Communion Of Dreams

Ah, great - the military has a new techno gizmo to use in the Global War on Terror: a hand-held lie detector! From the article:

FORT JACKSON, S.C. - The Pentagon will issue hand-held lie detectors this month to U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing to the battlefront a century-old debate over the accuracy of the polygraph.

The Defense Department says the portable device isn’t perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We’re not promising perfection — we’ve been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it’s properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”

Of course, there are all kinds of problems here. let’s just start with the next paragraph in the story:

But the lead author of a national study of the polygraph says that American military men and women will be put at risk by an untested technology. “I don’t understand how anybody could think that this is ready for deployment,” said statistics professor Stephen E. Fienberg, who headed a 2003 study by the National Academy of Sciences that found insufficient scientific evidence to support using polygraphs for national security. “Sending these instruments into the field in Iraq and Afghanistan without serious scientific assessment, and for use by untrained personnel, is a mockery of what we advocated in our report.”

Furthermore, the only tests which have been conducted on the devices has been done by the company selling them to the military. And that only involved a small group of paid volunteers (226 people, from the same MSNBC story). American volunteers. Here at home. Meaning without taking into consideration either cultural differences or the stress factors of a war environment.

Now, think about that for just a moment. They sold the military a bunch (94) of these units, even though they haven’t been tested for the situation where they’ll be used. That the military would leap at the chance to use such a thing without adequate data supporting it does not come as any surprise to me. Not at all. But look past the military, at a much larger market, where that data supporting the effectiveness of the devices *would* seem a lot more appropriate: used on Americans, here at home.

Never mind the fundamental problems with any kind of polygraph - that technology is already widely accepted as an investigative tool up to and including being accepted in some courts of law. Never mind that this device is much more limited than a conventional polygraph machine, and doesn’t require the operator to have extensive training to use it.

The device is being tested by the military. They just don’t know it. And once it is in use, some version of the technology will be adapted for more generalized police use. Just consider how it will be promoted to the law enforcement community: as a way of screening suspects. Then, as a way of finding suspects. Then, as a way of checking anyone who wants access to some critical facility. Then, as a way of checking anyone who wants access to an airplane, train, or bus.

Just how long do you think it will be before you have to pass a test by one of these types of devices in your day-to-day life? I give it maybe ten years.  But I worry that I am an optimist.

Jim Downey

(Via this dKos story. Cross-posted to UTI.)

Seems a bit ridiculous for someone 6′2″ and pushing 250 pounds to be “feeling small”, but that’s about the best characterization of my emotional state today. Bit of a headache, some intestinal issues - not ’sick’ exactly, but just under the weather.

And what weather. What was mostly sunny and near 70 yesterday and Saturday is cold, grey, wet and very unpleasant today. 35 for the high, sleet/freezing rain this afternoon and snow scheduled for tonight and tomorrow. The kind of day that makes the cats curl up on the radiators and refuse to budge.

Both my good lady wife and I are feeling this. I think it is just part of the natural let-down, the ebb & flow of recovery from being care providers for so long, of grieving. I cross posted this diary (with some additional explanatory material) to Daily Kos yesterday, and it generated some really good discussion. But I think it left me feeling a bit wrung-out. For the longest time I have been able to attribute any mild depression or exhaustion to the stress and demands of care-giving, but the fact remains that I do have a mild bipolar condition. I suspect that for a while things are just going to oscillate before reaching some kind of equilibrium once again.

So, take it a bit easy today. Maybe go watch Blade Runner or something this morning, then see if I can accomplish some more conservation work this afternoon. One step at a time.

Jim Downey

No, no, not downloads of the novel. That would be something. Rather, that’s the number of words I’ve written in the last year in posts here which have the ‘Alzheimer’s’ or ‘Hospice’ category tags. Why is that significant?

Because I am thinking about using those posts as the basis for a book about being a care-provider. With the feedback I got to my posts here, and those I cross-posted at UTI and Daily Kos, it became evident that there is a real interest in this topic. Because almost everyone either knows someone with Alzheimer’s, or they know someone who has a family member with Alzheimer’s, or they are afraid of developing the disease themselves.

