They're suing a former employee who signed up for the company health insurance -- so that the corporation can recoup the health care expenses she incurred after she suffered catastrophic brain damage in an auto accident. The woman can't even remember that her son died in Iraq and her husband had to divorce her so she could get more support from Medicaid, but Wal-Mart apparently needs the settlement money more.
Low, very low. Via CNN.
...this child molester could have been a pediatrician.
(Not that child sex abuse is ever OK, but a part of me that still hurts from losing our first baby feels Schadenfreude that it was NW Perinatal the guy worked at, since that was where Matthew and I learned things had gone horribly wrong.)
Save us from people who put everyone else at risk because they refuse to vaccinate their kids. There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism and overwhelming evidence that vaccines don't cause autism. Seriously. Repeat after me: vaccines don't cause autism. It's true!
I found it fascinating that the official Oregon immunization record requires documentation to exempt a child for medical reasons, but almost nothing to exempt a child for religious reasons. My feeling is that refusing to vaccinate a child based on religious tenets should at least result in revocation of 501(c)(3) status and should probably be criminalized. If the state has an interest in the health of a fetus and restricts late-term abortion, it certainly should have an interest in the health of the child who could go on to infect dozens of other children with life-threatening diseases.
There are few things that I refuse to debate and will brook no dissent upon - but this is one of them. If you don't believe me (and every reputably published study), why don't you (and your unvaccinated children) move to sub-Saharan Africa or Thailand or Malaysia and report back on how well that's working out?
Vaccines: good for your kids AND everyone else's kids.
Courtesy of Oregon Legal Research, some questions required for graduation from 8th grade in Oregon in 1930.
Princess Peach may have slept through the night last night, but I stayed up late working and am seriously beat this morning despite two or three cups of coffee (too tired to remember which). I'm also continuing to work, because, well, I need the money to feed Princess Peach and buy more coffee.
I'm working on a project that involves sex offender registration. I'm squeamish about violence in general, but sex crimes are particularly outrageous because they completely strip a victim of his or her sense of control and leave them helpless and fearful. These are inexcusable crimes. What to do with the perpetrators?
As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, I think incarceration is a pointless exercise: all it does is remove the person from society for a brief period of time. Practically, it's a huge waste of human potential, however vilely those humans have behaved. Plus, I look at it as their grad school or a criminal think tank. Therapy rarely helps and recidivism rates are high. And don't get me started on the trend toward civil commitment -- it gives me the creeps and makes me think of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn novels.
I'm ambivalent about sex offender registration, because I think it is overinclusive in some ways (the 18 year old and the 15 year old girlfriend, that sort of thing) and underinclusive in others (rapists who plead to lesser charges for reduced sentences). But if that guy was living next door to me -- yeah, I would want to know.
I recently picked up a book about Australia's early days, and was reminded of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where the moon, like Australia, was initially populated by criminal and political prisoners. It made me wonder...just what is so wrong with the idea of a prison colony? Not just for sex offenders, but for anyone convicted for a particular set of violent crimes. (And greedy corporate tools who bilk investors to line their own pockets -- Enron, anyone?) Maybe England had the right idea.
If the goal is to keep society safe, then a prison colony is a safety valve -- no worrying about return. If the goal is rehabilitation, a mirrored society could provide a way for criminals to become invested in the system -- in running the colony, operating businesses, developing products. Instead of farming production of goods out to sweatshops in China, we could farm production out to prison colonies. Ultimately, there would be a way to demonstrate readiness to rejoin society at large.
Ah, well. My 30 minutes of musing time is up -- back to work...
Particularly if you followed my brother's progress on my blog during the time he was deployed -- you'll get to learn the things I wasn't able to blog about then. And look online, too, for a really gorgeous picture of him.
Looks like the Governor has started a trend in Washington with the food stamp week. And I'm convinced it's a good thing for the well-off to know how hard it is to be poor and try to eat. In college we once lived on potatoes for 6 months (chili potatoes, frozen broccoli and potatoes, herb potatoes with some bullion to make it taste more like meat -- there's a reason why when we buy a bag of potatoes now more than half of them end up wasted-- we just can't bring ourself to eat them). Our big splurge in the day was Chinese takeout on payday, and $18.19 (what it always came out to) was a HUGE chunk of the budget. (It's still enough to make me feel guilty, actually.)
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