"Common infection builds defenses and puts millions at risk" by Matt Richtel New York Times, July 13, 2019
NEW YORK — There is growing evidence that urinary tract infections, one of the world’s most common ailments which afflict millions of Americans a year, mostly women, are increasingly resistant to antibiotics, turning a once-routine diagnosis into one that is leading to more hospitalizations, graver illnesses, and prolonged discomfort from the excruciating burning sensation that the infection brings.
The New York City Department of Health has become so concerned about drug-resistant UTIs, as they are widely known, that it introduced a mobile phone app this month that gives doctors and nurses access to a list of strains of urinary tract infections and which drugs they are resistant to.
It's “crazy and shocking,” but at least the cases of measles in Orthodox Jewish communities due to resistance to vaccines has cleared up.
Some urinary tract infections now require treatment with heavy-duty intravenous antibiotics. Usually, it is people with weakened immune systems or chronic medical conditions who are most vulnerable to drug-resistant infections, but UTIs have a dubious distinction: They are the single biggest risk to healthy people from drug-resistant germs.
Resistance to antibiotics has become one of the world’s most pressing health issues. Overuse of the drugs in humans and livestock has caused germs to develop defenses to survive, rendering a growing number of medicines ineffective in treating a wide range of illnesses — a phenomenon that is playing out worldwide with UTIs.
A deadly fungus can form, and whatever you do, don't scratch it.
The solution, researchers and clinicians say, includes a continued push for more judicious use of antibiotics worldwide, but more immediately, a partial solution would be the development of quick, cheap diagnostic tools that would allow an instant urine culture so a doctor could prescribe the right drug for UTIs, but whether to wait the several days it usually takes to get lab results before prescribing presents a tough dilemma for doctors and patients, who frequently are desperate for relief. Plus, depending on a person’s insurance, getting a culture can be expensive.
With the Affordable Care Act still in place (pffft)?
Generally doctors still do not order a urine culture before prescribing an antibiotic.
Some women have UTIs that the body fights off on its own without using antibiotics, while other women may have a different low-level ailment that feels like a UTI, but isn’t. The safest course is to see a doctor and make an informed decision that includes a judicious determination of whether antibiotics are warranted. The science does not support the efficacy of some popular remedies like cranberry juice or cranberry pills.
If the $cience doesn't $upport it, it must work.
Officials from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that UTIs acquired by otherwise healthy people were a growing concern and one poorly studied. They are not tracked nationally.
Oh, it's a pu$h for your pee!
In older people, UTIs can be deadly, but tracking in the United States is so weak that there are no reliable estimates on the numbers of deaths related to the infections. The CDC published an estimate of 13,000 per year, but that figure comes from a paper looking at 2002 data and refers only to UTIs acquired in hospitals.
Yeah, they gotta scare the piss out of ya'!
Dr. Clifford McDonald, associate director for science at the CDC, said the government planned to expand its research.....
Gotta “do something soon because it can be fatal.”
--more--"
I gue$$ you can flu$h the law$uits along with the full-page Total Wine ad on page A3.
Now look in the mirror:
"Companies gather massive databases of people’s images for facial recognition tools" by Cade Metz New York Times, July 13, 2019
SAN FRANCISCO — Dozens of databases of people’s faces are being compiled without their knowledge by companies and researchers, with many of the images then being shared around the world, in what has become a vast ecosystem fueling the spread of facial recognition technology.
The global $urveillance grid was con$tructed around you, and you didn't even know it.
At least Frisco and Somerville are fighting a rear-guard action after the war has been lost.
The databases are pulled together with images from social networks, photo websites, dating services like OkCupid, and cameras placed in restaurants and on college quads. Although there is no precise count of the datasets, privacy activists have pinpointed repositories that were built by Microsoft, Stanford University, and others.
The facial compilations are being driven by the race to create leading-edge facial recognition systems. This technology learns how to identify people by analyzing as many digital pictures as possible using “neural networks,” which are complex mathematical systems that require vast amounts of data to build pattern recognition.
