Fail to stop at a stop sign; get repeatedly raped (legally)

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This article is reblogged from TechDirt. Click through for the full article, including legal complaints and other documentation.

Edit: At least the poor guy was compensated to some degree. Hidalgo County and Deming coughed up $1.6 million to settle the suit. However, no disciplinary action was reported.

This is one of the most disgraceful abuses of power I’ve heard of in recent times, and some of them have been pretty bad.

I call for the immediate dismissal of the officers involved, and criminal charges to be filed against them, as well as against the doctors who performed these illegal, invasive procedures without the consent of the victim. Oh, and did I mention that the Gila Regional Medical Center is billing the victim for the invasive, non-consensual medical procedures and has threatened to take him to collections for non-payment?

By the holy skull of Mogg’s grandfather, this is beyond belief.

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Cops Subject Man To Rectal Searches, Enemas And A Colonoscopy In Futile Effort To Find Drugs They Swear He Was Hiding

from the a-vulgar-display-of-power dept

This post is going to be very short on commentary because the hideous abuse of justice has basically rendered me near speechless.

David Eckert, a resident of Deming, NM, was pulled over by police officers after failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. For whatever reason, the officers decided Eckert was hiding something, or perhaps they were unsatisfied that a routine stop hadn’t blown up into something bigger.

They asked him to step out of the car and then searched his vehicle (without his consent). Another officer brought in a drug dog which reacted (a relatively worthless indication of anything — drug dogs can easily be “alerted” by their controlling officers) to the driver’s seat. (Eckert’s lawyer calls into question this dog’s training, presenting documents that claim to show it hadn’t received the proper field training and recertification. See exhibits listed under docket item 27.) Then the officer “observed” that Eckert was standing “erect with his legs together” and his “buttocks clenched.” This was all the justification the Deming police needed to subject Eckert to the following horrific chain of events at a hospital in neighboring Silver City.

1. Eckert’s abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.
2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
4. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
5. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
6. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.
8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert’s anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.

At no time did Eckert give his consent to these searches. The police did obtain a warrant to rectally search Eckert but that warrant itself was problematic. For one, it was severely lacking in probable cause. For another, it was valid only for Luna County but the searches were executed inGrant County. Third, the warrant was only valid for four hours, up until 10 pm that night. Eckert was held for 14 hours and, according to medical records, prep for the colonoscopy didn’t even commence until 1 am the following day.

Why the venue shift? Because the doctor at the Deming hospital told officers the proposed search was “unethical.” Drs. Robert Wilcox and Okay Odocha of the Gila Regional Medical Center apparently had no qualms about forcibly “searching” Eckert eight times.

There’s more in Eckert’s complaint, including the fact that the second x-ray was of his chest, an area completely unrelated to the region where he was supposedly “concealing drugs.” In addition to what can be proven from medical records and police reports obtained by Eckert’s attorney, there are additional allegations that the officers Chavez and Hernandez mocked him and made derogatory comments about his “compromised position.” They also allegedly moved the privacy screen repeatedly to expose him to others in the hospital hallway. This verbal abuse apparently continued during Eckert’s ride back to the Deming police station. Understandably, Eckert now claims to be “terrified to leave the house” and does so “infrequently.”

There are many lawsuits filed where most details are alleged. This isn’t one of them. Most of what’s “alleged” by Eckert is documented by the routine paperwork that accompanies medical procedures and search warrants. And, to add insult to injury, KOB4’s news team states that the Gila Regional Medical Center is billing Eckert for the invasive, non-consensual medical procedures and has threatened to take him to collections for non-payment.

The only question that remains is why no one involved on the “law” side ever thought that anything past the first step on the list above might be excessive. These officers, along with two shamefully compliant doctors, went as far as they could to humiliate and violate someone simply because they could — in a collective effort that looks far more like making Eckert pay for the “crime” of making the cops look stupid than any sort of legitimate law enforcement effort.

The mind reels at the human corruption and institutional evil that allowed this travesty to take place.

Contact the Gila Regional Medical Center:

Complaint, send to our Patient Advocate: patientadvocate@grmc.org

Contact the Deming Police Department

700 E. Pine St. Deming NM 88030
Phone: (575)546-3012
Fax: (575)546-0503

Contact the Hidalgo County Sheriff

Saturnino Madero

720 E. 2nd Street
Lordsburg, NM 88045
575.542.3833
575.542.3143  FAX

The victim is suing for damages, and I hope he prevails beyond all expectations. A large settlement is the only thing that will make the various parties to this abomination sit up and take notice.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Just Imagine: Assembling a telephone

Posted on by The Old Wolf

I had a wonderful few minutes watching this old stop-motion film from 1947 showing how a telephone was put together. The music was great (although I couldn’t help seeing Wilson, Keppel, and Betty dancing off in the wings somewhere.)