With editing and culling of the current material, I probably have about 30,000 words done. If I supplement that material with explanatory notes and reflections, I can easily boost that to 60 or 70,000 words, which should be more than sufficient for this kind of memoir. And while my thinking on this is still rather vague, I’d probably see if I could pair-up with the Alzheimer’s Association, with some or all of the proceeds of the sale of the book going to help that organization with their research and educational programs.

It’s a thought.

Jim Downey

. . . to link to an announcement I made at Daily Kos about Martha Sr.’s passing.  You can find it here.  Thought you might like to know about it.

Jim Downey

“What’s wrong, MIL?”

She’d been restless most of the afternoon, but each time she called or squirmed enough to prompt me to investigate, the most she had been able to tell me was that she was “uncomfortable.” I tried to tweak her meds a bit, but I suspected that the duragesic patches which are supposed to be good for 72 hours were running dry half a day early.

She took a sip of water from the straw I held to her lips. She swallowed, then said: “I was just worried.”

“Worried? What are you worried about - maybe I can help?”

“Well, I think I need to go shopping.”

“Shopping?”

“For clothes. For when I take the train back to college this fall. I won’t have time to shop once I am there.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

My wife had been napping. These days, each of us does what we can to get enough sleep, whenever we can. Because while I write these entries about what I have been doing in caring for my mother-in-law, be assured that my wife does even more in caring for her mom. So we watch out for each other, try and leave time for napping.

When she came down, asked how her mom had been doing, I told her my suspicions about the patches. We’d seen evidence previously that they ran out a bit early for my MIL - everyone has a different speed at which they metabolize medicine, even something as supposedly stable as a transdermal patch. She agreed with my assessment, and we changed the patches 12 hours early. At worst, the hospice might complain that we had made a mistake, and not to do it again.

I didn’t care about that, and I wasn’t sure that it would matter - that the end would probably come before we had to worry about a new Rx for the patches.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

It takes a while for the painkillers from the patches to saturate the system - there’s a ‘ramp up’ period, once they have gone dry. This is well understood, and we have additional painkillers on hand to help get past the initial stages - what are called “breakthrough” medicines. We’d given her what we hoped was enough of this when we got her to bed, along with something to help relieve her breathing difficulties. For a while, she slept fitfully.

Then at midnight she woke, tried to get out of bed. I heard her (I was on-call), got dressed and went down to see what she needed. As I got her disentangled from the bed rails and onto the commode, I asked her if she was OK.

She looked at me, her eyes watery and unfocused. I never did get much of an answer out of her, but it was clear from how much difficulty she was having breathing that I needed to do something. I did - increasing the dosage of the med she takes to control this kind of spasming. This is what we’ve been instructed to do by the hospice nurses.

It worked. After I got her back into bed and settled, her breathing relaxed, and she started snoring loudly. She snored like that for two and a half hours, during which time I actually got some sleep. You learn what sounds are good sounds when listening to a monitor at night.

And you learn what sounds are not. I woke about 3:00 to the sound of silence. Not even a hint of breathing from my MIL.

I went to check, found her still breathing, but so lightly and shallowly that you could barely tell it, even when standing right over her.

Two more times before I got up at 6:00 I went to check, see if she was still with us. She was.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

She wanted to get up for breakfast, so we did that. But she was breathing and coughing so hard that when she’d finished we didn’t even suggest that we go ahead with her normal Sunday morning bath. Getting her dressed, she was barely able to hold herself upright in the wheelchair. When we got her into bed her breathing was again stressed, and again we gave her something to help, half a dose.

And then we called hospice.

Lisa, our usual nurse, had told me on her last visit Thursday: “Call. Anytime. We don’t like surprises.”

So I called. The office put us through to the nurse on call this weekend. It was Lisa. I told her how things had gone in the previous 24 hours.

“I’ll be right over.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

“There’s significantly diminished lung capacity,” said Lisa, setting aside her stethoscope. Kneeling there next to the bed, her hand gently brushing my MIL’s hair away from her face, she looked up at us, then back at my MIL. “Can you say goodbye to me? I just stopped by for a moment, and have to leave now.”

It took my MIL a few moments to understand. Then she smiled slightly, and with a weak voice said “Goodbye.”