Tech giants Facebook and Google have most likely amassed the largest face data sets, which they do not distribute, according to research papers, but other companies and universities have widely shared their image troves with researchers, governments, and private enterprises in Australia, China, India, Singapore, and Switzerland for training artificial intelligence, according to academics, activists, and public papers.
The NSA has had your profile for years.
Companies and labs have gathered facial images for more than a decade, and the databases are merely one layer to building facial recognition technology, but people often have no idea that their faces ended up in them, and while names are typically not attached to the photos, individuals can be recognized because each face is unique to a person.
Too busy with their heads in their.... pho.... nes.
Questions about the datasets are rising because the technologies that they have enabled are being used in potentially invasive ways. Documents released last Sunday revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials employed facial recognition technology to scan motorists’ photos to identify unauthorized immigrants. The FBI also spent more than a decade using such systems to compare driver’s license and visa photos against the faces of suspected criminals, according to a Government Accountability Office report last month. On Wednesday, a congressional hearing tackled the government’s use of the technology.
That's why they were so steamed.
There is no oversight of the datasets. Activists and others said they were angered by the possibility that people’s likenesses had been used to build ethically questionable technology and that the images could be misused. At least one facial database created in the United States was shared with a company in China that has been linked to ethnic profiling of the country’s minority Uighur Muslims.
When Qin the Chinaman gets here, Turkey is going to get Trumped!
Over the past several weeks, some companies and universities, including Microsoft and Stanford, removed their facial datasets from the internet because of privacy concerns, but given that the images were already so well distributed, they are most likely still being used in the United States and elsewhere, researchers and activists said.
It's called shutting the barn after the horse is out.
“You come to see that these practices are intrusive, and you realize that these companies are not respectful of privacy,” said Liz O’Sullivan, who oversaw one of these databases at the artificial intelligence startup Clarifai. She said she left the New York-based company in January to protest such practices.
“The more ubiquitous facial recognition becomes, the more exposed we all are to being part of the process,” she said.
Google, Facebook, and Microsoft declined to comment.
One database, which dates to 2014, was put together by researchers at Stanford. It was called Brainwash, after a San Francisco cafe of the same name, where the researchers tapped into a camera. Over three days, the camera took more than 10,000 images, which went into the database, the researchers wrote in a 2015 paper. The paper did not address whether cafe patrons knew their images were being taken and used for research.
It's what I call an in-your-face-laugher, and on obvious and brazen boast on what they are doing knowing most are too mind-numb to see it.
The Stanford researchers then shared Brainwash. According to research papers, it was used in China by academics associated with the National University of Defense Technology and Megvii, an artificial intelligence company that The New York Times previously reported has provided surveillance technology for monitoring Uighurs.
The Brainwash dataset was removed from its original website last month after Adam Harvey, an activist in Germany who tracks the use of these repositories through a website called MegaPixels, drew attention to it. Links between Brainwash and papers describing work to build AI systems at the National University of Defense Technology in China have also been deleted, according to documentation from Harvey.
Stanford researchers who oversaw Brainwash did not respond to requests for comment.
I'm getting the feeling that the NYT is perfectly comfortable with the U.S. government having these same tools.
At Microsoft, researchers have claimed on the company’s website to have created one of the biggest facial datasets. The collection, called MS Celeb, spanned over 10 million images of more than 100,000 people.
MS Celeb was ostensibly a database of celebrities, whose images are considered fair game because they are public figures, but MS Celeb also brought in photos of privacy and security activists, academics, and others, such as Shoshana Zuboff, the author of the book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” according to documentation from Harvey of the MegaPixels project. MS Celeb was distributed internationally before being removed this spring after Harvey and others flagged it.
Zuboff, j'you say?
