um... i don't care what they say, this is really scary

just exactly how do you lose one of these things?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/09/29/lost.bomb.ap/index.html

WTF

After the biggest intelligence failure in American history, the president finally held someone accountable and George Tenet decided to "spend more time with his family" meaning W gave him the shaft. Good Call.
But at least Tenet's been working with on the Middle East. His replacement:
a man who is ON TAPE explicitly saying he would not be qualified to be a good CIA chief.
THE MAN IS ON TAPE, and granted it is a Michael Moore tape and he CAN twist facts but there is nothing to twist here, the interview is there, NOT taken out of context, NOT edited. see it for yourself if you don't believe me. He says
1- he doesn't have the language skills
2- he's not particularly knowledgeable about the Middle East in terms of intelligence needs
3- he's not up on the new technologies
4- he's a freakin' politician

Granted he used to be a CIA agent but now he's a freakin congressman and a very loyal Republican and we shouldn't be having such a partisan figure running the CIA.
W is putting him in power because he can now wield even more political influence than he did with Tenet, leading to more fabricated intelligence, leading to more deceptions. IT's ON TAPE

WHY ISN'T THIS ON THE COVER OF THE TIMES? No one has even mentioned this video because the press is too afraid to give Michael Moore any shred of credibility for fear of being labeled "liberal."

PEOPLE: see it for yourselves. Meanwhile I'm gonna go get depressed as I see this Porter Goss guy get confirmed.

it's on the front page of www.michaelmoore.com -- i hate referencing him but it's there.
God help us all.

A Very Unique Special Opportunity

I signed up to help out wit a video my Social and Behavioral Science professor was making. Well when I showed up, it turned out that he wanted me and the other two students to interview one of our course's discussion leaders, a really old physician who has had Parkinson's for a long time now and was just diagnosed last week with pancreatic cancer. He's in hospice care right now and knows that he will most likely die within a few weeks max.

After being told this, my partnerns and I had a few minutes to get together and come up with the questions we would individually ask him for the video presentation.

I decided to go last and by the time I started asking him questions, I could tell he had gotten tired and was having a hard time coming up with the answers he wanted to.

Regardless, it turned out successfully and after we spent some more time with him and his family, my classmates and I left.

I guess the whole experience just got me down. I mean I never thought about what it would feel like to be talking with someone knowing that that person knows he is soon going to pass away. It's a very unusual situation and for that reason it feels strange and even scary on an emotional level. After the interview, I was drained and well, I kinda cried a bit, and just took a long nap.

But overall, I think talking to us medical students through the tape one last time and leaving some advice for this class and the many med student classes to come after us was a good thing for him and a great thing for me and my classmates. I'm sure to a certain extent it may have made him feel good to know he could leave us with something, and we were grateful that he wanted to do this.

In the end, we turned what really is a natural yet unfortunate situation and made the best thing possible out of it and for that I guess I feel really grateful and I think overall the experience put a lot of things in perspective for me. Well, it's 11 and I better go to bed, long long day of cellular biology and biochemistry tomorrow.

In case you didn't believe me when I told you the Glacier National Park in Montana was gorgeous, I thought I'd prove it by posting a picture of my buddies (at the SF Porno Palace) and I over there. Big ups to Ben Allen for emailing me this shot. Notice how beautiful the blue is.

A few people have been asking who the new friends are in school. Well here are a few of them from the summer program. To my right is pouria and then rahim, they're my middle-eastern afghan/persian roll dawgs. To my left is Lisa and the two girls on the right are steph and Tnguyen (I'll let you guess who is which).

We're going to be doctors and we can't even take blood

In theory, when the needle gets in the fat vein, blood is supposed to come out. Not so in my arm. My partner stuck me twice and still no blood came out. May I add I was well-hydrated and I do have fairly bulging veins due to some recent attempts at weightlifting. I even heard the resident say "I think you went in too deep and came out the other end, pull back out."

So finally, the third attempt to withdraw my blood was made and this time the first year med student handed it over to the resident supervising us who wasn't much better.

Here's the rule about the needle: it goes in and out not side to side, or else it hurts, really really bad. Well, the man went side to side, following my slipping vein and I was screaming, granted not too loudly but still screaming for it hurt like a mother.

Of course when it was my turn to draw blood from my partner, I had the same bad luck. The second time I even had the resident feel for the vein before I went in but it apparently escaped or something. My poor partner was in pain and finally the same resident ended up getting blood out of her too.

Man this profession is painful. What bothers me the most is that apparently half of our class was unsuccessful in getting blood from partners. Aren't we supposed to do this on patients soon?

God help us.