violence
gregladen | August 15, 2017In a series of strange events, President Donald Trump once again invoked violence against a CNN reporter and, apparently, embraced the idea that he is a fascist.
Following the homicidal terrorist attack on anti-White Supremacist demonstrators, trump saw fit to post the following tweet, memorialized here in a retweet by Kyle Griffin, an MSNBC producer.
Similar to an earlier contrived production in which Trump himself is shown in a video beating a CNN reporter, this shows a train labeled TRUMP running over a CNN reporter in cartoon form.
That tweet was deleted soon after being posted. I…
lborkowski | January 2, 2017The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on Jan. 29, is one of our favorite posts from 2016.
by Kim Krisberg
In the midst of another national debate over gun safety regulations, some argue that higher rates of gun ownership will protect people from dangerous strangers with deadly intentions. Physician and public health researcher Michael Siegel set out to study that argument. He ultimately found no relationship between gun ownership and stranger-related firearm homicides. But he did find that gun ownership levels translated into higher homicide…
cmonforton | November 3, 2016Kim Krisberg and I were in Denver this week at APHA’s 2016 Annual Meeting and Exposition — the year’s largest gathering of public health professionals. In our blog posts from earlier this week (here, here, here) we recapped just a few of the scientific sessions and events from the week. Below are some highlights from the final day at the meeting. You can read many more courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
Public health in the headlines: How does news coverage impact health?: Media. It’s everywhere these days. So, it’s not surprising that it impacts our health and behaviors as well as our…
gregladen | October 18, 2016My current model (subject to change) puts Arizona in the Clinton Column. This is the prediction that has resulted in the most head scratching from those observing this, but it turns out that the Clinton Campaign seems to agree. Clinton surrogates, including Chelsea, Michele Obama, and Bernie Sanders will be in the state over the next few days.
Frankly, I worry about good people going to Arizona stumping for a Liberal Democrat. Perhaps that is because of my own experience living there for several weeks. During that time a local desperado was arrested and made a court appearance, and his…
oracknows | July 18, 2016Back in December, I wrote about a phenomenon that I had observed from the very beginning of my sparring with those who promote antivaccine pseudoscience and thoroughly debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. It was a phenomenon that seemed to get a lot worse last year, almost certainly due to the impending passage and then passage of SB 277 in California, a bill that eliminated nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates in the state beginning this month. So it was that I came to describe the violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, complete with examples of such rhetoric, as well…
kkrisberg | June 21, 2016At Reveal, Will Evans investigates how lobbyists for the temporary staffing industry squashed a legislative effort in Illinois to reform the industry’s widespread discriminatory hiring practices. Evans has previously reported on how the temp industry discriminates against workers of color, particularly black workers, using code words, symbols and gestures to illegally hire workers according to sex, race and age.
In Illinois, the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative developed legislation to confront such hiring practices. Illinois Senate Bill 47 would have required temp agencies to track the race…
cmonforton | April 15, 2016Nurses and other healthcare workers joined Members of Congress yesterday at a news conference to discuss violence on the job in the healthcare industry. Ms. Helene Andrews, RN recalled being assaulted by a 25 year old psychiatric patient at Danbury Hospital. She was handing him mediation and a drink of water when, she explained:
“Without warning, the patient suddenly became viciously violent. He punched me with his full strength in my jaw, hurtling me backward onto the floor. The impact of my body crashing down shattered my left leg at the hip.’’
If that wasn’t bad enough, Andrews later…
kkrisberg | January 29, 2016In the midst of another national debate over gun safety regulations, some argue that higher rates of gun ownership will protect people from dangerous strangers with deadly intentions. Physician and public health researcher Michael Siegel set out to study that argument. He ultimately found no relationship between gun ownership and stranger-related firearm homicides. But he did find that gun ownership levels translated into higher homicide risks for one group in particular — women.
“Our data refute the hypothesis that the more guns out there, the more of a deterrent there is to strangers…
kkrisberg | December 18, 2015Researcher Douglas Wiebe first started studying gun violence as a doctoral student, investigating how having a firearm in one’s home affected the risk of injury. The work only heightened his interest in exploring gun violence from a public health perspective. Eventually, he decided to officially take on a question he’d been mulling over for almost a decade: Among people who’ve experienced a violent assault, are there any commonalities in their experiences just prior to the incident, and can we map those experiences in a way that reveals optimal intervention opportunities?
