Likely Fox headline: Planned Parenthood investigation results in two indictments.
I laughed so hard when I saw this news yesterday. Good for that grand jury!
Yeah, but I think this is the same jurisdiction that indicted Tom Delay years ago; while it got him out of Congress, his conviction was overturned on appeals. I was very disappointed about that, so I am not going to get my hopes up about this. I see that today, he is getting air time that "The FBI is ready to recommend an indictment of Hilary." As a NH voter, this statement is almost enough to get me to vote for her, on the grounds that if Delay is agin' her, Ah'm fer her.
I do hope it doesn't turn out to be for offenses that any investigative journalist could technically commit.
Technically, using a fake ID is something any investigative journalist could commit. But it doesn't sound like something commonly done except when the investigative journalists were 19 and wanted to go out to a campus bar.
Attempting to buy body parts could happen to anybody. But that's just a misdemeanor.
Does anyone know for real how hard it is to buy human body parts? Is there some kind of licensing scheme for medical use only? Is there an exchange market and are there published price lists somewhere? What is the regulatory regime?
And is there an actual illicit market in human body parts or not? Are there actually criminals who can "get you a toe"?
Whether ir not it's an active market with established pricing, which I highly doubt, I guarantee there are people who, for the right price, could get you a toe.
Any small business person with a shovel and dream.
9 I know where you can rent some toes IYKWIMAITYD.
I mean presumably some scientist, somewhere, needs a severed human hand for some legitimate research purpose. How do you get it? Are they required to be free from morgues, or is there a secret but regulated underground market?
People donate their bodies to science. The places that collect them put a notice in Craigslist and leave what they have on the porch.
So the highway patrol or whoever collects the bodies when people checked organ donation on their drivers' licenses just have to store and send and distribute the organs and severed hands for free? How do they cover their costs? Who decides who gets the severed hand?
Donating your body to science is different from organ donation. There's forms and all. You fill them out and the responsible party will take the body from the morgue. I'm not sure who that is. I think it depends on the details of your donation. If you donate to a medical school, they'll probably just use it there.
Organ donation is different from scientific research; if you've ticked the box for organ donation, then I think they return the hollowed-out leftovers to your relatives, once they've taken all the good bits out. Hand transplants are not a regular occurrence. Scientific research, they pretty much use all they can and incinerate the rest as far as I know.
Do you have to fill out a different form if you want to donate your body to mad science?
OK, but say I'm working in severed hand research in my med school and the closet is bare. Do I just have to wait for the fortuitous chance that some guy somewhere nearby dies and decides to donate his body to the med school, or can I call up some number and arrange to get a hand delivered? And if so does it have to be free or can I pay for it?
In Israel at least you can donate your body to science and then when they are done with it they'll give what's left to the family to bury if they so choose.
22: Apparently, there's a state registry in PA (
here). I'm sure you have to pay. They have costs to offset.
or can I call up some number and arrange to get a hand delivered?
1-800-SOBCHAK
Incidentally, now I want to make "Your phone's ringing, Dude" my ringtone.
Mary Roach's Stiff answers R. Tigre's questions, but I forgot the answers. Still a good read, though.
Leaving aside the corpses, is using a fake ID (and creating a fake company) something that is done by investigative journalists?
28: yeah, I think so. Setting up stings using false names is pretty common in investigative journalism.
What is journalism? What is life? Tough questions, to be sure. One cannot know the query of such an delusive answering. I am sitting on a three-legged plastic stool, in what my driver, known only as "Pedro Guerrero," tells me is Mazatlan. Three days ago, I sat across from Pedro Guerrero in a small boutique hotel in Paris I have known for years. We ate spinach.
29: Fake names, but with fake credentials? I'm assuming that they didn't just go into PP with a driver's license and underwear labels reading "Dr. Smith."
Old but probably still happening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/us/in-science-s-name-lucrative-trade-in-body-parts.html
Broadly speaking, though, investigative journalists can't engage in activity that would otherwise be considered illegal, can they?
"Yes, your honor, my client did spend $20,000 on cocaine and prostitutes over the course of three days, but he's an investigative journalist! He was working on a story!"
Self-plagiarizing from Twitter: I would like to be able to specify that my body will be donated to science, and then after science is done, my skeleton will be donated to entertainment.
Some of science wants the bones also.
33: Not in general, but it gets complicated with the Espionage Act, I believe.
33: well, no. But giving a false name isn't a crime unless it's done with the intent of defrauding or committing some other crime. Even having a fake ID is not a crime; using it to obtain something you aren't supposed to have is a crime. (Possession of false ID documents with improper intent).
It's all about criminal intent, rather than possession per se.
I'm pretty sure that just making a fake ID is a crime in the U.S.
Some of science wants the bones also.
The fertiliser industry?
I've heard that there are diseases that involve bones, usually the joints.
34: Supposedly this is the origin of where Arch Stanton's skeleton in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly came from.
There may well be a market for pathological specimens, but I'm told that if you just want a skeleton for pre-meds to familiarise themselves with it's cheaper to print them these days than go through all the hassle to get a real one.
