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Most honest historians believe America's best known dissident intellectual, Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus of MIT, who has said over and over again, that all the US presidents after FDR would have been hanged if tried under the same Nuremberg Principles of International Law Nazi leaders were tried under.

Obama dropped 200,000 bombs killing and maiming tens of thousands of women and children, bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital and sent gunners in to kill the fleeing nurses and patients. Why isn't he on trial for war crimes at The Hague?

http://www.msf.org/kunduz-hospital-attack

The attacks took place despite the fact that MSF had provided the GPS coordinates of the trauma hospital to the US Department of Defense, Afghan Ministry of Interior and Defense and US Army in Kabul as recently as Tuesday, 29 September. The attack continued for more than 30 minutes after we first informed Resolute Support and US military officials in Kabul and Washington that it was a hospital being hit.

Obama bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital and sent gunners in to kill the fleeing nurses and patients. Check their own website here.

"The attacks took place despite the fact that MSF had provided the GPS coordinates of the trauma hospital to the US Department of Defense, Afghan Ministry of Interior and Defense and US Army in Kabul as recently as Tuesday, 29 September. The attack continued for more than 30 minutes after we first informed Resolute Support and US military officials in Kabul and Washington that it was a hospital being hit."

This was one of the most shocking moments of the 21st Century. You will notice during Obama's last term he would often not be greeted by a senior delegation when visiting foreign countries, this was due to the hospital bombing. Oh, did your news not tell you that? Huh, I wonder why.

As for the deep state, although there's no precise or scientific definition, generally refers to the agencies in Washington that are permanent power factions. They stay and exercise power even as presidents who are elected come and go. They typically exercise their power in secret, in the dark, and so they're barely subject to democratic accountability, if they're subject to it at all. It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads. Remember Salvador Allende being overthrown and replace with a dictator? That was the deep state. Don't believe me? View this article in the house organ of the deep state, the Washington Post, in which the deep state is praised as a savior.

Before this harebrained and reckless administration is history, the nation will have cause to celebrate the public servants derided by Trumpists as the supposed âoedeep state.â

The term itself is propaganda, intended to cast a sinister light upon men and women whom Trump and his minions find annoyingly knowledgeable and experienced. They are not participants in any kind of dark conspiracy. Rather, they are feared and loathed by the president and his wrecking crew of know-nothings because they have spent years - often decades - mastering the details of foreign and domestic policy.

God bless them. With a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss.

A foreign policy establishment that serves its own goals instead of obeying the elected government. That's the definition of "deep state".

killing 63 patients

Hyperbole. Lots of people died, but even the operator of the hospital lists it as "at least 30 people" including 10 patients. Source: http://www.msf.org/topics/kund...

Hello,

Thanks for your comments. I'm the guy quoted in the article, and you're right that in some cases (e.g., Gaza), a political solution would de-necessitate a cheap and readily printable stethoscope. However, The Gaza strip is blockaded. While in theory medical equipment should be allowed in according to this partial (if old) list from Gisha, you can see from various reports (e.g., this one from MSF that in practice medical equipment and supplies are very, very short. My personal experience on the ground validates this. Even those who are in favour of the continued blockade don't argue the shortages, only the reasons why.

So, for Gaza, get this one out of your head. There is no supply truck coming. No shipment docking. No airlift. If the Gazans want stethoscopes and don't want to spend a month's salary on it, they have to make it. In other parts of the world, it's a strictly financial proposition: Want a high quality, validated stethoscope? You gotta pay a month (or more) of salary. Very few can afford to do that, and so the crappy stethoscopes come into play.

It's also obvious to me that you've never needed to use a stethoscope. I have yet to hear a cheap stethoscope that sounds as good as a Littmann cardiology III (the gold standard) - except for ours. Don't believe me? The testing regimen is indeed simple and well-documented in the literature. Go ahead and test it and publish your results.

Re: Pulse oximetry, our design will be clinical grade and will be able to do O2, carboxyhemoglobin and methemoglobin. Trust me when I tell you that doing that for under $100 is impressive. Ours will be about $15 with a display, and less without. The ECG is similarly engineered to a high standard and will be comparable with the $5k models in terms of parts and sensitivities.

Here we've found a way to make this gourmet item for cheaper in a decentralized way and lose nothing in terms of quality. You're asking why don't they just get some pop-tarts and be done with it. No thank you: Not good enough for my patients.

tarek : )

They're effective, efficient (per dollar), and badly needed. I spent some time looking for something I could be comfortable donating to monthly, and this is the one I concentrated all my charitable donations to (aside from my own volunteering in an unrelated area). http://www.msf.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Airlines are perfectly willing to charter planes to people who don't have their own.

