how meta

you can indeed destroy the master's house with the master's tools

Christmas with the Waltons

Occasionally, I get action alerts from the American Family Association, a conservative watchdog group that acquired my email address when I voted in their poll on whether gay marriage should be legal. (I guess they didn't check my answer before adding me to their list.) So now every couple weeks they write to tell me what they're up to and to encourage my participation in some grass roots campaigns. This week, they're inviting us all to write Chairman Rob Walton of Wal-Mart fame. There is a pre-written letter thanking him for inviting the red SA bell ringers and matching shoppers' donations between now and Christmas. Now, I have mixed feelings about the Salvation Army and don't plan to follow the suggested boycott of Target, but I welcome the opportunity to email Chairman Rob. You can modify the text of the message in any way you'd like, and his snail mail address is at the bottom of the web page. Y'know, in case you'd like to wish him a Merry Christmas or Happy Solstice or something.

Ah, wacky fun...

Putting the "AAaaaa!" in Anti-Choice

The Chastity Mask

Last Minute Christmas Gifts from Belarus (thank you, scottscidmore!)

...but don't ask the Defective Yeti about gifts.

Leigh Anne loves the smell of sugar in the morning.

Am I feeling productive today? No.

One Nation, Under Medication

There were two great pieces in the NYTimes yesterday about our country's love affair with drugs. The first, entitled "This is Your Country on Drugs" by Carl Elliott, compares the most recent doping scandal in baseball with our culture's penchant for performance-enhancing drugs of every flavor.

College students take Ritalin to improve their academic performance. Musicians take beta blockers to improve their onstage performance. Middle-aged men take Viagra to improve their sexual performance. Shy people take Paxil to improve their social performance. The difference is that if athletes want to get performance-enhancing drugs they go to the black market. If the rest of us want performance-enhancing drugs, we go to our family doctors.
...
Perhaps this is the inevitable result of turning our medical system over to the market, where making sick people well is often less profitable than making well people better than well. Procter & Gamble, for example, has decided that the profit margins of its ordinary consumer items like Crest toothpaste and Tide laundry detergent are not nearly as appealing as the enormous profit margins of prescription drugs.

The second, "We Love Them. We Hate Them. We Take Them." by Abigail Zuger, MD, is an account of a doctor's negotiation with her patient around pharmaceuticals, and will sound extraordinarily familiar to anyone who's ever had more than one prescription at a time.

Medical anthropologists have written at length about how medications "commodify" health, fostering the illusion that it is something bought and sold at market. In doctors' offices and in medicine cabinets, though, a reverse process takes place: we all anthropomorphize pills right back from commodities to willful agents of good or evil...

As a woman in my twenties, I have already acquired three long-term prescriptions. One of them (my anti-baby device) I have to explain to any doc who isn't a GYN. They look at me kinda funny, because they want to know why the regular old Ortho Whatever-Cyclen isn't good enough for me. I don't enlighten them. The next one is an anti-malarial pill that I take to control my lupus. Do I need it? Well, no, but it helps my hands stop aching. It improves my performance when knitting and typing and putting on my underwear. It's unclear whether Elliott would consider me a "sick person made well" or a "well person made better than well" by the anti-malarial. The last of my three is an antidepressant that I have never gotten around to weaning myself off of... I've never found a month that I'm willing to give up as I taper off the drug. Elliott probably would have more of a problem with the last one, though it's much more vital to my mental and physical health than the others. So who does get to decide the good drugs from the bad drugs? Obviously, the FDA hasn't been up to the task lately. I don't think Elliott is the one to ask. And Zuger doesn't sound entirely confident about either the drugs or her ability to do without them when caring for her patients.

What about caffeine? If I had to choose, I'd say that the coffee I drink every morning has more of an effect on me than the prescription drugs I'm taking. I know more than one man who changes completely after a pint of beer. So what counts as a "drug" under these analysts' definitions? The jury, I think, is still out.

"Experimental writing devices" and other travesties

HEY U GUYS CHECK OUT THIS ARTICLE FROM NYTIMES! DID U KNOW WE CULD TAKE CLASSES 4 THIS!? i NEED 2 DO THIS 4 MON! OK THANKS!
(The last two sentences were quoted from a page I received this week from my boss. Really. E)

What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence
By SAM DILLON
Published: December 7, 2004

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student.

"i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you".

Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing a number that has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it.

"E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited," Dr. Hogan said. "It has companies tearing their hair out."

A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training.

The problem shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said. "It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy," said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. "But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard."

Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.

Here is one from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation based in Palo Alto, Calif.: "I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies
Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'."

The incoherence of that message persuaded the analyst's employers that she needed remedial training.

"The more electronic and global we get, the less important the spoken word has become, and in e-mail clarity is critical," said Sean Phillips, recruitment director at another Silicon Valley corporation, Applera, a supplier of equipment for life science research, where most employees have advanced degrees. "Considering how highly educated our people are, many can't write clearly in their day-to-day work."

My favorite quotes:

• "People think that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter will make their point forcefully," Ms. Andrews said. "I tell them they're allowed two exclamation points in their whole life."
• "E-mail has just erupted like a weed, and instead of considering what to say when they write, people now just let thoughts drool out onto the screen," Dr. Hogan said. "It has companies at their wits' end."

Read the whole article--and kindly consider passing it on to others as a service.

OK THX!

BBC on New York's ACS

Wells, have you heard anything about this? There was a BBC report last night on children in NYC foster care being given experimental HIV meds, probably in response to World AIDS day yesterday. The report sounds heavily slanted but the facts are worth investigating. I'm sure the The Administration for Children's Services gets a lot of flak for a lot of topics, but I'd hate to think something like this could go unnoticed for very long.

For more tidbits on reproductive health and other mind dandruff, go visit Fray.