Matt Zeiler, founder and chief executive of Clarifai, the AI startup, said his company had built a facial database with images from OkCupid, a dating site. He said Clarifai had access to OkCupid’s photos because some of the dating site’s founders invested in his company.
He added that he had signed a deal with a large social media company — he declined to disclose which — to use its images in training facial recognition models. The social network’s terms of service allow for this kind of sharing, he said. “There has to be some level of trust with tech companies like Clarifai to put powerful technology to good use and get comfortable with that,” he said.
Smile, you are on $urveillance camera!
An OkCupid spokeswoman said that Clarifai contacted the company in 2014 “about collaborating to determine if they could build unbiased AI and facial recognition technology” and that the dating site “did not enter into any commercial agreement then and have no relationship with them now.” She did not address whether Clarifai had gained access to OkCupid’s photos without its consent.
I'm never comfortable with collaboration, for it leads to collusion.
Clarifai used the images from OkCupid to build a service that could identify the age, sex, and race of detected faces, Zeiler said. The startup also began working on a tool to collect images from a website called Insecam — short for “insecure camera” — which taps into surveillance cameras in city centers and private spaces without authorization. Clarifai’s project was shut down last year after some employees protested and before any images were gathered, he said.
Did the tool work, because..... ??
Zeiler said Clarifai would sell its facial recognition technology to foreign governments, military operations, and police departments provided the circumstances were right. It did not make sense to place blanket restrictions on the sale of technology to entire countries, he added.
O’Sullivan, the former Clarifai technologist, has joined a civil rights and privacy group called the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. She is now part of a team of researchers building a tool that will let people check whether their image is part of the openly shared facial databases.
“You are part of what made the system what it is,” she said.....
--more--"
They will want to see some ID, and God can't help you:
"Xaverian Brothers release names of members credibly accused of abuse" by Danny McDonald and Alison Kuznitz Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent, July 13, 2019
The Xaverian Brothers, a Roman Catholic religious order that operates five high schools in Massachusetts, has identified 34 men found to be credibly accused of sexually abusing minors dating back to the early 20th century.
They unearthed this on page B1.
At least a dozen of those named were associated with St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers and at least five men worked at Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood. Others taught at Malden Catholic High School and St. John’s High School in Shrewsbury, according to the list.
The Baltimore-based congregation, which operates 13 schools in five states, said the list released Friday was compiled by an independent investigator who reviewed personnel files for the brothers accused of sexual abuse since the early 1900s.
That's.... over a hundred years.
“As religious, the Xaverian Brothers are deeply sorry for the pain caused by the crime of sexual abuse of minors committed by any Xaverian Brother,” wrote Superior General Brother Edward Driscoll. “We regret not being worthy of the trust of young people. We must confess and repent as we ask forgiveness for the actions of ‘shepherds’ who betrayed this sacred trust and inflicted great suffering.”
The headmasters of Malden Catholic, St. John’s Prep, St. John’s High School, and Xaverian Brothers High School also sent letters to students and alumni on Friday, identifying the brothers named who once taught at their institutions, and outlining steps taken to protect students now enrolled.
At St. John’s Prep, the brothers accused were associated with the school between 1922 and 1978. Ten of the 12 are dead. One still alive, Thomas Morrissey, is currently a Xaverian Brother who is on a “safety plan,” according to a letter Headmaster Edward P. Hardiman sent to the school’s community.
Morrissey, known as Brother Gabriel, was associated with the school between 1965 and 1967, and the allegations of abuse are related to his time there, as well as his time working at Xaverian in Westwood, where he was from 1967 to 1979. He also had two different stints at St. John’s High School in Shrewsbury.
Allegations made against half of the 12 men who had ties to St. John’s Prep were connected to their stints at the school, which was founded by the order in 1907.
That group included William Burns, who was known as Brother Francis Jerome and worked at the Danvers school in the early 1930s, the early 1950s, and the early 1960s. Burns was also assigned to Malden Catholic during the 1930s and from 1968 to 1974, Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood in 1966, and St. John’s High School in Shrewsbury the following year, according to the order.