You seem to be overestimating the scale of the operation.

MSF currently have 270 "international" staff members in the field. They do 4-6 week assignments.

Chartering whole planes would be ridiculous.

http://www.msf.org/article/ebola-quarantine-can-undermine-efforts-curb-epidemic

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), an organization known for both efficiency and heroism. They provide medical care where it is badly needed, including war zones.

Donate and Help the Médecins Sans Frontières International MSF
http://www.msf.org/msfinternational/donations/
Or Unicef, so many children need help at this moment... So many are either alone or hurt.
http://www.supportunicef.org/site/pp.asp?c=9fLEJSOALpE&b=1023561

How generous. As I really won't need Helvetica privately and have licensed access to it at work, please choose a charitable organization of your liking, maybe the FSF, Debian, or Médecins Sans Frontières :)

Apparently you and the AC below you have still managed to miss the fact that he's IN! AFRICA!

This is a doctor doing aid work in a third world WAR ZONE, at a hospital less than 20 miles from the border with Rwanda. This is volunteerism; he doesn't even have sufficient *blood* to do the surgery safely, much less someone to reimburse him for what might end up as a several hundred dollar phone bill. You work with the tools you have, and the fact that he was able to pull this off given the resource and budget constraints that were put on him is something to be commended.

Commended. Not denigrated by some privileged jackass who has NO FREAKING CLUE what the world is like outside of his wealthy Western lifestyle and doesn't know (or probably even care) what kind of resources these doctors are working with. This guy takes a month off each year to go work for FREE to save lives, working 24-hour trauma shifts, and you gripe him out because his method of checking with his colleagues isn't high class enough for you -- because he isn't emptying his pocket fast enough.

You make me sick.

With all due respect, you are comparing a few exceptional people from the 18th century, who have withstood the test of time, to the commoners of today. Better choose a few more modern heroes on either side of the Atlantic. My favourite current Frenchman is Dr. Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medecins sans Frontieres (doctors without borders). He is a socialist (ok), but he is right now the health minister of France, the equivalent to the surgeon general, in a right-wing government ! It is as if GWB had employed Al Gore to be his environment deputy. His aura is huge.

organizations exist

always have, always will

therefore, the solution to the abuses you (rightfully) see involves working through organizations, tweaking them, not working against them, destroying them

because you can never destroy them

do you understand that?

furthermore, no organization can be 100% ethical. all you can do is CONSTANTLY work with them to make them as ethical as possible

"I presented an argument that basically stated that organizations are inherently amoral and if they are amoral, they cannot be a force to enculcate morality - as you suggest."

let me be clear: organizations will never be 100% ethical. but with hard, constant work, by people with your heart, but a better mind, they can function at 70-90%

as for "I presented an argument that basically stated that organizations are inherently amoral" is such low iq teenaged nihilistic emo bullshit, it is beneath my ability to stomach the hand holding intellectual charity work to show you that you are wrong. you're wrong, you simply are. that i am not defending that statement is not because i don't have a defense for that statement, btu that i don't have the desire to engage in the intellectual chairty work required for you to understand the fucking obvious

but i'll throw you a bone:

http://www.msf.org/

so, figure it out yourself

or remain a useless emo retard ;-)

xoxoxoxoxoxoxox

Although you are right that only half the money collected for tickets is used for prize money, the other half, as well as any unclaimed portions of prize money, go to support charities like Save the Children, Medicins Sans Frontieres and World Wildlife Fund.

You don't really know what a true Jack of All Trades is, if you think there is one for IT. IT is only one trade.

In the IT world, the job title with a wide range of IT skills as you described is called a Systems Administrator. If you have some networking and telecoms experience on top of that, you can call yourself a Network Administrator. This is what corporations, large and small, hire. When larger companies need a specialist to perform a highly complicated job, say setting up a new windoze AD domain, they find someone who can do that job internally and task them with it. Small shops have JoATs out of necessity, but there is no real job growth, adventure, or chance to make it big. Your best bet is to network and find some startup with potential, as everyone at the startup will be performing every necessary job because they can't afford specialists.

I've met some Jacks of All Trades in my life, and they had one thing in common, they were willing to work in remote locations and they had one extremely valuable skill on top of the breadth of other skills. Ex-military for the most part, having learned a few extreme skills during their hitch, then combining those skills with many others. Deep sea underwater construction, land mine clearance, petroleum exploration, or supporting relief missions in trouble spots.

For a true Jack, IT (all of IT combined) is just one trade. Everything from compiling kernels, rebuilding power supplies, setting up satellite communication networks, fixing email servers, twiddling databases, configuring routers are all rolled up as just a single skill, a bullet point in a long list of other trades. When they are in a remote location and faced with technical problems, they overcome and move on. No corporation with an IT department ever needs someone like that.

