Chetzemoka

no illicit drugs were present

I'm deeply afraid that this might have turned out differently if she had even something as simple as cannabis in her system.

Republican obstruction and wanton destruction is responsible for the lack of progress. Refusing Medicaid expansions and then overturning the individual mandate is what gutted the plan.

And sure you could jump right into single payer without any incremental change. But you're going to put the 400,000 Americans currently working in the health insurance industry out of work, if you do that. Which is not a small consideration. (That's per a CBO analysis of the feasibility of single payer, which does conclude it would save money, but it will require a massive work transition.)

https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/congressional-budget-office-scores-medicare-for-all-universal-coverage-less-spending

Well I really appreciate the effort you put into this. It's so much fun to read these posts and learn about owls I would never have known existed otherwise. Like, somehow I could always imagine like sparrows being this diverse, but it would never have occurred to me that owls are as well.

Yeah that camouflage is pretty amazing. And I've been really surprised how many of these owls you're posting are in the tropics?! My whole life, I thought of owls as cold weather birds for some reason.

That was during wartime and it was a court martial. Courts martial are still notoriously harsher than civil courts today.

This is exactly why the billionaires are dismantling the current social media platforms. Organizing is the only threat they truly fear.

As a Registered Nurse who is receiving actually successful medical treatments for ME/CFS from a big Boston hospital, thank you for sharing this.

"Worrell suffers from a rare form of lymphoma and said he was afraid the cancer treatment he’d get during a long prison sentence could allow the disease to kill him. He said he did take a number of pills just before he was recaptured and had opioids in his system.

“I acted out of severe mental anguish and very genuine fear for my life,” he said. “I am truly sorry and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”"

Had opioids in his system, suffers from an actual other medical condition, also probably a psych eval. That could easily take five days.

All of the Apollo missions, actually, including 13. In fact, Apollo 13 marks the farthest distance human beings have ever been from Earth because of the modified trajectory they had to use in order to get back to Earth faster with their damaged spacecraft.

But Apollo 13 also is the only moon mission where there was never a single individual alone in the ship when it went dark behind the moon. (On all other missions, the Command Module Pilot remained in the ship while the other two landed on the surface, so for the duration of that time, they were doing solo orbits that took them through the silent shadow of the moon.

Concur. I'm a huge Trek fan, and The Expanse fits that blend of optimism and realpolitik.

But golden gate doesn't have anything inherent that pushes people to commit suicide.

Don't be so sure about that. Check out some of this research.

Believe it or not, reducing access to lethal means actually reduces the number of deaths by suicide, and we have robust data to back this up.

"Nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date. This has been well-established in the suicidology literature. A literature review (Owens 2002) summarized 90 studies that have followed over time people who have made suicide attempts that resulted in medical care. Approximately 7% (range: 5-11%) of attempters eventually died by suicide, approximately 23% reattempted non-fatally, and 70% had no further attempts."

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survival/

We ALSO need to improve people's material conditions and provide better mental health care. But even in societies with strong social safety nets, people still die by suicide. Reducing access to lethal means will reduce deaths, giving people time and opportunity to access any social safety net that exists.

There's one particularly fascinating case study out of Washington state:

"Running perpendicular to the Ellington Bridge, a stone’s throw away, is another bridge, the Taft. Both span Rock Creek, and even though they have virtually identical drops into the gorge below - about 125 feet - it is the Ellington that has always been notorious as Washington’s “suicide bridge.” By the 1980s, the four people who, on average, leapt from its stone balustrades each year accounted for half of all jumping suicides in the nation’s capital. The adjacent Taft, by contrast, averaged less than two.

After three people leapt from the Ellington in a single 10-day period in 1985, a consortium of civic groups lobbied for a suicide barrier to be erected on the span. Opponents to the plan...had the added ammunition of pointing to the equally lethal Taft standing just yards away: if a barrier were placed on the Ellington, it was not at all hard to see exactly where thwarted jumpers would head.

Except the opponents were wrong. A study conducted five years after the Ellington barrier went up showed that while suicides at the Ellington were eliminated completely, the rate at the Taft barely changed, inching up from 1.7 to 2 deaths per year. What’s more, over the same five-year span, the total number of jumping suicides in Washington had decreased by 50 percent, or the precise percentage the Ellington once accounted for."

And you know why twice as many people jumped off the Ellington vs. the Taft bridge in the first place? Because the railings on the Taft were slightly higher and therefore harder to scale.

I don't know if this article is paywalled or how to fix that, but it also contains details of a specific study conducted on people who intended to, but didn't jump off the Golden Gate bridge specifically. The absurdity of how minor an obstacle was required to prevent their deaths is amazing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html

Show me where pregnant women are being given anything remotely resembling a trial by jury and due process of law before being sentenced to death.