P, thanks for the ride lasterday. I will not ride this morning, apart from a ride to school this morning. rep for the arrival of grandma will keep me here on the vacuum and in other domestic servitude. Will let you know about Rita and bridge on Tuesday -- later today. How much time do we need to ride from your digs to Horseshit Bay? W
If you feel the need to try to justify your underhanded luring of the weak, ex-peletonii to the regions of sloth please feel free to call or write. By now I am an expert on rationalization and feeble excuses, having endured the slings and arrows of such for far too, too long, so much so that I am prone to fits of dizziness whenever such pathetic utterances are proffered.
I remain, as ever, Vitriolically Yours, Patrizzio, Il Conduttore, Bafflegab Detector Exrtraordinaire!
Dear Caustic BDE, I am enjoying my
latte as you ride, cursing like a sailor, all the way to Deep Crave,
Seymour's Demon and back, if there is a return.
George,
Hey there, How are you doing now? Hope you are 100 % back! Off tomorrow for a week with Range Rider and family. Will say hello for you. Hope to see you soon. G&F
The pedant in me is behooved to point out the error of your
anagramatic ways. To wit: the correct form of post-nominal address for
His Holy-than-thouness would be BED, for struth, is he not such an
engine, a Bafflegab Emitting Device? Further apropos,
his persistent fits of [self-diagnosed] febrility would argue for some
BEDrest as a restorative [for all of us!].
Here's hoping [forlornly ?] that the morrow will bring us some brief respite...See you at Science World at shortly after 10:15. 8^) cheers, Mark
If you want to donate blood in the United States, there are a bunch of eligibility requirements you have to meet first. (The American Red Cross has a long list.) The purpose of these requirements are twofold: one, to ensure that the donor is able to donate without harming him or herself, and two, to reduce the chances that the donor has a communicable disease which may infect a recipient of the blood. While some of the restrictions are controversial, one -- not listed by the Red Cross -- may have saved thousands of American donees from receiving tainted blood. That restriction: a ban on blood banks from purchasing blood from prisons and, ultimately, from prison inmates. How do we know that prisoners' blood had a disproportionate amount of problems?
Because Canada hadn't instituted the same ban. In the 1960s, it wasn't uncommon for American prison systems to set up paid-for blood drives. Prisoners would give blood and the prisons, acting as a broker of sorts, would sell the blood and give a cut back to the inmates. Starting in 1964, Arkansas was one of the states which participated in these programs.
By 1978, a company
called Health Management Associates (HMA) won a contract to provide
medical services to the state's inmates -- including
running the blood donation program. Over the next few years, HMA sold
prisoners' blood for $50 a pop,
according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, with the individual
inmates receiving about $7 in scrip. Unfortunately, HMA's oversight of
the program wasn't great. Pre-screening of donors simply wasn't as good
as it would be on the outside, with many carriers
of HIV or hepatitis allowed to donate blood. And even when inmates were
flagged as carrying communicable diseases, many of them complained when
turned around. Arguing that they had a "right to bleed" -- they wanted
scrip -- these inmates convinced organizers
(often prisoners themselves) to look the other way and allow the
otherwise-ineligible inmates to donate.
By the end of 1982, the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) advised would-be blood purchasers to eschew blood from inmates. This effectively ended the practice in the United States as the American Red Cross and other collectors and distributors of blood follow FDA requirements. However, many organizations outside the States did not follow FDA regulations and advisories. Specifically, the Canadian Red Cross continued to purchase blood from HMA, and, ultimately, from Arkansas' inmates. Over the next decade, over 20,000 Canadians received tainted blood transfusions. Roughly 1,000 contracted HIV while the others were later diagnosed with hepatitis C.
In 1994, the scandal came to a halt. HMA stopped collecting donations from inmates. The Canadian government began an investigation the fall prior, issuing what is now called the Krever Report, after the presiding judge. The Krever Report concluded that the original source of the blood may have been obfuscated by HMA, which packaged the blood as coming from "ADC Plasma Center, Grady, Arkansas." (ADC stands for "Arkansas Department of Corrections," but this was left for the addressee to figure out.) But the Krever report did not absolve the Canadian Red Cross, which ended up paying criminal penalties. (Then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas during the period HMA administered the prison medical program, is often alleged to be blamed in the Krever Report, but in truth is never mentioned or otherwise referred to by the report.) Finally, the Canadian government, as a result of the scandal and due to the recommendations of the Krever Report, created a pair of organizations solely empowered to administer the nation's blood supply, with Hema-Quebec entrusted to run Quebec's and the Canadian Blood Service for the rest of the nation.
"Roosevelt considered
the Panama Canal to be one of the greatest achievements of his
presidency, and he believed that the canal's architectural genius and
the indelible mark that it -- and, through it, he
-- would leave on the world more than justified the small South
American revolution he had had to foment in order to make it a reality.
In 1903, Roosevelt's third year in the White House, the United States
government decided, after much heated debate, that
Panama rather than Nicaragua would be the best location for a canal
that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
At that time, Panama
was a state within Colombia, and so Roosevelt had offered Colombia
twelve million dollars for the right to build the
canal. When the Colombian Senate countered with restrictive treaty
language and a demand for more money, Roosevelt's response was
impatience and contempt. He wrote to his secretary of state, John Hay,
that the United States should not allow the 'lot of jackrabbits'
in Colombia 'to bar one of the future highways of civilization,' and he
proceeded quietly to encourage and support a Panamanian revolution that
had been bubbling under the surface for years.
"On November 3, 1903,
with U.S. Navy ships lined up in nearby waters, Panama declared its
independence. Fifteen days later, John Hay and Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a
Frenchman who had been the canal's chief engineer,
signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which gave the United States
control of the Canal Zone, a five-mile-wide swath of land on either
side of the waterway. A decade later, the Colombians were still fuming.
When asked by a Brazilian official why he had left
Colombia off of his South American itinerary, Roosevelt had replied,
'Don't you know, my dear friend, that I am not a 'persona grata' in
Colombia?'
"Although Roosevelt
had steered clear of Colombia, he would not be able to avoid a hostile
encounter in Chile, where Colombian students had organized protests
against him. When his train pulled into Chile's
capital, Santiago, in late November, he was greeted by a crowd that at
first seemed to mirror the friendly masses that had welcomed him to
Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. But the moment he leapt from his Pullman
to the train-station floor, with the triumphal
strains of the American and Chilean national anthems echoing around
him, his welcoming party suddenly transformed into an angry protest
rally. 'The human multitude, showing marked hostility, shouted with all
their might vivas! -- to Mexico and Colombia, and
Down with the Yankee Imperialism!' a journalist for Lima's West Coast Leader excitedly reported.
"Roosevelt told the spellbound crowd, 'I took the action I did in Panama because to have acted otherwise would have been both weak and wicked. I would have taken that action no matter what power had stood in the way. What I did was in the interest of all the world, and was particularly in the interests of Chile and of certain other South American countries. I was in accordance with the highest and strictest dictates of justice. If it were a matter to do over again, I would act precisely and exactly as I in very fact did act.' As these words rang through the hall, the audience leapt to its feet, cheering and applauding the Yankee imperialist. Candice Millard, The River of Doubt, Anchor Books, 2005