Bones are tissues. There's much, much more going on there than morphology.
And leaving aside pathological specimens, you can learn quite a bit from the shape of the bones at the joint. You just have to know what you are looking at.
can I call up some number and arrange to get a hand delivered?
A thing that I actually saw in person: Bob Dole being introduced to an audience by someone who asked that we "give a hand to Bob Dole."
Last weekend we attended a kid's play. At intermission, the director stood up to ask for donations and her speech began, "I had a dream."
The article linked in 32 is great and answers many questions. E.g.:
The parts are supplied by a largely invisible network of brokers who make handsome profits for processing and transporting human remains. Selling body parts is illegal, but there is no prohibition on charging for shipping and handling. Research doctors say the demand for bodies and parts far outstrips the supply, raising prices and encouraging a growing number of body-parts entrepreneurs. Some of these are companies that promote their ''facilitator'' services on Web sites emphasizing the great benefit to humanity a willed body provides.
These sites do not mention that a human body, particularly one in pieces, is also of considerable benefit to a broker. Delivery of an intact cadaver costs as little as $1,000, but different specialists seek out specific pieces of anatomy for their work, and individual parts can be expensive. A head can cost $500 in processing fees, according to brokers who handle such parts. A torso in good condition can fetch $5,000. A spine goes for as much as $3,500, a knee $650, a cornea $400. In 2002, a pharmaceutical company paid $4,000 for a box of fingernails and toenails.
So the money is in the processing and in the brokering. A cadaver is only $1,000, but a box of presumably well-prepared fingernails and toenails is $4000, and a cornea is $400. Doesn't seem THAT expensive considering.
There's probably a manicurist who discovered a very lucrative sideline.
Investigative journalists get some protection by merit of being journalists. Editing fraudulent videos to smear your enemies is not the same thing as journalism.
Order your body parts over the internet:
http://www.cryolife.com/products/cardiac-tissues/
(not really taking orders, but there are some neat photos of inventory)
Fpr Shipping and packing/unpacking instructions, and the toll free customer service number:
http://www.cryolife.com/products/cardiac-tissues/tissue-instructions/
Apprarently, you can't thaw in the microwave.
46: Nah. He was probably accustomed to it.
"STOP ILLEGAL ORGAN HARVESTING"
Actual banner I saw here some time ago; think I have a photo somewhere.
I've seen that. It was Falun Gong protesting, apparently with some cause.
Aha. I was somewhat mystified, especially since the main text is in English. It was one of these.
They made a reasonably big push here, maybe four years ago. For while all my son knew about China was that and airbending.
They had signs mounted on trucks, not bikes.
Somebody told me that apparently that story about waking up in a bathtub full of ice and blood with a scar on your side and a missing kidney was an urban myth. I was oddly disappointed.
Just to be safe, don't accept a drink from that person.
||
NMM to Abe Vigoda. Seriously.
|>
Boy, he looked a million years old in the Seventies. When was Barney Miller? Late Seventies?
That's way more surprising than to me that you might think.
He was only ten years older than Hal Linden.
He's looked 90 years old for the last 50 years.
I was very fond of Barney Miller as a kid. That was a good era for sitcoms.
Yeah. I share the seemingly universal opinion that we are in a television Golden Age, but as far as sitcoms go, has All in the Family ever been equaled? Where is the modern Barney Miller?
He's still working. Singing and acting.
In Conan's early years on Late Night he had Vigoda as a recurring guest in gags, often turning on the legend he was already dead.
I don't see why we need all these regulations on selling body parts when anyone has access to a cemetery and a shovel.
71: I would pay $5 to watch Sausagely undertake the physical labor of disinterring a corpse.
68.last ou sont les neiges d'antan? Yossarian (IIRC) asked where were the snowdens of yesteryear, and I think the correct answer is Moscow.
How do you transfer VHS to YouTube?
That came out wrong. I meant to say that I would pay $5 to watch Sausagely undertake the physical labor of disinterring a corpse, if popcorn and Junior Mints were provided.
If you send me a VHS of Sausagely disinterring a corpse, I'll upload it to YouTube for a fee of $5.
Even before mailing, I've lost my profit.
62: What I think is so amazing about his career, is that not only was he the apotheosis of a certain type of arch, English gay man, not only did he radically reinvent himself on a regular basis, forming both a consistent link to rock's past, while also serving as a harbinger of its future, and not only did he remain committed for decades to his hard-drinking, hardcore lifestyle, but he was also someone who appeared as a rather forced rhyme in a Beastie Boys song, catapulting him at once into a revered pantheon that includes such immortals as Rod Carew, JD Salinger and the Chevrolet Impala.
Something has happened at Malheur. A. Bundy is in custody, they say.
Actual sources at last. Highway stop, shots fired. One dead, one Bundy with minor injuries, five including both Bundys arrested and charged with conspiring to impede federal officers.
We're talking about it in the other thread.
Thank you. (I use the mobile site so I just see the front page posts.)
80: Have you just been reusing Bowie's obit for every old prominent white male performer who dies this year, with small modifications?