Lisa gave us another patch, this one to help control secretions into my MIL’s airway. Some swabs for her mouth, when it needs moistening but she is unable to drink. Told us how to arrange the pillows under my MIL to help control aspiration problems. And that we should freely use the meds which help control breathing spasms, keep her comfortable. “It’ll probably make her even sleepier. But at this point, that is not a bad thing.”

I nodded.

And now we wait.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to Daily Kos.) 

I usually save the ‘political’ stuff for UTI or dKos. And, for the most part, I intend to continue that policy even through what promises to be a very ugly election year here in the U.S.

But I want to chat here about this morning’s assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. Why? Because it ties in with Communion of Dreams a bit. And because I think that the news really should be examined more widely than in just ‘political’ or ‘news’ forums.

First, the Communion connection. [Mild spoilers to follow next paragraph.]

In the “history” of the novel, following the chaos of the world-wide pandemic flu, I have an unspecified regional nuclear war in Asia. The characters reference it in terms of the state of things in China and Chu Ling’s health. I kept the specifics of it rather vague, since I see about a dozen different ways that such insanity could easily occur, involving China, India, Taiwan, Japan, North and South Korea, and Pakistan. And, once started, such a regional conflict could easily draw in more than the initial combatants, depending on exactly what the alignment of allied countries was at the time. This would further cripple the economic powerhouses of Asia, and could be part of the motivation the Japanese would have for seeking to establish a colony on Mars.

OK, that’s fiction. I actually worry that reality could be worse. Worse? Yeah - rather than ‘just’ a regional war, this could precipitate a wider war, or draw in the U.S. in our current paranoia about Islamic fundamentalism.

Now, why do I say this? I’m not an expert on Pakistan’s political situation. In fact, I’d readily admit that I do not understand even all that I know about Pakistan’s current political situation - and what I know is quite limited. But Pakistan is only one part of this puzzle. At least as important are other components - the deteriorating relationship between the US and Russia, a global recession on the horizon, ongoing tensions of every variety in the Middle East, and our own jingoism and aforementioned paranoia here.

To sum it all up, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. It is the exact same sort of feeling I had when I heard of another assassination of a political figure several years ago: Ahmad Shah Massoud. It’s doubtful that you recognize the name. But maybe this will ring a bell:

Massoud was the target of a suicide attack which occurred at Khwaja Bahauddin on September 9, 2001. The attackers were two Arabs, Dahmane Abd al-Sattar and Bouraoui el-Ouaer, who claimed to be Belgians originally from Morocco. However, their passports turned out to be stolen and their nationality Tunisian. The assassins claimed to want to interview Massoud and set off a bomb in a belt worn by the cameraman while asking Massoud questions. The explosion also killed Mohammed Asim Suhail, a Northern Alliance official, while Mohammad Fahim Dashty and Massoud Khalili were injured. The assassins may have intended to attack several Northern Alliance council members simultaneously.^{[citation needed]} Bouraoui was killed by the explosion and Dahmane was captured and shot while trying to escape. Massoud was rushed after the attack to the Indian Military hospital at Farkhor, Tajikistan which is now Farkhor Air Base. The news of Massoud’s death was reported almost immediately, appearing in European and North American newspapers on 10 September 2001. It was quickly overshadowed by the September 11, 2001 attacks, which proved to be the terrorist attack that Massoud had warned against.

The timing of the assassination, two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, is considered significant by commentators who believe Osama bin Laden ordered the assassination to help his Taliban protectors and ensure he would have their protection and cooperation in Afghanistan. The assassins are also reported to have shown support for bin Laden in their questions of Massoud. The Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Mujahideen leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan Wahhabi Islamist, have also been mentioned as a possible organizers or assisters of the assassins.^[19] Massoud was a strong opponent of Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan. The assassins are said to have entered Northern Alliance territory under the auspices of the Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and had his assistance in bypassing “normal security procedures.”^[20]

So, there it is. An earlier attempt on Benazir Bhutto raised suspicions that the Pakistani security forces were involved. The method of attack was similar this time around, and only different from the assassination of Massoud in scope. Pakistan is struggling with democracy, martial law had just been lifted (and may actually be declared again by the time I am done writing this), there are known elements in the Pakistani government which are supportive of the Taliban (and Osama bin Laden), and they have nuclear weapons.

When I heard the news of Bhutto’s assassination this morning on NPR, I flashed back to that moment in September of 2001 when I heard of Massoud. And a chill ran up my spine.

