Startling fact: You can get a free HIV test virtually anywhere in the United States.
Second startling fact: You're free to take gambles with your own life. You're not free to take gambles with the life of another, which is exactly what you're doing if you're having sexual intercourse with someone while you have an unknown HIV status.
But unknowingly doing so can still be a target for the bigots out there.
How do you "unknowingly" give someone HIV? It's the most studied disease of our times, the mechanisms of transmission are well known even to the layman, as are the risk factors. The best you can say for someone who unknowingly transmits the disease is that they were criminally negligent.
I don't engage in any high-risk behaviors, never have unprotected sex outside of long-term monogamous relationships, and I still get STD tests before starting new relationships. This isn't rocket science people.
There's a reason why the Manhattan Project needed Leslie Groves. Few people remember him today, but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that he was every bit as important to the success of that endeavor as the scientists. He was also the guy who supervised the construction of the Pentagon, completing it ahead of schedule and under budget.
Every successful US presidential assassination has resulted in the assassin's death:
Sure, after the fact, by the judicial system (except for Oswald).....
I was trying to dispel the notion that the USSS would shoot the person outright, if they had the ability to take him alive, not that they wouldn't be executed after the fact. Actually I hinted at that, Terra Haute is where the Federal death row is....
but legally the government outside the IRS isn't allowed to look at your tax returns
Unless you're buying health insurance in one of the new Obamacare exchanges. Or applying for a FHA mortgage. Or you happen to be the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. Your State Government can access it too, if they have an income tax and wish to match up your State return to the Federal one. The IRS also shares returns with SSA.
There's also a multitude of Federal and State agencies that can access your tax account, if not your actual returns. The Department of State will check with the IRS before they issue or renew a passport, for the purpose of collecting foreign income taxes and denying passports to serious tax scofflaws. Child support enforcement agencies can seize refunds, so they've got a mechanism of communication with the IRS too.
Too bad the ACA took a lot of it away, by telling people what kind of coverages they must have, because clearly 55 year old menopausal women need maternity coverage. Mandated coverages are the biggest thing driving the sticker shock that a lot of people are seeing right now, and it's only going to get worse.
Also nice that they outlawed a lot of traditional actuarial processes, like charging women more than men (hint: women use more healthcare, though I could get behind this if we apply the same concept to auto insurance), only allowing them to charge the elderly 3X more than the young even though they use many times that in coverage (and usually have more money than the young to foot the bills with....) and so on.
And there are plenty MORE stories about people getting screwed by insurance companies BEFORE the ACA. Even with the ACA, it's still the insurance companies screwing you.
Insurance companies were the problem, so we "fix" it by mandating that everybody do business with them? WTF?!
You just don't get it.... The biggest problem with our healthcare system is the cost, and the ACA did nothing whatsoever to address that. What good is universal coverage (which, FYI, the ACA doesn't provide) when healthcare costs are slowly bankrupting us? 21% of GDP and rising. There are a variety of reasons for this, few that can be boiled down to simple talking points, and the ACA did nothing to address them. Healthcare costs (by extension, health insurance costs) continue their endless upward march, consuming an ever larger slice of the national pie, while our body politic squabbles about stupid shit like mandatory contraceptive coverage, a non-issue (generic birth control pills: $30/mo, box of 12 condoms: $8.99 at the grocery store) except for those most partisan of asshats on both sides of the aisle.
Read this article, How American Health Care Killed My Father. It's old, but the trends that he talks about were not addressed by the ACA. These problems will remain regardless of the eventual success or failure of the ACA, and sooner or later they'll have to be addressed.
Stop boiling this issue down to talking points, it does both sides a disservice. In fact, a talking point ("If you like your health insurance you can keep it.") is precisely the reason why our fearless leader finds himself with a 39% approval rating.
There were a multitude of ways to get everybody insured that didn't require a 2,000 page Rube Goldberg piece of legislation. The goal of universal coverage is laudable. The ACA is anything but, and, incidentally, will still leave millions of people without insurance. For 2,000 pages and trillions of dollars I really had hoped for more than just nibbling around the edge of the problem.
Then again, with casual sex being as mainstream as McDonalds, finding clean donors will become the real challenge.