Also in the group were John Sullivan, who was known as Brother John Augustine and was at St. John’s Prep from 1937 to 1938, Albert Kerressey, who was known as Brother Ricardo and served at the school in the mid-1940s and from 1956 to 1971, Thomas Harrison, who was known as Brother Bosco and served at the school for seven years starting in 1949, Thomas Holihan, who was known as Brother Rudolph and was at the school for more than 40 years starting in 1940; and Morrissey.
With the exception of Morrissey, all of those men are dead, according to the school. Harrison left the Xaverian Brothers before he died.
And one presumes frying in the fires as they toil endlessly for the rest of eternity.
In Shrewsbury, at St. John’s High School, five of the six accused brothers are dead, with their assignments spanning from 1907 to 1998, according to a letter sent from Headmaster Alex Zequeira, and Christopher Creed, chairman of the school’s trustees.
At Malden Catholic, Brother Francis Jerome allegedly abused a minor at Malden Catholic, where he was assigned from 1935 to 1938 and again from 1968 to 1974, according to the letter sent Friday by Brother Thomas J. Puccio, who served as acting headmaster this past school year.
Also accused were John Donovan, who was known as Brother Ronald and was assigned to the school in the early 1970s, along with Leo Gillis, known as Brother Wenceslaus who served there from 1987 to 2004, Puccio wrote.
In his letter to Xaverian alumni, Brother Daniel Skala, the school’s headmaster, encouraged alumni to report abuse to civil authorities and the school.
“Child abuse stands in direct conflict with everything we stand for and believe,” he said. “I am sorry to learn that abuse of any kind took place here.”
--more--"
Related:
Saint Jude’s School in Waltham is closing because of growing debt and low enrollment
It's a day of rest after church, sorry.
NEXT DAY UPDATES
This was the reflection looking back at you this morning:
"R.I.’s David Cicilline uses his House perch to take on Google and Facebook" by Jazmine Ulloa Globe Staff, July 14, 2019
WASHINGTON — It was early 2017, and Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island was in the middle of his own tech convergence.
He had just become the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, and the politically ambitious former Providence mayor had taken a key role in developing the economic message the House Democrats would use to regain the chamber’s majority in the 2018 midterms.
The two roles — political strategist and antitrust point person — led to a confluence that now is reverberating from Washington to Silicon Valley. He is at the center of the emerging debate on Capitol Hill: Should Facebook, Google, and other technology giants be broken up?
His early conclusion: The tech giants have grown too powerful. As the new chairman of the antitrust subcommittee, Cicilline has launched a series of high-profile hearings — the most significant congressional probe of its kind in decades — to figure out how to level the digital market playing field.
His new role as the House’s big-tech inquisitor dovetails with his history of fighting to protect people in a system he views as rigged against them. It also provides a platform to further elevate Cicilline’s rising profile after his frequent TV appearances speaking out on another major Judiciary Committee issue by calling for impeachment proceedings against President Trump.
Cicilline, 58, discovered politics at 15, when he asked his parents to drop him off at Town Council meetings in Narragansett, and while still in high school he helped defeat a developer’s efforts to encroach on Black Point wildlife grounds in Rhode Island.
At Brown University in the 1980s, he formed a branch of the College Democrats with his classmate John F. Kennedy Jr.
After law school, Cicilline became a public defender in Washington, D.C.’s juvenile justice division, defending teens from impoverished neighborhoods. He later returned to Rhode Island to run for public office to try to accomplish more for minors in the criminal justice system by changing policy.
After losing a state Senate race in 1992, he won a seat in the Rhode Island House of Representatives in 1994. Then in 2002, he ran for Providence mayor against the popular and controversial incumbent Vincent Cianci.
Cianci was forced to resign amid racketeering charges and Cicilline was elected in a landslide. He would go on to become the first openly gay member of the House leadership after being elected to Congress in 2010.