Jim Downey

Just thought I’d take a moment and do a little meta stuff this morning.

First off, over 6,250 have now downloaded the novel. The pace has slowed somewhat in the last couple of months, with just 5 or 10 people a day downloading it. Still, I find that encouraging, given how little effort I have put into trying to promote the book. If you know someone who enjoys SF, send ‘em a link to it - a cheap and quick Christmas gift, if you want to just send them the .pdf of the the book. I figure eventually this will help me get the book published, so the more downloads, the better.

A little more surprising to me is how popular this blog has become. Typically, I get between 50 and 70 hits a day now, and the total is over 10,500 views, and that doesn’t include people who get an RSS feed. (If you do read this by RSS, either drop me a note or leave a comment, would you? I would like to have some sense of how many people do, and the WordPress software doesn’t let you know that.) I don’t get a lot of comments, which surprises me a bit, given how my posts (and cross-postings) elsewhere tend to generate discussion. But that’s OK, as there has been a slow but steady rise in readership and linkage from other sites. Sure, it’s nothing like UTI or Daily Kos, but still, I’m pleased that my random wonderings do regularly draw readers.

And yes, I do a lot of random wondering about things. Just a glance to the left will show you that - there are 239 categories. And this will make post number 241. For a blog which started out with the ostensible goal of discussing my novel, it has turned into something else almost entirely. But that’s OK - as I told a friend via email this morning, this allows me to keep my intellectual and writing skills somewhat sharpened during this time when my attention span is compromised by the demands of care-giving. If you figure my average post runs something like 500 words, I’ve written another full-length novel here - but given my current lack of ability to really concentrate and plan, a novel would be out of the question presently. This helps keep those other writing skills fresh, and that’s about the best I can hope for.

So, thanks for coming by. And Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Jim Downey

It’s been a little while since I’ve written about our old friend H5N1 - the “Avian Flu” virus. Partly this is because I like to keep my posts varied according to topic (which is a nice way of saying my attention wanders a lot these days). Partly, though, is because the mainstream media pays little attention to the threat of this flu virus as a general rule. Which is curious, given the potential threat it presents and the amount of governmental effort going into tracking and preparation for a possible epidemic/pandemic. Even if you take the cynical view that our news is event/entertainment-driven, you’d think with the release of I am Legend, the latest adaptation of Richard Matheson’s SF novel of the same name, would be a natural tie-in to news about the flu.

Because yes, there is indeed news about the flu:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - International health experts have been dispatched to Pakistan to help investigate the cause of South Asia’s first outbreak of bird flu in people and determine if the virus could have been transmitted through human contact, officials said Sunday.

Four brothers — two of whom died — and two cousins from Abbotabad, a small city about 30 miles north of Islamabad, were suspected of being infected by the H5N1 virus, said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl in Geneva. A man and his niece from the same area who had slaughtered chickens were also suspected of having the virus.

Another person in a separate case who slaughtered poultry in nearby Mansehra, 15 miles away, also tested positive for the disease, he said.

And if you saw either this diary on the front page of Daily Kos yesterday or check out the Flu Wiki, then you’d know that the situation is even potentially more troubling. From the Daily Kos diary:

See Flu Wiki’s Sunday wrap-up for the week’s documented human and bird cases, courtesy of the wiki volunteers who track cases around the world - helpful to CDC and WHO and other public health officials as they do their work (more than a few have written me that they stop there to get the morning news - this is netroots activism applied to public health!). Not only are there new human cases scattered throughout Asia (including Pakistan, Burma, China and Indonesia, all of whom are less than than transparent about internal news), there are also new bird cases of H5N1 in Germany, Poland, Russia, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia (and the hadj is soon, 1.5 million pilgrims expected).

Now, I’m not claiming that it’s the end of the world. Or even the end of what passes for civilization. But I do find it somewhat curious that this reality gets so little press attention, even when there is an obvious entertainment tie-in that can be made to the latest big-budget post-apocalyptic movie. Odd.

Well, when I do get back around to trying to find an agent or publisher for Communion of Dreams, at least I’ll be able to point to the ongoing threat of a pandemic flu that exists. Provided, of course, that the pandemic isn’t already underway.

Jim Downey