The old dial phones had quite a few parts, didn’t they? But on the gripping hand, they were built like tanks and lasted pert’near forever.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

When the earth decides to let go.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

On March 14, 2010, rain-sodden ground on a hillside to the west of Maierato in Calabria, Italy, had had enough of fighting with gravity, and slid into the valley below. The slide was captured by an amateur photographer amid the cries of people to Run! Run! and various oaths to “Madonna santissima!” The video is truly chilling – we don’t expect good old terra firma to let go like that under our feet – it’s like a river of earth.

Fortunately for the village, the hillside was undeveloped except for agriculture; still, there was a lot of damage to the neighboring village.

10_02 Italy 1

Maierato before the slide.

Maerato2

After.

If you have Google Earth, just do a search for Maierato, Calabria, Italy – being able to see the elevation and move around the area gives you a good idea of the lay of the land.

For no reason, here’s another video of an epic landslide captured in France:

And one more:

This is the 1993 Pentai Ramis landslide in Malaysia. The landslide took place in an abandoned open cast tin mine close to the coast. This area of Malaysia is well known for its tin mining industry. The video footage shows the rapid collapse of the working face closest the sea, allowing complete flooding of the mine and forming a new cove measuring approximately 0.5 km2 (0.19 sq mi). Although the video quality is poor, the impact of watching this much earth move is powerful – it just keeps going, until the ocean floods in.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The Hillside Letters

Posted on by The Old Wolf

If you have never been in the great West, a local phenomenon may raise your eyebrows as well as a few questions. You’ll see huge letters all over the mountains and hills – some large, elaborate, and concrete, others not much more than the impression of thousands of feet wearing them into the soil. But they’re hard to miss once you get west of Denver.

From Wikipedia: Hillside letters or mountain monograms are a form of geoglyph (more specifically hill figures) common in the American West, consisting of large single letters, abbreviations, or messages emblazoned on hillsides, typically created and maintained by schools or towns. There are approximately 500 of these geoglyphs, ranging in size from a few feet to hundreds of feet tall. They form an important part of the western cultural landscape, where they function as symbols of school pride and civic identity, similar to water towers and town slogans on highway “welcome to” signs in other regions.

Block U 1971

University of Utah – Block “U” in 1971

Block U Illuminated

Illuminated for Homecoming. As with BYU (mentioned below), the Intercollegiate Knights had the privilege of whitening and lighting the Block U. The U was reconstructed a number of times, and the latest incarnation included plug boxes that allowed lightbulbs to be plugged in during homecoming. In this manner, the bulbs could be easily removed after an event and not left to the depredations of weather or vandals.

U

Block “U” as seen from Google Earth, the light plug boxes visible.

Block U Article

By 1974, the IK’s were an endangered species, but they did their best to keep the tradition going as long as possible. It was traditional during the famous rivalry games between the U of Utah and BYU for students to try to paint the opposing team’s letter the wrong color, which necessitated the whitewashing if efforts were successful – as well as repairing the effects of weather.

May 1973 - Block U 4

Here are six of the intrepid 9 who soldiered on. Below are three shots from an earlier event in October of 1967, showing the previous Block “U” before it’s refurbishing.

Oct 1967 - Block U 2

Oct 1967 - Block U 3

Oct 1967 - Block U

On to Provo…

BYU_East

The Block “Y” on the mountain above Brigham Young University

BlockYGoop

The “Block Y” illuminated at night with electric lamps. Originally the “Y” was lit with “goop,” balls of mattress stuffing mixed with oil; the Intercollegiate Knights service fraternity was responsible for this activity. Later students lit the “Y” with torches, and in the 70’s, for safety reasons, strings of lights were devised that allowed the letter to be lit up (usually at homecoming or during important athletic events) without the risk of fire on the hillside.

A lovely video which explains not only the history of the “Y” but also gives a feeling of why these letters are important to those who place them.

PaysonP

Payson High School – Payson, Utah

Battle Mountain

Sometimes you wonder if they were thinking. Battle Mountain, Nevada.

tumblr_mvkzx4bg9K1rasnq9o1_1280

Map of the block letters in the West. Click through for a list of where these letters can be found.