“The key thing with him is always wanting to promote economic opportunity and fair play, and as a mayor he was a fighter for working-class people,” said Darrell West, who taught Cicilline at Brown and now is director of governance at the Brookings Institution think tank. “I can see those principles flowing as part of his tech work now.”
Cicilline originally wasn’t interested in becoming the lead Democrat on the Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, but the committee’s top Democrat, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, convinced him by saying it was a new opportunity that “could stretch his mind,” Cicilline said.
That led Cicilline to his convergence. As he helped craft the House Democrats’ agenda centered on an economy they said was not working for average Americans, he was learning about antitrust laws designed to promote competition and innovation while protecting workers and consumers.
After he gained the subcommittee chairmanship this year with Democrats in the majority, his subcommittee’s first probe centered on health care consolidation and led to legislation to drive down the cost of generic drugs that passed the House.
Now, Cicilline has turned his attention toward technology giants as Facebook and Google have amassed more than 60 percent of the online ad market.
In a Globe opinion article in March, he said he had asked the Federal Trade Commission to open an antitrust investigation into Facebook as it had acquired more than 75 companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Cicilline opened his subcommittee’s probe last month with a look into the ways such tech platforms are dictating the terms for local publishers and newspapers. Witnesses and subcommittee members said tech companies had hurt some publishers amid already declining sales revenue by buying up the ad market and distorting what the public shares and consumes.
Oh, now we see why he is such a hero to the Globe and getting the royal treatment on the front page!
The agenda-pu$hing, $elf-$erving advocacy journali$m is becoming over the top sickening.
“We cannot have a democracy without a free and diverse press,” Cicilline said from his chairman’s perch. “Our country will not survive if we do not have shared facts, if corruption is not exposed and rooted out at all levels of government, and if power is not held to account.”
The second of several expected hearings will take place Tuesday and will center on how tech mergers have had an impact on new businesses and startups.
They are in search of a second city for New England startups.
The bipartisan panel’s findings could provide the foundation for legislation to update antitrust laws, spur new federal rules, and put pressure on enforcement agencies to pursue their own investigations. At the least, hearings and witness testimony could expose bad practices, pushing companies to own up to the public, antitrust lawyers and legal experts said.
Tech companies are under scrutiny from Democrats and Republicans.
In her run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has called for breaking up tech giants, and Trump has accused social media platforms of colluding with Democrats against him, though he hasn’t offered evidence.
Warren seems to be ahead of the curve, and the qualifier regarding evidence being needed is like a pot-hollering-kettle situation.
Congress has not intervened in a major way to revise what is prohibited under antitrust law since 1950, while courts have exhibited leniency in allowing mergers, and antitrust enforcement efforts have lagged.
The last major US government antitrust suit against a tech company occurred when the Justice Department sued Microsoft in 1998.
Lawyers and legal analysts at the time debated whether the antitrust statutes could be applied to a complex and fast-evolving tech market, but the Microsoft case, in which a settlement ultimately imposed restrictions on the computer software giant, proved “antitrust law was adaptable,” said Andrew Gavil, a professor at the Howard University School of Law.
Now the FTC and the Justice Department are reportedly paving the way for antitrust investigations against Facebook and Google, respectively, and a growing number of researchers and experts argue that greater antitrust enforcement could protect competition and consumers and more equitably spread the benefits of innovation.
The $5 billion fine is just the beginning of the pain for Facebook.
“It is perfectly possible to enforce the law without having tech platforms disappear,” said Fiona Scott Morton, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management who is expected to testify on Tuesday.....
--more--"
Also on the front page:
"It was a parking lot. Now it’s a park, and the ‘center of gravity’ in reimagined Fenway neighborhood" by Janelle Nanos Globe Staff, July 14, 2019
Several months ago, bulldozers rolled into a paved parcel in the Fenway neighborhood and did something that would have made Joni Mitchell grin: They tore up an acre-sized parking lot that had long served the Landmark Center’s big box stores to make way for a verdant stretch of grass.