Casual sex isn't the problem, that would be unprotected casual sex. As with everything else, it comes down to risk management, not risk avoidance. The Red Cross asks a whole bunch of questions about your sex life during the intake exam, but whether or not you engage in casual sex is not one of them.
Find a lab that will let you lay down while they do the draw. You faint during the draw because of a drop in blood pressure, lying down will ensure that more blood remains in the brain when this happens, which will prevent (or at least postpone) fainting. Get a few successful draws under your belt and you might find that you don't have to keep laying down, since your body will have moved past the negative association.
YMMV, but it worked for me, I used to have the exact same problem and managed to conquer it to the point of becoming a regular blood donor. I could tell you some real good stories about passing out in hospitals though.:)
Stories abound of people who have lost under the ACA, some of whom have lost big. You don't need some random/. member to tell you his story when similar stories have aired on every major news network for the last few weeks. Here's one from PBS, a relatively unbiased source that few would claim was rooting for the failure of the ACA.
There must be a reason why such testing hasn't made its way to the local blood drive.... I'm guessing accuracy and/or cost? They have to collect an entire donation, ship it off to a processing center, then throw it away when it comes back HIV positive, plus track the donor down to inform them....
Do those tests have the same detection window as the lab tests? Maybe that's what's holding them back?
I imagine that Walgreens is going to run only a few tests - cholesterol, pregnancy, HIV antibody
HIV can be a gray area in a lot of jurisdictions. New York treats HIV tests differently than other tests, with mandated reporting of positive results to the Department of Health, plus extra privacy protections such that they aren't allowed to disclose the results via phone or mail. I'm not sure how that would jive with a program like this, or frankly that there's a need for it, since you can get a free HIV test almost anywhere in the United States if you know where you go.
The trick that I've found is to get the pinprick on the side of your finger. Makes it a lot more tolerable. Most of the people administering these tests realize that, though you're always apt to run into one that insists on doing it square in the middle of a pad for whatever reason. I'll usually just grin and bear that, though the one lady that failed to find a capillary (what were the odds of that?) and drew no blood managed to annoy me enough to protest her second attempt in the same location.
Not really. I've got this hang up about actually wanting to be a part of raising the children I'll (hopefully) one day father.
Besides, sperm donation doesn't exactly save lives, whereas blood donation does. Last Wednesday marked my 20th donation (2.5 gallons) and the second year in a row I managed to make six donations in a calendar year, the maximum allowed in the United States and Canada. Earlier in the year I even got a letter from the ARC saying that one of my donations had been transfused into two different patients somewhere out in Buffalo.
Do you know of a way to make that kind of a positive impact for less than an hour of your time?
I'm always a bit awed at the speed of the blood iron/hemoglobin pinprick test when I give blood. 15 seconds from pinprick to result. I guess that's the exception and not the rule where blood testing is concerned (something tells me the HIV/Hepatitis tests they run aren't nearly that fast), but it's still a neat little trick to marvel at.
Of course, that stupid little spring loaded thing freaks me out more than the 16 gauge IV they use for the actual donation, but that's probably a different conversation...... thank god I'm not diabetic.
The difference between Greenwald and Assange is the former isn't hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy, playing the victim card, because of charges that are entirely unrelated to the issue we're talking about. Frankly I think Assange is bad spokesman for journalism, given his character flaws and vendetta against the United States, but that's neither here nor there.
It does not mean that Journalists are not being prosecuted without hesitation
Name one journalist that has been criminally charged -- never mind convicted -- in the United States for the publication of classified material. Just one. I'll be waiting....
There were patches scattered throughout the Windows 2000 source code leak, all with comments along the lines of "Putting this in for the Office team". That was one of the big discussions around here back in the day when that story broke.
The GP is probably taking it to far saying they were doing it for deliberate competitive advantage -- all of the comments that I read sounded like standard bug-fixes -- but it's hard to dispute that Microsoft obviously has an advantage over Libre Office when trying to track down bugs in the O/S that cause problems with the office suite.
School bus drivers don't need to have their shit together?