I grew up in New York City, but I’ve been in the West since 1969, and these ubiquitous letters have become part of my world. I wouldn’t recommend the expansion of the tradition eastward, as they do cause some damage to the areas where they are installed, but the ones that exist continue to be an expression of local pride and have a decidedly western flavor.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Kiwis know BBQ.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

If you’re not up on the slang, a Kiwi is someone from New Zealand. Over at reddit, user /u/whetu lays down some sincere guidelines for how to host the perfect one. The comments have been only slightly bowdlerized for my audience.

4485072679_76f32e7191_z

Sometimes a circle of friends has that friend who rises above the rest and gets decreed the master of the grill. Unfortunately for me, in my circle of friends, I am that guy. I’m not that hard core about BBQ’s either, but I’ll offer the following:

  • Start by getting your act together. Make sure you have cooking oil/spray, any herbs/spices/sauces, tools, FOIL, enough of whichever flammable you’re using, rubbish bins, ice buckets etc
  • Ambiance. Line up some tunes that set the mood. Last BBQ I ran, I queued up all sorts of summery music: Black Seeds, Breaks Co-Op, UB40, Katchafire, Herbs, right on down to Groove Armada… You also need to be selective about the mix. You can’t just chuck together albums from a few select artists and hope for the best. You don’t have to like it either. It’s background music for a BBQ, not a rave.
  • If you know in advance that the BBQ’s going to happen, marinade something. Ribs? Oh yes. Does it matter how? Not really. Find a recipe online that has decent feedback and try it. If the BBQ’s at your place, take it up a notch and slow-cook those bad boys.
  • If you’re going to a BBQ on short notice, NEVER get sausages. EVERYBODY gets sausages. Get fresh mussels and a bottle of white wine instead. Mussels are cheap and stupidly easy to do on the BBQ.
  • If you do buy sausages, get decent ones from a proper butcher. Not the bag of “contains 30% meat” sausages. I worked in a butcher shop for a decade, don’t get me started.
  • On that note: If you’re going to a BBQ, don’t arrive with sausages and eat all the steak. That’s ignorant behaviour deserving of an uppercut. Likewise, don’t bring a box of Tui and then help yourself to the range of microbrewed/craft/imported beer that others have brought along. Don’t be a jerkwad.
  • Start with a clean BBQ. If it’s messy, run it for 20-30 minutes, then clean it, oil it, let it come back up to temperature and then start using it. Chastise the moron who left it in a mess.
  • Learn/know your grill. They almost all have hot spots. Learn to use the hot spots for cooking and the colder spots for keeping cooked food warm. If it has a warming rack, use that to your advantage.
  • If you’re the master of the grill, make sure you’ve got a deputy. Someone to hang around, talk to, hand you beers and to take over as needed. You’ve gotta leave the grill at some point to visit the facilities or something. Don’t let the responsibility of your tongs fall to your mate Johnny “It’s not burnt: it’s Cajun Style” McDoughhead.
  • It’s not all about you. Rotate with your deputy. When you come back, hand them the beers, let them run the grill until they need to go themselves. Cheekily blame them for anything that’s overcooked.
  • Hygiene, dipweed! Did you just use the bathroom and not wash your hands? Or cross-contaminate from raw to cooked food? That’s twenty vigorous whacks with the tongs.
  • I like to have a special needs corner of the BBQ for the pain in the butt participants: the friend who likes his lamb chops cooked to ash, the mum whose kid apparently gets hyper unless their sausages are preservative free, the born-again whatever whose halal sherka derka goat chops need to be cooked with blessed oils, the friend’s preachy level-8 vegan girlfriend and her soysages… that kind of thing. Yes, I have experienced all of those things.
  • Cheap meat, grazing foods (e.g. mussels) and pain the butt participants are dealt to first.
  • Experiment with the cheap meat to see what flavour combinations work. I have a lemon tree right next to my BBQ so I’m always chucking lemon juice or lemon zest onto things. Lemon and cayenne pepper steaks is a favourite combo of mine. I also wipe the grills with a sliced lemon as part of cleaning.