The new park is a finishing touch on the $650 million redevelopment of the historic Sears, Roebuck and Co. warehouse and distribution center, a yellow-brick Art Deco structure that has served as a gateway to the Fenway for 90 years. The building, renamed 401 Park, is now a mixed-use retail and office behemoth that’s home to the new Time Out Market, a food hall that opened last month, and, soon, a Trillium beer garden.
Related: "Authorities say a drunken driver who was on probation for a previous DUI conviction deliberately forced another vehicle into oncoming traffic on an Oklahoma highway, causing a head-on collision that killed two people and injured four others. The suspected road rage attack happened at around 5 p.m. Saturday west of Durant, which is about 120 miles southeast of Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol said....."
Steve Samuels, the developer of the project — and architect of the 20-year makeover of the Fenway neighborhood — can’t contain his excitement about that green patch out front. The two-decade evolution of the neighborhood has also made it more attractive to other developers, including the Red Sox and Live Nation, which are teaming up on a plan to build a 5,000-seat music venue at the corner of Lansdowne and Ipswich streets. (John Henry, principal owner of the Red Sox, also owns The Boston Globe.)
Can his paper be any more brazen about its $elf-$erving aspect?
The prospect of even more redevelopment makes some neighborhood advocates nervous about what the Fenway may eventually become.
Leah Camhi, executive director of the Fenway Community Development Corporation, applauds all that Samuels has accomplished, but she worries that the Time Out Market might cannibalize other small food businesses in the neighborhood, and she wants Samuels and other developers to look beyond the empty nesters and young professionals and to build more affordable housing, larger units, and places where senior citizens can grow old.....
Samuels said he’s still getting started, as the Globe pu$hes elite gentrification of Bo$ton.
--more--"
On the front page of the B-section, I find this:
Red Sox announce 37-year Boston police veteran as new security director
He is “leaving one great team and going to another.”
Also see:
Polar Beverages CEO will be part-owner of minor league team
The team is the Pawtucket Red Sox, and I re$t my ca$e.
"A woman was treated for an injury after being hit by a foul ball at Saturday night’s Red Sox game at Fenway Park against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Red Sox spokeswoman Zineb Curran said. “She received immediate medical attention and is doing fine,” Curran said in an e-mail Sunday....."
I was surprised to see lightning strike twice.
Never mind the latest Red Sox loss in this roller-coaster of a season, but it simply has to stop -- even if it is just a kid's game:
"Boston-area sports camp abruptly canceled, leaving parents in the dark" by Lauren Fox Globe Correspondent, July 14, 2019
Charlie Bodwell’s two teenage sons play in a baseball league in Thailand and dreamed of training in the United States. So after searching online, Bodwell signed them up for three weeks at MB Sports Camps, an “intensive, instructional program designed for the dedicated athlete,” but on July 2, just five days before the camp was scheduled to begin, Bodwell received an e-mail from the camp’s founder and CEO that it had been canceled, with no mention of a refund.
“It is with great sadness and a broken heart that we are informing you that MBSC will not be running any camps this summer of 2019,” Mehdi Belhassan wrote.
Bodwell’s sons, 13 and 15, had already arrived in Boston to stay with friends before their first day at camp.
“And what happens? It all blows up,” Bodwell said.
The camp has cut off communication, leaving families furious and wondering where to turn to get back their money, typically thousands of dollars.
The camp’s voice mail and automated e-mail response deliver the same message.
“Due to unforeseen circumstances, MB Sports Camps is not hosting any camp the summer of 2019,” the message states. “Unfortunately, at this time we are unable to answer questions regarding this cancellation. But we are doing our best to rectify the situation. Our legal team will contact you when they are best able to answer your question.”
The Massachusetts attorney general’s office said it is reviewing six complaints over the camp’s sudden cancellation.
