For those situations, I employ the use of Sod's Law: if you don't pack one, you'll need it. If you do pack one, you won't.

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The Christmas bomber was treated exactly the way every "terrorist" arrested on American soil has been, through Republican and Democratic administrations. He was arrested and processed by the judicial system. Attempting to blow up an aircraft is a crime whether you do it because you wish to undermine the U.S. government, you were dumped by a flight attendant or you want to impress Jodie Foster. An artificial "war on terror" doesn't change that. Terror is a tactic, not a country or a particular ideology. As far as I'm concerned, the Oklahoma City bombing, attacks on abortion clinics and the guy flying his plane into the building the other day were all terrorism. They were violence in pursuit of political ends. I don't know how we legitimately sort out who goes into what system. I'll note that the terrorists who went through the court system, including Richard Reid, were all convicted and are all in jail.

That being said, I'd love to hear more from you, Shari. I was once a Republican myself, until the Republicans sold out to the religious right and political expediency. If the Republicans were still the party of fiscal conservatism and small government, I'd be with them on that, but over the last 15 years, they've been the party of cutting taxes and then spending like drunken sailors.

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I never bring more than a change of underwear to the hospital because I figure I'm going to be changing into a gown as soon as I'm admitted, in which case I can wear the same clothes I came in with.

Definitely bring your phone & iPod chargers, though.

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I have been exceptionally lucky to have a Kat when I've been admitted unexpectedly (which has been every admission so far) and she brings me slipper socks and pjs and ablution materials and trashy magazines. And a baby, but I don't get to keep him.

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Shari, I'm glad you spoke up. Takes a lot of courage to be the red duck in a blue bath. As I am a fence-sitter, fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and the only left leaning person in my family, I know it can be frustrating. So, understand, when I bring up this issue, I do so out of respect.

(Torture is pulling out fingernails, not sleep dep, but let's not digress. If sleep dep is torture, I have a bone to pick with my children.)

I think you fail to understand the levels that folks in power over someone incarcerated will go to. That your level of sleep deprivation is mild compared to that employed by interrogators. When I think of sleep dep, I recall a lesson from college. As a Communications-Radio major, we were taught to be careful of promotional stunts, as they can have serious long term health consequences. The prime example was Peter Tripp, a DJ in the 50's, who thought it would be a great idea to stay awake for 201 hours as a promotional thing for the March of Dimes and the radio station. Here is a snid bit of what happened:

Back in the 1950's Peter Tripp, a popular radio DJ, thought it would be a good idea to try to stay on radio for 200 hours, with no sleep at all. Ultimately he wanted to break the world's record for staying awake. He was on the air for about 3 hours per day, and was kept awake by doctors who were also studying him, doing everything they could to keep his attention. They even went to the bathroom with him to make sure he didn't get some sneaky shut eye in there.

The first major change to Tripp was after three days or so. He started to show signs of mild psychosis, he would get irritable with everyone, he was so rude to his barber (who had been his barber for more than twenty years) that he went away crying and never cut his hair again. The second major change was his body temperature dropped. And it continued to drop throughout the whole course of the experiment, as time went on he would ask for more and more layers of clothes, until he looked like an Eskimo compared to everyone else around just wearing T-shirts. The lower it went, the crazier he became. Then, after about the fourth day he began to hallucinate. He saw cobwebs on his shoes. He saw mice and kittens that weren't there. He rummaged through drawers looking for money that never existed. He thought a technician had come to bury him. He was truly trippin' (probably where the term comes from )

The scientists were puzzled by the hallucinations, as this sort of thing had not been recorded back then, but then they made a surprising finding. They discovered that when he was going through particularly bad periods of hallucinations, although being awake, the hallucinations were shadowing the 90 minute REM cycle of dream sleep. It was as if he was having dreams, even though he was awake. Strangely though, whenever Tripp had to go on air to do his show the hallucinations would completely disappear, and listeners to the show said they couldn't really hear any difference.

By the last day he was completely out of it. He thought although everyone thought he was Peter Tripp, he wasn't, he was actually an impostor pretending to be Peter Tripp. He didn't recognize his wife, and the hallucinations were getting worse. Finally, on the last day after 200 hours his brain waves were monitored, and the doctors found that although he was awake, his brain waves were fully that of a person asleep. This was despite him being fully awake, and he knew that he was awake. He was asleep, but walking around functionally with his eyes open and talking to people, even though the EEG was showing something quite different.

After this he went to bed and slept for 24 hours. He claimed after this that he felt fine and there were no long term effects, but his wife didn't think so, and they divorced a while later. He also lost his job, and his friends said he was never the same again.

It's all fine and good to monday-morning-quarterback and say "it's ok to use sleep deprivation" if you aren't the one being tortured.

And because Windsparrow (continued...)

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( continues...) is wise, and it bears repeating:

Miranda rights are are for humans, not solely for Americans. Speaking as a member of a select group which has been routinely denied rights that at least one other select group takes for granted, I'm a big fan of not taking human rights away from select groups just to make privileged groups feel secure. A person never knows when s/he is going to be summarily included in a select group chosen to have their rights denied them.

As for salad shooters. I'm not much of a salad eater, so, I'll try my .357 on it the next time someone brings a salad over. I hope the cops don't come. Eh, it's Texas, gunfire is no big deal.

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I heard kat has a very strict return policy.

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That your level of sleep deprivation is mild compared to that employed by interrogators.

I can state with absolute authority that non-parents have NO IDEA how much sleep deprivation newborn babies cause unless they've been in Gitmo. It really is that bad.

I simply approach it politically from the opposite direction - the reason the first few months of parenting can feel like torture is BECAUSE IT IS. If anyone other than a newborn baby kept you awake that long, they'd be violating the Geneva Convention.

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Sorry, it seems to have become a pet peeve or something. Here is some youtube videos with the first hand observations from the Peter Tripp thing:

Part 1(9min): [link]

Part 2 (5 min): [link]

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I'm sort of on the fiscal conservative side, though I like the idea of single-payer health care (puts everyone in one pool, gets employers out of the health care business and makes it easier to change jobs and start your own business, should reduce the cost of what the government currently subsidizes (again, by pooling everyone)) even though it flows more money through the government. So with that caveat aside, I tend to favor trimming defense spending, looking at phasing in a slimming of education spending at the federal level, combining a small cut in social security with an increase in the cap on social security taxes, cutting some farm subsidies, and again pooling everyone in a single payer system I believe will lower the overall spending on health care (private and government).

Cutting spending is really hard. There's so little that's easy to cut. The monster of health-care costs has to be tamed to really bring spending under control.

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