Most drug tests don't detect intoxication. They detect the metabolites of drug use, which linger for a few hours (LSD) to a few weeks (THC) after use, depending on the drug in question and that particular person's metabolism. Frankly I don't care if the bus driver smoked a joint three days ago. I do care if he's under the influence at the moment he's driving the bus, but other than alcohol we never test for actual intoxication, just past use.
You're right of course, thanks for expanding on some of my thoughts. One thought:
On the other hand, there are pistol bullet designs that tend to fragment, such as the high-velocity low-weight 9x19mm loads (90/65/50 grain). They don't penetrate anywhere near as deep as your typical 9mm JHP bullet, but in many situations they do penetrate enough.
I wouldn't count on such a round for self-defense applications. The FBI protocol demands at least 12 inches of penetration in ballistics gel, to ensure the ability to reach the vital organs from most angles of entry. I doubt you can count on that with any pistol round that is designed to fragment, at least within the range of loadings that are suitable for self-defense (.500 S&W Magnum need not apply....)
For much the same reason, I'm extremely skeptical of the people (and there's a lot of them) that advocate the use of bird shot loads for home defense. There seems to be a theme on many of the gun forums, of people condemning buckshot because of "over-penetration" (while nobody ever condemns a 9x19 or.45 for the same thing, even though they'll both go through at least as much drywall as 00 buckshot), but penetration is kind of a requirement for firearms to do their job effectively. Nor do I understand the argument that you should make the "first one" birdshot, so they get a "fair warning", fairness being ill-advised when you're fighting your life, plus the fact that the legal system will draw no distinction between birds hot or buckshot when determining if the shoot was justified. You were either in risk of serious bodily injury and death or you weren't. If you were then why use bird shot? If you weren't, then you didn't have the right to shoot them with anything, be it rock salt, bird shot, or a.50 BMG....
Being shot in the heart does not instantly stop or kill you. You have at least 10-15 seconds of willful full-strength action remaining, even when the heart is completely destroyed, plus a few more seconds of extreme disorientation, then things finally go black and you pass out. You won't be running a marathon, but you've got plenty of energy and mental capacity left to keep shooting at someone, even after a direct hit to the heart.
The heart also has a fairly impressive ability to (temporarily) remain functional after penetrating trauma. The pericardium can fill with blood, exert pressure on the heart, and slow/stop the bleeding, at least in the short term. You're still dead without prompt medical attention, but you'll maintain control of your facilities long enough to do damage to those who wounded you.
In the firearms classes I've taken we've been taught to aim above the heart, at the so-called "cardiac triangle", roughly in the area of the first or second button on a collared shirt. The objective is to sever one of the arteries coming off the heart, not to hit the heart itself. Hit one of those arteries and the person's blood pressure will drop very rapidly, without any ability for the body to temporarily close the wound. Even at that, they've still got enough of an O2 reserve in the brain and skeletal muscles to keep fighting back for a few seconds, which is ample time to give you a mortal wound if they're armed with a firearm or knife.
Firearms aren't magical talismans, they work via effects that have studied for decades, and the notion of someone being dead before they hit the floor is largely a creation of the Hollywood. Even a direct hit the brain isn't a sure thing (Gabby Giffords and James Brady both survived CNS hits), the only thing that is would be a direct hit to the brain stem, and that's a very small target indeed.
The current legal argument says that you forfeited that protection when you voluntarily shared the data with a third party. You're not being compelled to be a witness against yourself, it's the phone company that's being compelled to be a witness against you. It's analogous to the way that you forfeit attorney-client privilege if a third party is in the room. If you tell your lawyer that you killed someone while a police officer is present, you didn't really have a reasonable expectation of that communication remaining private, did you? The same theory applies to spousal, clergy–penitent, and medical privilege too. Those privileges can only be claimed in the absence of a third party, otherwise it's plain as day that a reasonable person would have known they had no expectation of privacy.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the argument, just saying that it's the current and long-standing legal precedent. If you want to argue against it you're going to need more than the 4th Amendment, because the Courts have long held that the 4th doesn't apply to this particular circumstance. You shared the numbers you called with Verizon, not just those you communicated with. You know that Verizon uses that information for billing purposes, at the very least (never mind what they do with it for marketing purposes), and that all manner of Verizon employees can access it during the course of their duties, so what expectation of privacy did you really have?