“I wanted to do a…
cmonforton | July 22, 2015A physician from the Houston area taught me a new phrase: “Code Silver.” Dr. Stella Fitzgibbons had an op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman yesterday about assaults and other violence in US hospitals to healthcare workers. She begins:
“You’ve been waiting in your hospital bed for pain medicine or some ice water, and are starting to get cranky about the nurse’s delay. Then you find out that it happened because another patient tried to strangle her with her stethoscope. Or you hear ‘Code Silver’ on the overhead speakers, and a nursing assistant comes in, wedges the door shut, and helps you…
lborkowski | April 13, 2015A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
L.V. Anderson at Slate: We Should Have a Better Condom by Now. Here’s Why We Don’t
Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham at Wonkblog: The rich get government handouts just like the poor. Here are 10 of them.
Mark Binelli in the New York Times: Inside America’s Toughest Federal Prison
Ashley Judd at Mic: Forget Your Team: Your Online Violence Toward Girls and Women Is What Can Kiss My Ass
Jonathan Cohn at the Huffington Post: Working Parents Should Be Very Happy About This Obscure Senate Vote
lborkowski | October 20, 2014A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Nancy Shute at NPR's Shots blog: Nurses Want to Know How Safe is Safe Enough with Ebola
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: What Would Keep Ebola from Spreading in the US? Investing in Simple Research Years Ago. (Check out the last paragraph for links to other great recent pieces on the disease.)
Atul Gawande at Slate: No Risky Chances: The conversation that matters most
Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post: Is sex only for rich people?
Laurie Abraham in Elle: Abortion: Not easy, not sorry
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic: To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black…
milhayser | April 6, 2014Perovskite solar cells can not only emit light, they can also emit up to 70% of absorbed sunlight as lasers.
Critical signaling molecules can be used to convert stem cells to neural progenitor cells, increasing the yield of healthy motor neurons and decreasing the time required to grow them.
Mexican blind cavefish are so close to their sighted kin that they are considered the same species, but they use pressure waves (from opening and closing their mouths) to navigate in the dark.
Electrostatic assembly allows luminescent elements (like Europium) to be embedded in nanodiamonds; these glowing…
aardvarchaeology | January 10, 2013Ferdinand Balfoort contributes a guest entry upon a recent ancestral pilgrimage to Stockholm.
I gladly agreed to write something for the blog after being introduced by Martin to a book by Frans G. Bengtsson about Early Modern Scottish brigades (and brigadiers) in the Nordic region including Sweden. I visited Stockholm in December on my quest to find my 16th century ancestor Gilbert Balfour who lost his head during a public decapitation procedure with a sharp implement, somewhere in the Old Town. So far I am no closer to retrieving his head or his grave site, but some illumination has been…
cmonforton | July 23, 2012A night out for the midnight premiere of the summer blockbuster "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises" turned deadly. Twelve people are dead and at least 59 were wounded. The victims will be mourned, the suspect studied, and the incident relegated to our criminal justice system. In my circle, however, we see gun violence a public health problem. It affects people, it causes death, injury and disability, and it can be addressed with environmental, legal, and behavioral interventions. A classic paper examining violence in a public health frame was published in a 1993 issue of the journal Health…
sastyk | August 9, 2011From Counterpunch, Ehrenreich, who, along with Jonathan Kozol and the late Joe Bageant and a vanishingly few others, tells the true story of American poverty more clearly than anyone else explores how we punish the poor::
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several…
lborkowski | April 8, 2011Last year, psychiatric technician Donna Gross was killed on the job at Napa State Hospital, allegedly by a patient who had a pass that gave him unsupervised access to the grounds. In a two-part series, NPR's Ina Jaffe talks with staff, directors, and patients from two psychiatric hospitals, Napa State Hospital and Atascadero State Hospital, about patient violence.
Both hospitals treat mentally ill patients who arrive through the criminal justice system; Atascadero was designed from the start to treat mentally ill criminal offenders, while Napa had hardly any criminal commitments 20 years ago…
gregladen | January 12, 2011First, watch this:
Mention of crosshairs at 2:20.
Then, Gabby got her head shot through with a bullet.
Then (blood libel phrase is at ca 3:20) :
Notice how she forgets to use the term "alleged" ... so much for the fifth amendment. Notice the very intense attempt circumscribe responsibility and rip the event from context.
She is obviously FOS when she disavows her own responsibility, but at least she is repeatedly saying that debate should be peaceful. That does in fact knock the legs out of her overall rhetoric and will be used against her in the future by other teabaggers. It may…
lborkowski | November 5, 2010Researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health analyzed data on nursing-home employees from the 2004 National Nursing Assistant Survey and learned the following about on-the-job violence:
Thirty-four percent of nursing assistants surveyed reported experiencing physical injuries from residents' aggression in the previous year. Mandatory overtime (odds ratio [OR] = 1.65; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.22, 2.24) and not having enough time to assist residents with their activities of daily living (OR = 1.49; 95% CI = 1.25, 1.78) were strongly associated with…