, and arrested another lesbian activist and held her overnight.

On September 29, 2005, President Museveni signed into law a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The amendment says that “marriage is lawful only if entered into between a man and a woman,” and specifies that “it is unlawful for same-sex couples to marry.” A parliamentary spokesperson said at the time that criminal penalties for engaging in such marriages would be imposed later.

The government has also silenced discussion of gay and lesbian rights and lives. The Broadcasting Council, a board of government censors, fined a radio station 1.8 million shillings (more than US$1000) for hosting a lesbian and two gay men on a talk show, where they protested against discrimination and called for repeal of the sodomy laws. In February 2005, the Media Council – a state censorship board – banned a staging of the play, “The Vagina Monologues,” by the U.S. author Eve Ensler, because it “promotes illegal acts of unnatural sexual acts, homosexuality and prostitution.

Men named in the Red Pepper’s August 8 article have reportedly already been threatened and harassed. Ugandan activists point out that, in a deeply patriarchal society, accusations against alleged lesbians could subject them to violence in the family and community. U.N. statistics in 2000 showed that 41 percent of Ugandan women had suffered domestic violence.

A March 2005 Human Rights Watch report on “abstinence-until-marriage” HIV programs in Uganda found these programs were denying young people accurate information on HIV transmission and on sexual health. These programs also intrinsically discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. With a legal ban in place against gay or lesbian relationships, the programs promote only permanent abstinence and are uniformly silent about safer sexual practices. Promoting abstinence until heterosexual marriage is the continuation of an outright denial by the Ugandan government that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people exist. In March 2002, while accepting an award for his country’s HIV/AIDS prevention programs, President Museveni said simply, “We don’t have homosexuals in Uganda.”

“Uganda’s once-successful HIV/AIDS prevention programs are already reeling from the impact of silence and bad science,” said Stern. “Driving vulnerable people underground can only hamper those programs further.”

There are different ways people can help and it is important that as many Africans as possible take action. Since time is running out, the most efficient action would be to call directly the editor of Red Pepper in Uganda:
Arinaitwe Rugyendo; Tel: +256 712 973 077, +256 772 760 106, +256 312 279410

The journalist who wrote the article with the list of names is called Denis Sabiiti. You can call him on +256 312 26 1813.

You can also send a protest to the editor’s. Email rugyendo@mail.redpepper.co.ug

When I was twelve, doctors told me I was rarer than one-in-a-million with a condition called sarcotubular myopathy. It’s not a flamboyant disease. Nothing that would make good TV emergency room drama. But apparently I am medically “interesting.”*

I’ve seen hundreds of doctors in my life, many at teaching hospitals where student doctors are a common feature of consultations with specialists. In theory, I enjoy being an active part of the learning process in the field of medicine. In practice, the presence of students fundamentally changes the doctor-patient relationship so that I’m much less the priority at my costly (and sometimes crucial) appointments. A couple times, a doctor with something to prove to his students has left me feeling like the object of abuse.

I’ve had good experiences with student doctors, student nurses and student respiratory therapists (also student nurse’s aides, student x-ray techs, student phlebotomists, etc.) but I’m going to describe one bad experience. Someday soon, I’ll relate my worst medical student experience — this isn’t it. But both happen to have occurred within the last few years at a world-renowned hospital I have generally excellent opinions about.

The neurology department patient waiting rooms all have inaccessible examining tables with fancy dark wood sides that match the decor. In fact, the only accessible examining tables I’ve seen at this world-famous clinic are in the physical medicine department. But I’d seen neurologists before, and the last one had no problem with me remaining in my electric scooter while he tested my reflexes and the strength of a few muscles. The steering column pops out so it’s easy to get close enough to me. I’m just lower than usual and sitting somewhere stable instead of perched on a bench I can’t get to myself and need someone else to hold me upright on.

I hadn’t met this Dr. Neuro before, and he came in with three residents. The students stood quietly in the corner while Dr. Neuro reviewed my medical history with me. All went well until he inquired if I could get up on the examining table and I replied that it was very inconvenient and suggested I stay in my scooter chair. He may well have had excellent reasons for preferring to use the table, but it was clear from his sharp response and demeanor that his sudden shift to insisting I get up on the table was related to the presence of the observing residents.

So we did it his way, with my parents and the residents assisting, and two residents helping me as I struggled to remain sitting atop the table without any useful support. Needless to say, testing the reflexes of a woman tensed to keep her head upright and her body from falling to the floor was impossible. I didn’t stay up there long. It was readily apparent that the only thing to be learned was that I do indeed have severe muscle weakness, as both my patient records and I had declared.

I accept that I may be asked to do physically difficult or uncomfortable things to get medical treatment. I don’t have a problem with that or with attempting things trial-by-error. I also know doctors take each “fact” a patient tells them about themselves with professional scepticism and I’m glad that they do. But I don’t need an ego contest to come between me and my medical care.

I don’t recall the rest of the appointment or if anything useful was determined or planned. Dr. Neuro was gruff and when the appointment ended, one of the residents trailing out behind him quietly apologized to me. It was a memorable appointment only because the residents were clearly embarrassed by their boss, and the boss had weirdly seen me as a threat to his authority. I do wonder what, if anything, was learned by the students that day.

__________________________________________

*One thing that makes me interesting with regard to the diagnosis is that I am not a Hutterite male. Not even close.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade

As with other link farms, feel free to add your own or whatever.