Feinstein is a Senator, i.e., a Legislator, she doesn't get to interpret the law (a job for Local, State, and Federal Judges) nor decide who gets charged for breaking it (a job for Local, State, and Federal prosecutors). She does get a hand in writing the law, alongside 534 other Federal Legislators and countless State and Local ones.
I'll concur with you that it's a hard time to be a journalist in the United States, when contrasted to years past, but I'd still rather be a journalist here than almost anywhere else. The United States does not have a State Secrets Act like the United Kingdom. The only people who can be held to account for leaking classified information are those with security clearances who voluntarily accepted the obligation to keep that information under wraps. The rest of us (journalist and non-journalist alike) have no legal obligation to do so. If a CIA Officer knocks on your door tomorrow and hands you a hard drive full of classified information there's nothing in the legal system stopping you from sharing it with the world. You could be compelled to testify against him at his trial, and you might be compelled to turn over the actual hard drive as evidence, but you could not be punished for having looked at or shared the information that was given to you.
In any case, I don't really understand Assange's logic here. He professes to be afraid of extradition to the United States, but he was content to stay in a country with a much closer relationship to the United States than Sweden has, only seeking refuge when he exhausted the legal appeals that were keeping him out of Sweden. It's enough to make me wonder if the Swedish accusations have merit, particularly when you consider his personality (described as arrogant even by his colleagues and supporters) and the fact that many of us with 'Y' chromosomes tend not to think with our brains when it comes to matters in the bedroom. The people who support him should pause and think about the seriousness of those allegations, what he's accused of doing would be a crime in most jurisdictions (this isn't some charge that's unique to Swedish law), and even if you don't think it rises to the level of a criminal offense it's a damn shitty thing to do to someone.
He'd be doing himself and his movement a favor if he'd face the heat and clear this matter up, one way or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you get transfusions or donate blood, or did you do so before the tests improved?
How do you get HIV (or any other blood-borne disease) from donating blood?
Startling fact: You can get a free HIV test virtually anywhere in the United States.
Second startling fact: You're free to take gambles with your own life. You're not free to take gambles with the life of another, which is exactly what you're doing if you're having sexual intercourse with someone while you have an unknown HIV status.
But unknowingly doing so can still be a target for the bigots out there.
How do you "unknowingly" give someone HIV? It's the most studied disease of our times, the mechanisms of transmission are well known even to the layman, as are the risk factors. The best you can say for someone who unknowingly transmits the disease is that they were criminally negligent.
I don't engage in any high-risk behaviors, never have unprotected sex outside of long-term monogamous relationships, and I still get STD tests before starting new relationships. This isn't rocket science people.
There's a reason why the Manhattan Project needed Leslie Groves. Few people remember him today, but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that he was every bit as important to the success of that endeavor as the scientists. He was also the guy who supervised the construction of the Pentagon, completing it ahead of schedule and under budget.
Can you imagine what the comment threads would look like on more up-to-date forum software that allowed people to post photos?
Every successful US presidential assassination has resulted in the assassin's death:
Sure, after the fact, by the judicial system (except for Oswald).....
I was trying to dispel the notion that the USSS would shoot the person outright, if they had the ability to take him alive, not that they wouldn't be executed after the fact. Actually I hinted at that, Terra Haute is where the Federal death row is....
but legally the government outside the IRS isn't allowed to look at your tax returns
Unless you're buying health insurance in one of the new Obamacare exchanges. Or applying for a FHA mortgage. Or you happen to be the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. Your State Government can access it too, if they have an income tax and wish to match up your State return to the Federal one. The IRS also shares returns with SSA.
There's also a multitude of Federal and State agencies that can access your tax account, if not your actual returns. The Department of State will check with the IRS before they issue or renew a passport, for the purpose of collecting foreign income taxes and denying passports to serious tax scofflaws. Child support enforcement agencies can seize refunds, so they've got a mechanism of communication with the IRS too.
Choice is a wonderful thing.
