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“I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career… I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate.” —Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)

iTunes 5 Disasters

Posted on 12 Sep 05 by FmH

For those of you who remain in the newer-is-better school of software use, this entry at The Digital Music Weblog may make you think for a moment before reflexively installing iTunes 5.0 over your 4.x version.

‘Unbearable decision: we had to kill our patients’

Posted on 12 Sep 05 by FmH

“Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she ‘prayed for God to have mercy on her soul’ after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William ‘Forest’ McQueen, said: ‘Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die.'” (Mail.UK)

Given that euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, the paper has concealed the names of the doctor. Morphine in escalating doses is often given as a ‘comfort measure’, even if it hastens the end, when a patient’s death is judged to be inevitable and imminent. In this case, however, the imminence and inevitability may have been a function of the government failure to respond to the disaster promptly. Would you have done differently under the circumstances?

Open Letter to Kansas School Board on Intelligent Design Debate

Posted on 12 Sep 05 by FmH

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The Flying Spaghetti Monster meme advances. [thanks, Seth] [Anyone remember the classic 1958 sci-fi film, The Crawling Eye, by the way?]

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