Many of the campers live abroad, and Bodwell, 58, said that makes it harder for parents to form an unified front.
“We are a bunch of dispersed parents. We don’t even know each other,” he said. “I suspect that this guy’s just going to hope that nobody follows up.”
I'm sure Globe will keep an eye on it, and a pair of devastated parents from Nigeria spent years saving for lost the $4,640 they paid the camp.
By Friday, the MBSC website had been taken down, but on Facebook, people were looking for answers.
“I hear all 2019 camps are canceled,” wrote one. “How do we get our money back? Who should my attorney contact?’’
Looks like they $truck out.
--more--"
Maybe God can help them:
"For decades, this Christian bookseller went by the name CBD. Then that became a problem" by Dugan Arnett Globe Staff, July 13, 2019
Shortly after they began selling Bibles out of their parents’ Lynn home 40 years ago, the teenage Hendrickson brothers realized their new enterprise needed a name.
Christian Book Distributors, they quickly settled on. Or, CBD.
For the next four decades, as their small venture grew in scope and influence, those three letters came to be the hallmark of the country’s largest distributor of Christian products, adorning catalog covers, employee merchandise, and the company logo.
Then came the rise of what company president Ray Hendrickson calls “the other CBD.”
The kind that burns up quick.
The sudden popularity of cannabidiol — a chemical compound found in cannabis that has become wildly trendy in wellness circles, and also happens to be called CBD — has proven to be an unfortunate development for the company, wreaking havoc on its Google search results and creating significant brand confusion for its customers.
As a result, the Peabody-based company announced last month that it would be undergoing an official rebranding, retiring its long-used CBD name in favor of “Christianbook.”
It was not a problem the brothers saw coming.
“Forty-one years ago,” Hendrickson says, “we would’ve not expected to have had our three letters . . . become synonymous with this.”
As part of the overhaul, “CBD” has been scrubbed from the company’s catalogs and its website. The bookseller is also in the process of changing employee e-mail addresses, which end in “at cbd.com.”
For the record, Hendrickson says, the change comes not from concerns of being accidentally associated with a less-than-holy product. Rather, it’s the confusion that has followed as the cannabis-related CBD has worked its way into the American lexicon.
Employees said they’ve gotten strange looks when they wear company gear in public. On one occasion, a company representative spent a confusing 30 minutes on the phone with a caller trying to locate his order information before the customer, in describing the product he’d purchased, mentioned it had a marijuana leaf on the bottle.
“The call ended quickly after that,” said the representative, in an e-mail, “as I was able to explain that we sell Christian books and home school items and do not carry any marijuana products.”
Even those associated with the company have been left occasionally bewildered.....
That's when I closed the good book.
--more--"
Want some mushrooms, man?
See:
"A patient at a state mental hospital in South Carolina died earlier this year after being at the bottom of a dog pile of several employees — something specifically prohibited in their training. Three of the 13 employees involved in the death of 35-year-old William Avant in January had not been through training on physically restraining patients, according to The State newspaper. His death hadn’t been reported prior to Sunday. Video of the incident showed the employees on top of Avant at a Columbia mental hospital for four minutes. His face was blue and he was unresponsive when they got up. The State Law Enforcement Division investigated Avant’s death but did not press charges. The newspaper reported that agents and the Department of Mental Health refused to release records. They cited patient privacy laws even though Avant died in the government’s care. Avant’s family declined to talk to the newspaper through their attorney. The incident that led to Avant’s death started Jan. 22 with him repeatedly kicking a glass window....."
The victim had been under the Department of Mental Health’s care for a dozen years and had Klinefelter syndrome — a rare chromosomal disorder linked with anxiety, depression, learning disabilities, and behavioral problems such as impulsivity, according to medical records obtained by the newspaper. Several Department of Health and Environmental Control employees were suspended and the agency was cited for regulatory violations, but no criminal charges were filed, documents obtained by the newspaper showed.