Too bad the ACA took a lot of it away, by telling people what kind of coverages they must have, because clearly 55 year old menopausal women need maternity coverage. Mandated coverages are the biggest thing driving the sticker shock that a lot of people are seeing right now, and it's only going to get worse.
Also nice that they outlawed a lot of traditional actuarial processes, like charging women more than men (hint: women use more healthcare, though I could get behind this if we apply the same concept to auto insurance), only allowing them to charge the elderly 3X more than the young even though they use many times that in coverage (and usually have more money than the young to foot the bills with....) and so on.
And there are plenty MORE stories about people getting screwed by insurance companies BEFORE the ACA. Even with the ACA, it's still the insurance companies screwing you.
Insurance companies were the problem, so we "fix" it by mandating that everybody do business with them? WTF?!
You just don't get it.... The biggest problem with our healthcare system is the cost, and the ACA did nothing whatsoever to address that. What good is universal coverage (which, FYI, the ACA doesn't provide) when healthcare costs are slowly bankrupting us? 21% of GDP and rising. There are a variety of reasons for this, few that can be boiled down to simple talking points, and the ACA did nothing to address them. Healthcare costs (by extension, health insurance costs) continue their endless upward march, consuming an ever larger slice of the national pie, while our body politic squabbles about stupid shit like mandatory contraceptive coverage, a non-issue (generic birth control pills: $30/mo, box of 12 condoms: $8.99 at the grocery store) except for those most partisan of asshats on both sides of the aisle.
Read this article, How American Health Care Killed My Father. It's old, but the trends that he talks about were not addressed by the ACA. These problems will remain regardless of the eventual success or failure of the ACA, and sooner or later they'll have to be addressed.
Now they can't do that.
Stop boiling this issue down to talking points, it does both sides a disservice. In fact, a talking point ("If you like your health insurance you can keep it.") is precisely the reason why our fearless leader finds himself with a 39% approval rating.
There were a multitude of ways to get everybody insured that didn't require a 2,000 page Rube Goldberg piece of legislation. The goal of universal coverage is laudable. The ACA is anything but, and, incidentally, will still leave millions of people without insurance. For 2,000 pages and trillions of dollars I really had hoped for more than just nibbling around the edge of the problem.
Then again, with casual sex being as mainstream as McDonalds, finding clean donors will become the real challenge.
Casual sex isn't the problem, that would be unprotected casual sex. As with everything else, it comes down to risk management, not risk avoidance. The Red Cross asks a whole bunch of questions about your sex life during the intake exam, but whether or not you engage in casual sex is not one of them.
Find a lab that will let you lay down while they do the draw. You faint during the draw because of a drop in blood pressure, lying down will ensure that more blood remains in the brain when this happens, which will prevent (or at least postpone) fainting. Get a few successful draws under your belt and you might find that you don't have to keep laying down, since your body will have moved past the negative association.
YMMV, but it worked for me, I used to have the exact same problem and managed to conquer it to the point of becoming a regular blood donor. I could tell you some real good stories about passing out in hospitals though. :)
If not, pony up some details.
Stories abound of people who have lost under the ACA, some of whom have lost big. You don't need some random /. member to tell you his story when similar stories have aired on every major news network for the last few weeks. Here's one from PBS, a relatively unbiased source that few would claim was rooting for the failure of the ACA.
There must be a reason why such testing hasn't made its way to the local blood drive.... I'm guessing accuracy and/or cost? They have to collect an entire donation, ship it off to a processing center, then throw it away when it comes back HIV positive, plus track the donor down to inform them....
Do those tests have the same detection window as the lab tests? Maybe that's what's holding them back?
I imagine that Walgreens is going to run only a few tests - cholesterol, pregnancy, HIV antibody
HIV can be a gray area in a lot of jurisdictions. New York treats HIV tests differently than other tests, with mandated reporting of positive results to the Department of Health, plus extra privacy protections such that they aren't allowed to disclose the results via phone or mail. I'm not sure how that would jive with a program like this, or frankly that there's a need for it, since you can get a free HIV test almost anywhere in the United States if you know where you go.