  • Don’t cook all of the sausages. You’ve been to BBQ’s before: you know they’re not all going to be eaten. Last BBQ I ran (40 odd people), 6kg’s of sausages arrived. I cooked maybe half a kilo. It wasn’t all eaten. The rest went into the freezer.
  • Don’t prick or pierce the sausages. Fat is not evil. Leave it in the casing to help cook whatever meat is in there.
  • Patience is a virtue. One friend in our circle is banned from grilling because he thinks there has to be a theatre about it; throwing good booze on there to get flames spewing forth and constantly messing with meat. That’s not how you get your steaks perfectly cross-hatched. That’s how you overcook things. Put the meat on and leave it the hqiz alone until it needs to be touched again.
  • Seriously. One of the most important things you can do to improve all aspects of your cooking is to learn patience.
  • The exception is if you need to constantly flip your meat, say you’re doing a steak Heston Blumenthal style. If that’s the case, you likely know what’s up and don’t need this stupid list.
  • Further to that, put your meat in a roasting dish, loosely cover with foil and let it rest. This is doubly important with steak. It’s the difference between dry, chewy steak, and perfect juicy goodness. Any hands attempting to get at those steaks before, say, five minutes of resting? Whack them with your tongs. This, more than anything else, is the reason I was promoted to master of the grill. There’s something to be said about a steak that bites clean and juicy.
  • Yes. Even a cheap-ish cut of steak like rump can yield amazing results if you handle it properly. It’s also a great cut for practising with.
  • You’ve got foil. Use it wisely. You can use it to protect wood skewers.
  • One of the boys shows up with some fish he caught that morning? Poisson en papillote au barbecue, baby! Gut and scale, stuff with whatever herbs are handy, salt and pepper, squeeze out half a lemon’s worth of juice all over, the other half cut into slices or halved again and packed in there. A decent knob of unsalted butter. Wrap it in parchment paper, then a newspaper and tie it up with butcher’s twine. Soak the paper briefly in water and biff it on the warming rack of the BBQ (failing that, turn the BBQ down and try the plate rather than the grill). Look around for recipes for this great cooking method.
  • Veggies. This might make it easier on the people entrusted to that task: Get them to boil the potatoes until they just start to soften, then transfer to squares of foil. Throw in whatever else: sliced carrot, asparagus, capsicums, mushrooms, baby onions… season to taste (e.g. lemon and cayenne pepper again) and add a knob of unsalted butter. Fold them up nice and tight into parcels. They take 10-15 minutes on the BBQ, if that. This tends to be better suited to a BBQ with lower attendance, say, some friends come over for dinner kind of thing.
  • You can do courgettes in a veggie parcel, but I prefer to do them straight on the grill. Cut in half, season, cook cut-side down on an angle for a few minutes. Flip once. Few more minutes.
  • Have some respect: Thank whoever sorted out the rabbit food salads.
  • Have some respect: It’s not all about the grill. You should help with setup and cleanup, and if you’re any good, you’ll be cleaning as you cook.
  • Importantly: Have some respect: So you’ve been invited to a BBQ and the grill isn’t your preferred type? You prefer a Weber charcoal BBQ manned by scantily-clad Swedish models. How dare these people who invited you here use a gas BBQ?! Why, you should just give them a piece of your mind! On the other hand, you know where your house is.
  • The master of the grill generally gets kudos but misses out on the good stuff. If you want awesome steak, you need to set aside a stash for yourself (e.g. warming rack), or eat as you go.
  • When it’s all done, let the BBQ just cook off for 10 minutes, then give it a clean by whichever way you find appropriate. Then switch it off, and lightly oil the grill and plate to protect them, leaving it good and clean for next time. Find the moron who left it messy last time and chastise them again.

