Octopus Overlords

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 11:40 am

Punisher wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 9:40 pm I stand corrected. Guess i list more medical knowledge than i thoyght. That makes me sad.

Makes me sad too. I'm sorry Punisher. Still, you seem to be doing well!

Punisher wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 10:58 pm I do partially wish that i didn't remember that i was smarter in the before times because i do think it would be a lot easier to deal with.

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 2:09 am I sort of understand this. I used to be smarter, but my decline has been graceful.

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 10:01 am

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 2:09 am I sort of understand this. I used to be smarter, but my decline has been graceful.

Same. But Punisher's situation is different. I had a co-worker who was hit by a bus and sustained a head injury and his personality actually changed significantly.

My wife works on a hospital neuro ward so I have some 3rd hand knowledge of what can happen as well. Anyway, I can imagine it's very challenging for Punisher but as I said, he seems to be coping.

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 10:29 am

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 10:01 am

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 2:09 am I sort of understand this. I used to be smarter, but my decline has been graceful.

Same. But Punisher's situation is different. I had a co-worker who was hit by a bus and sustained a head injury and his personality actually changed significantly.

My wife works on a hospital neuro ward so I have some 3rd hand knowledge of what can happen as well. Anyway, I can imagine it's very challenging for Punisher but as I said, he seems to be coping.

I didn't mean to compare myself to him. I'm just slowly slipping with age, as happens to so many of us.

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 10:29 am

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 10:01 am

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 2:09 am I sort of understand this. I used to be smarter, but my decline has been graceful.

Same. But Punisher's situation is different. I had a co-worker who was hit by a bus and sustained a head injury and his personality actually changed significantly.

My wife works on a hospital neuro ward so I have some 3rd hand knowledge of what can happen as well. Anyway, I can imagine it's very challenging for Punisher but as I said, he seems to be coping.

I didn't mean to compare myself to him. I'm just slowly slipping with age, as happens to so many of us.

Punisher wrote: ↑Tue Mar 26, 2024 9:28 pm Hey! This isn't a contest...but if it was..id win..
But yeah I'm coping as best as i can. Dont really have a choice other then wallowing in misery. I tried that when i was in the hospital. It wasn't fun so i flipped it.

LordMortis wrote: ↑Wed Mar 27, 2024 6:06 am

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 10:29 am

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 10:01 am

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 2:09 am I sort of understand this. I used to be smarter, but my decline has been graceful.

Same. But Punisher's situation is different. I had a co-worker who was hit by a bus and sustained a head injury and his personality actually changed significantly.

My wife works on a hospital neuro ward so I have some 3rd hand knowledge of what can happen as well. Anyway, I can imagine it's very challenging for Punisher but as I said, he seems to be coping.

I didn't mean to compare myself to him. I'm just slowly slipping with age, as happens to so many of us.

I play games (I try to do new to me games on BGA regularly) and now I'm doing exercise, such as I can, in an effort to fight my my premature decline, and declining prematurely I am.

Punisher wrote: ↑Tue Mar 26, 2024 9:28 pm Hey! This isn't a contest...but if it was..id win..
But yeah I'm coping as best as i can. Dont really have a choice other then wallowing in misery. I tried that when i was in the hospital. It wasn't fun so i flipped it.

I truly feel for you and hope something comes about to reverse your progression to date, if nothing else for selfish reasons. My anxiety, if I were in your shoes would be intolerable.

Zarathud wrote: ↑Wed Mar 27, 2024 12:32 pm Glad you’re still kicking, Punisher. Life isn’t easy, but I’m sure you better appreciate the things you can do.

The ruling is on hold for 14 days, and voters will likely have a chance to weigh in on an ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state's constitution this fall.
...
The decision — which could shutter abortion clinics in the state — effectively undoes a lower court’s ruling that stated that a more recent 15-week ban from March 2022 superseded the 1864 law.

The Arizona Supreme Court said it would put its decision on hold for 14 days, writing that it would send the case back to a lower court so that court could consider “additional constitutional challenges” that haven’t yet been cleared up.

Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said moments after the ruling that she would not enforce the law.

El Guapo wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 12:47 am the politics is helpful.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 9:55 am

El Guapo wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 12:47 am the politics is helpful.

That's what keeps being uttered, but I'm not convinced yet that it will be as motivating as claimed. Maybe I'm just too far down into the cynical pit of despair, but it just feels like there are still so many people shrugging all this off.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 9:55 am

El Guapo wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 12:47 am the politics is helpful.