The trick that I've found is to get the pinprick on the side of your finger. Makes it a lot more tolerable. Most of the people administering these tests realize that, though you're always apt to run into one that insists on doing it square in the middle of a pad for whatever reason. I'll usually just grin and bear that, though the one lady that failed to find a capillary (what were the odds of that?) and drew no blood managed to annoy me enough to protest her second attempt in the same location.
Not really. I've got this hang up about actually wanting to be a part of raising the children I'll (hopefully) one day father.
Besides, sperm donation doesn't exactly save lives, whereas blood donation does. Last Wednesday marked my 20th donation (2.5 gallons) and the second year in a row I managed to make six donations in a calendar year, the maximum allowed in the United States and Canada. Earlier in the year I even got a letter from the ARC saying that one of my donations had been transfused into two different patients somewhere out in Buffalo.
Do you know of a way to make that kind of a positive impact for less than an hour of your time?
I'm always a bit awed at the speed of the blood iron/hemoglobin pinprick test when I give blood. 15 seconds from pinprick to result. I guess that's the exception and not the rule where blood testing is concerned (something tells me the HIV/Hepatitis tests they run aren't nearly that fast), but it's still a neat little trick to marvel at.
Of course, that stupid little spring loaded thing freaks me out more than the 16 gauge IV they use for the actual donation, but that's probably a different conversation...... thank god I'm not diabetic.
The difference between Greenwald and Assange is the former isn't hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy, playing the victim card, because of charges that are entirely unrelated to the issue we're talking about. Frankly I think Assange is bad spokesman for journalism, given his character flaws and vendetta against the United States, but that's neither here nor there.
It does not mean that Journalists are not being prosecuted without hesitation
Name one journalist that has been criminally charged -- never mind convicted -- in the United States for the publication of classified material. Just one. I'll be waiting....
There were patches scattered throughout the Windows 2000 source code leak, all with comments along the lines of "Putting this in for the Office team". That was one of the big discussions around here back in the day when that story broke.
The GP is probably taking it to far saying they were doing it for deliberate competitive advantage -- all of the comments that I read sounded like standard bug-fixes -- but it's hard to dispute that Microsoft obviously has an advantage over Libre Office when trying to track down bugs in the O/S that cause problems with the office suite.
School bus drivers don't need to have their shit together?
Most drug tests don't detect intoxication. They detect the metabolites of drug use, which linger for a few hours (LSD) to a few weeks (THC) after use, depending on the drug in question and that particular person's metabolism. Frankly I don't care if the bus driver smoked a joint three days ago. I do care if he's under the influence at the moment he's driving the bus, but other than alcohol we never test for actual intoxication, just past use.
You're right of course, thanks for expanding on some of my thoughts. One thought:
On the other hand, there are pistol bullet designs that tend to fragment, such as the high-velocity low-weight 9x19mm loads (90/65/50 grain). They don't penetrate anywhere near as deep as your typical 9mm JHP bullet, but in many situations they do penetrate enough.
I wouldn't count on such a round for self-defense applications. The FBI protocol demands at least 12 inches of penetration in ballistics gel, to ensure the ability to reach the vital organs from most angles of entry. I doubt you can count on that with any pistol round that is designed to fragment, at least within the range of loadings that are suitable for self-defense (.500 S&W Magnum need not apply....)
For much the same reason, I'm extremely skeptical of the people (and there's a lot of them) that advocate the use of bird shot loads for home defense. There seems to be a theme on many of the gun forums, of people condemning buckshot because of "over-penetration" (while nobody ever condemns a 9x19 or .45 for the same thing, even though they'll both go through at least as much drywall as 00 buckshot), but penetration is kind of a requirement for firearms to do their job effectively. Nor do I understand the argument that you should make the "first one" birdshot, so they get a "fair warning", fairness being ill-advised when you're fighting your life, plus the fact that the legal system will draw no distinction between birds hot or buckshot when determining if the shoot was justified. You were either in risk of serious bodily injury and death or you weren't. If you were then why use bird shot? If you weren't, then you didn't have the right to shoot them with anything, be it rock salt, bird shot, or a .50 BMG....