I thought I’d just reinforce a point. I touched on it earlier. In a word: experiment! The absolute best BBQ’s I’ve been to have had people arriving with foods with all sorts of marinades, spices etc. I had a Greek boss once and he’d host staff xmas parties at his place. The coal cooked kebabs were to die for. I had a friend bring a South African mate from his rugby team around to one of my BBQ’s, and he brought some kickass spicy Boerewors and some Braai skills. It goes on…

So experiment with marinades, herbs, spices, flavours. You will fail sometimes, there will be recipes online that have great feedback but just aren’t to your taste, but the times where a combination works are the times that you really remember.

/u/That_One_Australian has pointed out that I didn’t go into detail about correct steak procedure. This was intentional because I didn’t want to go on forever about aging, temperature, correct seasoning etc. Perfect steak method videos are frontpage news all the time. Educate yourself, integrate tips from all of the below into a method that you like (experiment!), they apply to BBQing:

Note: American friends please note: Kiwis use the term BBQ to describe the event (you may call it a cook/grill out), and the grill – both charcoal and gas. Keep in mind: You’re not the target audience. Accept the cultural/regional difference.

I’m by no means a champion grillmaster, but I’m learning – and this was an amazing tutorial. I’ll definitely be taking pages from this individual’s book.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Drool

Drool

Should I Get a Flu Shot?

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Flu_Vaccine_copy

Over at reddit, a physician writing under the pseudonym of /u/crucifoxes (a throwaway account which will not be used again) provides a concise summary about the medical reality of flu shots. This is a crucial read for anyone who has questions, and – from where I sit – helps clear up a lot of the tinfoil-hat nonsense that swirls around vaccinations in general. It deserves to be shared; I have bowdlerized it only slightly, and any emphasis is mine. The answer arose to the following question in /r/Vancouver: “I have never gotten a flu shot before, this year I have the option of getting one for free but I’ve heard both negative and positive things about getting them. Do you get one? Why or why not?”

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Physician here. If I were you, I’d jump at the chance for a free flu shot.

The reason there are so many misconceptions about the flu shot is largely due to the lay public’s understanding of Influenza.

We have taken to calling any stomach bug or upper respiratory infection “a flu.” Stomach flu. 24 hour flu. Et cetera. It’s all nonsense. There are hundreds of mild viruses that cause these symptoms, none of them are Influenza, and none of them are meant to be reduced by getting the flu shot. So when your aunt Kathy complains that her flu shot didn’t work because she threw up for two days in February, slap her gently across the face. That wasn’t flu, Kathy.

I’ve had Influenza A once in my life, and once was enough. Two weeks of headache, myalgia, nausea, vomiting. Every day it felt like I had just woke up after being hit by a bus. I will never, EVER call any cold-with-some-squirts a “flu” anymore.

Now. With that established, we still haven’t really figured out if you should get the shot or not.

Advantages: Lower chance of acquiring Flu, maybe a less severe course if you do contract the infection.

Disadvantages: sore deltoid for a day or two, maybe a mild cold-like illness for a few days.

That’s essentially it. There’s a lot of polemic out there around vaccines, but most of it is hogwash, and the rest is mostly outdated concerns about chemicals that aren’t used any more.

The flu vaccine contains no “live” virus whatsoever, nor does it contain any flu DNA. You cannot “get the flu” from a flu shot. What you can get is some side effects of your body mounting its immune response, hence the cold-like symptoms listed above.

The flu vaccine does not contain thimerosal[1] (exception – if you’re a senior citizen, they’ll still give you the thimerosal-containing vaccine. This is because you’re old, your immune system isn’t exactly top-notch anymore, and the addition of thimerosal helps potentiate the immune response. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. Don’t even Google it. There’s about as much evidence for vaccine levels of thimerosal being harmful, as there is evidence for wifi signals being used to control your mind.)

Some haters will also bring up rare, 1:1 million complications, like Guillain-Barre Syndrome. This condition is ultra rare, can occur with any viral illness or immune response, and is actually MORE likely if you get the flu than if you get the vaccine. The risk of dying if you catch flu is 1/10000. The risk of Guillain-Barre if you get the vaccine is 1/1,000,000. So you do the math.

That said, if you’re a young adult who is immunocompetent and is not pregnant, your chances of serious disability or death from influenza are pretty low. We encourage vaccination of medical staff NOT because we’re worried about the health of our workers. We vaccinate medical workers so that they are less likely to contract flu, and then kill off half a geriatric ward when they spread it.

I don’t know why you have access to a flu shot, but if it’s because of your own health issues or health-related employment, it’s a no-brainer. Get it. If you’re not in a risk group, or around risky individuals, it’s less clear what your choice should be.

That’s all I got. Keep in mind that while I’m a medical professional, allergy/immunology is not my area. Now go do some decent Googling and then decide for yourself!

EDIT: Forgot about Flumist, thanks for all the reminders. I’m OBGYN so I never use it, my comments are valid only for the non-Flumist, injectable, protein-capsid-whatever types.

——————

At my previous job, I’d get a free flu shot every year, and never once had a negative reaction. I’ve only gotten one since I retired in 2006; I think my insurance covers one annually – I need to check. Now that I’m moving toward bona-fide “senior citizen” status, I think it behooves me to get back in the habit.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] Thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative, and the biologically inactive form of mercury. It was added to vaccines to prevent the vaccine from spoiling, and to prevent cross-contamination. In the early days of vaccination the whole class was vaccinated from a single bottle with a single needle. Just a quick wipe with a cotton ball and some alcohol.
Thimerosal probably saved many, many lives.