• A Canadian Dimension review of two books about mothers of children with disabilities notes the emphasis on activism and politics rather than just personal experiences. The books are Battle Cries: Justice for Kids with Special Needs by Miriam Edelson and Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of Disability by Susan Scwartzenberg.

• Michael Bérubé shares a Chicago Tribune article where Jerry Lewis compares MDA Telethon protestors to those delightful poster children of Islam — Hezbollah.

• Nat Hentoff of The Washington Times looks back at the Schiavo case as Michael Schiavo becomes a Democratic shill for the right to die.

• Vicki at Speak Softly writes a letter to a Nameless and Shameless Physical Therapist for, well, being a professional asshat. Meanwhile, Sarahlynn at Yeah, But Houdini Didn’t Have These Hips evaluates the system that declares her precocious Ellie to be “severely delayed in cognition.” She finds, well, asshattery.

• The photojournalists’ blog WarShooter features captivating pictures of “Disability in Cambodia,” though the repeated use of “suffers from-” should be ignored, if possible, unless the condition following that phrase is replaced by “abject poverty.”

• The current issue of Clamor magazine features a report on “The New Wartime Body” where Dennis Clarke, a doctor specializing in lower-extremity amputees and getting them prosthetics, says:

“The prosthetic industry is moving forward because of war…. War is the single driver of technology in our profession. The net effect of these young and vibrant amputees is that they are pressing forward and doing well; that makes us look good. Technology does not lead change. Need leads change, and war is good for business because it necessitates need. One could argue that as earnest an anti-war statement could be made regarding the same issues.”

• ComicFoundry features a two-part analysis by Franny Howe entitled “Dissing Abilities: The Contradiction of Disabled Superheroes.” It’s on the strange hero-worship of animated freakery.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade

This is a real gem. Here’s the quote from CNN:

“I mean Cuban, Puerto-Rican, they are all very hot,” the governor says on the recording. “They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it.”

So apparently he was referencing a Latina assemblywoman, who he thinks is hot tempered (not hot as in good looking). This is a nice example of racial essentialism, note the reference to “blood.” I guess he’s referencing that “angry gene” found in blacks and Latinos. To add insult to injury the congresswoman gave a defense of Schwarzenegger:

Garcia, who is Puerto Rican, told the Times the governor’s remarks did not bother her.

“I love the governor because he is a straight talker just like I am,” she said. “Very often I tell him, ‘Look, I am a hot-blooded Latina.’ I label myself a hot-blooded Latina that is very passionate about the issues, and this is kind of an inside joke that I have with the governor.”

Just what we need, a white guy making racist comments and the woman who is the object of those comments, standing up for him. Living proof that acceptance of stereotypes transcends racial/ethnic groups.

This is not the first time Schwarzenegger has been accused of making racist comments two body builders accused him of using racial slurs, including the n-word. Others have a accused the California governor of anti-Semitism as well.

On another note, who can forget all of the famous gropings.

I guess he’s continuing a long tradition of racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny.

I’m signed up for Medicare Part D, though it wasn’t by my choice. The company they chose for me sent me a huge packet filled with information, rules, disclaimers, and a partial drug formulary — that is, a partial list of the prescription drugs they’ve decided to cover at this time. Since local Republican politicians are swaggering in their campaign ads about how they helped create this giant headache, I thought I’d look at some details of which drugs my assigned company covers.

I freely admit I don’t have any professional training that informs me about prescription drugs. My observations are purely as a layperson looking at the formulary that people must refer to in order to see if what company and plan they will choose.

My particular company is in the Medicare Part D business in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., though co-pays and monthly premiums of plans vary from state to state. Here in Minnesota, the three different plans offered vary by co-pay, premium, and when the doughnut hole begins (though it’s federally-mandated that the doughnut hole end at $3,600). These three plans are named “Signature,” “Complete” and “Premier,” which, of course, tells you nothing whatsoever about how they actually compare. You can’t even determine basic versus fancy coverage from the plan names.

Drugs are categorized according to whether the plan covers them: “generic,” “preferred,” “non-preferred,” “specialty,” and not covered. Looking at the online Signature plan formulary, which has the lowest monthly premium, here’s what I can observe:

Under antidepressants, the only two brand-name drugs that are preferred are the MAO inhibitors Nardil and Parnate, both of which I’ve never heard of and were omitted from the formulary I received by mail. Every listed brand-name reuptake inhibitor (Cymbalta, Effexor, Lexapro, Paxil, and Zoloft) is non-preferred, meaning the consumer cost will be higher. They are all also listed as “SE,” which inexplicably stands for “step therapy.” This means that these drugs will not be covered by the plan unless you first try some other drug of the company’s choosing, probably a generic drug. There are many generic antidepressants covered, but if you don’t have a prescription for them or the brand-name equivalent, you need to visit the doctor for a new one or pay the non-preferred brand-name price.

Almost all vaccines listed are generic or preferred. A few are “specialty” and require prior authorization (PA) from the company in order to be covered.

All anti-HIV agents seem to be brand-name and preferred.

Under “bipolar agents” only Depakote and the generic lithium carbonate are in the formulary at all. Depakote is non-preferred here and wherever it’s listed elsewhere.

All but one “blood glucose regulator” is either generic or preferred. So diabetics get better coverage than those who are bipolar, it seems.

Under “dyslipidemics” — apparently cholesterol-lowering drugs — it’s a very mixed bag: There are generics. Crestor, Lescol, Vytorin an