Being shot in the heart does not instantly stop or kill you. You have at least 10-15 seconds of willful full-strength action remaining, even when the heart is completely destroyed, plus a few more seconds of extreme disorientation, then things finally go black and you pass out. You won't be running a marathon, but you've got plenty of energy and mental capacity left to keep shooting at someone, even after a direct hit to the heart.
The heart also has a fairly impressive ability to (temporarily) remain functional after penetrating trauma. The pericardium can fill with blood, exert pressure on the heart, and slow/stop the bleeding, at least in the short term. You're still dead without prompt medical attention, but you'll maintain control of your facilities long enough to do damage to those who wounded you.
In the firearms classes I've taken we've been taught to aim above the heart, at the so-called "cardiac triangle", roughly in the area of the first or second button on a collared shirt. The objective is to sever one of the arteries coming off the heart, not to hit the heart itself. Hit one of those arteries and the person's blood pressure will drop very rapidly, without any ability for the body to temporarily close the wound. Even at that, they've still got enough of an O2 reserve in the brain and skeletal muscles to keep fighting back for a few seconds, which is ample time to give you a mortal wound if they're armed with a firearm or knife.
Firearms aren't magical talismans, they work via effects that have studied for decades, and the notion of someone being dead before they hit the floor is largely a creation of the Hollywood. Even a direct hit the brain isn't a sure thing (Gabby Giffords and James Brady both survived CNS hits), the only thing that is would be a direct hit to the brain stem, and that's a very small target indeed.
The current legal argument says that you forfeited that protection when you voluntarily shared the data with a third party. You're not being compelled to be a witness against yourself, it's the phone company that's being compelled to be a witness against you. It's analogous to the way that you forfeit attorney-client privilege if a third party is in the room. If you tell your lawyer that you killed someone while a police officer is present, you didn't really have a reasonable expectation of that communication remaining private, did you? The same theory applies to spousal, clergy–penitent, and medical privilege too. Those privileges can only be claimed in the absence of a third party, otherwise it's plain as day that a reasonable person would have known they had no expectation of privacy.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the argument, just saying that it's the current and long-standing legal precedent. If you want to argue against it you're going to need more than the 4th Amendment, because the Courts have long held that the 4th doesn't apply to this particular circumstance. You shared the numbers you called with Verizon, not just those you communicated with. You know that Verizon uses that information for billing purposes, at the very least (never mind what they do with it for marketing purposes), and that all manner of Verizon employees can access it during the course of their duties, so what expectation of privacy did you really have?
Feinstein is a Senator, i.e., a Legislator, she doesn't get to interpret the law (a job for Local, State, and Federal Judges) nor decide who gets charged for breaking it (a job for Local, State, and Federal prosecutors). She does get a hand in writing the law, alongside 534 other Federal Legislators and countless State and Local ones.
I'll concur with you that it's a hard time to be a journalist in the United States, when contrasted to years past, but I'd still rather be a journalist here than almost anywhere else. The United States does not have a State Secrets Act like the United Kingdom. The only people who can be held to account for leaking classified information are those with security clearances who voluntarily accepted the obligation to keep that information under wraps. The rest of us (journalist and non-journalist alike) have no legal obligation to do so. If a CIA Officer knocks on your door tomorrow and hands you a hard drive full of classified information there's nothing in the legal system stopping you from sharing it with the world. You could be compelled to testify against him at his trial, and you might be compelled to turn over the actual hard drive as evidence, but you could not be punished for having looked at or shared the information that was given to you.
In any case, I don't really understand Assange's logic here. He professes to be afraid of extradition to the United States, but he was content to stay in a country with a much closer relationship to the United States than Sweden has, only seeking refuge when he exhausted the legal appeals that were keeping him out of Sweden. It's enough to make me wonder if the Swedish accusations have merit, particularly when you consider his personality (described as arrogant even by his colleagues and supporters) and the fact that many of us with 'Y' chromosomes tend not to think with our brains when it comes to matters in the bedroom. The people who support him should pause and think about the seriousness of those allegations, what he's accused of doing would be a crime in most jurisdictions (this isn't some charge that's unique to Swedish law), and even if you don't think it rises to the level of a criminal offense it's a damn shitty thing to do to someone.
He'd be doing himself and his movement a favor if he'd face the heat and clear this matter up, one way or the other.