That's what keeps being uttered, but I'm not convinced yet that it will be as motivating as claimed. Maybe I'm just too far down into the cynical pit of despair, but it just feels like there are still so many people shrugging all this off.

hepcat wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 12:21 pm I remember a time, a more innocent and naive time, when I thought Americans couldn't be dumb or just plain evil enough to do many of the things they've done since 2016.

I miss those days.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 10:58 pm I wonder what else was legal in 1864…

The Arizona law that will begin to be enforced in 14 days was written by a single man in 1864.
In 1864, Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases.

And, of course, the United States was in the midst of the Civil War.

In fact, the 1864 law soon to be in force again in Arizona to control women’s reproductive rights in the twenty-first century does not appear particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care in the nineteenth—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for Arizona Territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men.

The 1864 Arizona criminal code talks about “miscarriage” in the context of other male misbehavior. It focuses at great length on dueling, for example—making illegal not only the act of dueling (punishable by three years in jail) but also having anything to do with a duel. And then, in the section that became the law now resurrected in Arizona, the law takes on the issue of poisoning.

In that context, the context of punishing those who secretly administer poison to kill someone, it says that anyone who uses poison or instruments “with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child” would face two to five years in jail, “Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”
The next section warns against cutting out tongues or eyes, slitting noses or lips, or “rendering…useless” someone’s arm or leg.

The law that Arizona will use to outlaw abortion care seemed designed to keep men in the chaos of the Civil War from inflicting damage on others—including pregnant women—rather than to police women’s reproductive care, which women largely handled on their own or through the help of doctors who used drugs and instruments to remove what they called dangerous blockages of women’s natural cycles in the four to five months before fetal movement became obvious.
Written to police the behavior of men, the code tells a larger story about power and control.

The Arizona Territorial Legislature in 1864 had 18 men in the lower House of Representatives and 9 men in the upper house, the Council, for a total of 27 men. They met on September 26, 1864, in Prescott. The session ended about six weeks later, on November 10.

The very first thing the legislators did was to authorize the governor to appoint a commissioner to prepare a code of laws for the territory. But William T. Howell, a judge who had arrived in the territory the previous December, had already written one, which the legislature promptly accepted as a blueprint.
Although they did discuss his laws, the members later thanked Judge Howell for “preparing his excellent and able Code of Laws” and, as a mark of their appreciation, provided that the laws would officially be called “The Howell Code.” (They also paid him a handsome $2,500, which was equivalent to at least three years’ salary for a workingman in that era.) Judge Howell wrote the territory’s criminal code essentially single-handedly.

The second thing the legislature did was to give a member of the House of Representatives a divorce from his wife.

Then they established a county road near Prescott.

Then they gave a local army surgeon a divorce from his wife.

In a total of 40 laws, the legislature incorporated a number of road companies, railway companies, ferry companies, and mining companies. They appropriated money for schools and incorporated the Arizona Historical Society.

These 27 men constructed a body of laws to bring order to the territory and to jump-start development. But their vision for the territory was a very particular one.

The legislature provided that “[n]o black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person,” thus making it impossible for them to protect their property, their families, or themselves from their white neighbors. It declared that “all marriages between a white person and a [Black person], shall…be absolutely void.”

And it defined the age of consent for sexual intercourse to be just ten years old (even if a younger child had “consented”).

So, in 1864, a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as ten able to consent to sex, and they adopted a body of criminal laws written by one single man.

And in 2024, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.

One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

...

Federal law requires emergency rooms to treat or stabilize patients who are in active labor and provide a medical transfer to another hospital if they don’t have the staff or resources to treat them. Medical facilities must comply with the law if they accept Medicare funding.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday that could weaken those protections. The Biden administration has sued Idaho over its abortion ban, even in medical emergencies, arguing it conflicts with the federal law.

“No woman should be denied the care she needs,” Jennifer Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council, said in a statement. “All patients, including women who are experiencing pregnancy-related emergencies, should have access to emergency medical care required under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.”

EMTALA was initially introduced decades ago because private hospitals would dump patients on county or state hospitals, often because they didn’t have insurance, said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Some hospitals also refused to see pregnant women when they did not have an established relationship with physicians on staff. If the court nullifies or weakens those protections, it could result in more hospitals turning away patients without fear of penalty from the federal government, she said.

“The government knows there’s a problem and is investigating and is doing something about that,” Kolbi-Molinas said. “Without EMTALA, they wouldn’t be able to do that.”

Even as states have enacted strict abortion laws, the White House has argued that if hospitals receive Medicare funds they must provide stabilizing care, including abortions.

In a statement to THE AP, Becerra called it the “nation’s bedrock law protecting Americans’ right to life- and health-saving emergency medical care.”

“And doctors, not politicians, should determine what constitutes emergency care,” he added.