In addition to IT skills, add to that a whole bunch of real world skills.

Be a pilot, able to fly both fixed and rotary wing craft. Be able to file international flight plans, deal with airport and fueling fees, and negotiate customs at airports. Many organisations want aircraft repair skills as well, for jobs far from civilization.

Drive a truck, one of the big ones for hauling 40 tonnes of goods, and the ability to get the truck across national borders. Diesel repair skills go along with that.

Welding seems to be a necessary skill for every JoAT I've met, along with some basic metalworking, carpentry, and electrical. 19" racks may be plentiful and in good repair in data centres where you work, but in the field you probably have to lash up a rack and cooling systems from the materials at hand.

Press relations, diplomacy, accounting, and a whole host of other trades that will allow you to work autonomously are necessary.

On top of all these other skills, every Jack I've ever known (and a few Jills), had one extreme specialisation. Doctors and nurses, ordinance disposal, undersea welding; each one required a tremendous amount of specialised learning, usually at the beginning of their career. They then added onto that base many other skills necessary for jobs that take them far from cubicle farms and obnoxious managers.

The myth of a Jack of All Trades also being limited to Master of None possibly stems from some hack Sci-Fi writer in the early 1980s, and just doesn't exist. If you don't have one skill completely in depth, abandon any hope of ever being hired for your breadth of skills.

If you want a job where your JoAT skills can help, you have to move completely outside of corporate IT life. Look at Medecins Sans Frontiers for an idea of what a real life JoAT needs to know. They often need support personnel for their medical missions, volunteers with a stipend. They won't even consider you without IT skills, radio communications, truck driving, repair of medical equipment, multiple languages, and a knowledge of security in hostile environments. You can learn some of it as you grow into the role, every ex-MSFer I've known swears it was

what do you think the ratio of new drug research is to profits? For a major drug company? Conversely, what do you think the ratio of marketing vs profits? Got a clue? No? Feel free to go do a little googling.

Here are the Financial Highlights from the annual reports of Novartis, Pfizer and AstraZeneca. They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing and profits.

So the standard argument for granting patent monopolies and allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for the patented drugs - that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs - is simply not true.

The organization Doctors Without Borders gives an example of how pharmaceutical patents affect prices i a recent press release:

The case of AIDS illustrates the trend. While fierce generic competition has helped prices for first-line AIDS drug regimen to fall by 99% from $10,000 to roughly $130 per patient per year since 2000, prices for second-line drugs - which patients need as resistance develops naturally - remain high due to increased patent barriers in key generics producing countries like India.

To the western world, pharmaceutical patents mean an enormous waste of money. In the third world, it's lives that are wasted instead. It's time to think about an alternative.

And alternatives exist - plenty of them, in fact. Nobel prize winner Joseph E Stiglitz has made one proposal. The Swedish Pirate Party has made another (or essentially the same, actually). Economist Dean Baker has collected four others, that also run along the same lines.

It's time to open up a global discussion about the effects of pharmaceutical patents, and the alternatives. Today's system is not only grossly immoral, it is also expensive and wasteful. It's time for a better way. Pharmaceutical patents kill.

For example, in a recent press release they write:

The case of AIDS illustrates the trend. While fierce generic competition has helped prices for first-line AIDS drug regimen to fall by 99% from $10,000 to roughly $130 per patient per year since 2000, prices for second-line drugs - which patients need as resistance develops naturally - remain high due to increased patent barriers in key generics producing countries like India.

The standard argument for allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for patented drugs, is that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs. But that is not true.

We can look at the numbers for Novartis, Pfizer or AstraZeneca.

They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing an profits.

So there are clearly better ways to finance drug research than to hand out patent monopolies to the big pharma companies, and hope that they will spend the money they make on research. Because clearly, they don't.

The Swedish Pirate Party has one proposal for an alternative system. Many others have suggested other alternatives.

But at least it is time for us to start discussing the problem in earnest. Today's situation is expensive, wasteful and completely immoral. There must be a better way.

25 million dollars given to http://www.msf.org/ would have been much better spent than satisfying her own bloody ego. I have no idea if she donates regularly to some charity. Kudos to her if she does, but this is one of the biggest display of selfish behaviour I ever witnessed (along with all the others that preceeded her).

As an alternate, I also suggest Doctors Without Borders, or in 'Internationale', Medicins Sans Frontiers. A lot of doctors and nurses from here (Houston) are members of this wonderful organization.

http://www.msf.org/ Nobel peace prize winners helping african orphans, how much better can it get?

Think about how many Africans will die (malnourishment, diseases) because you use your "charity" budget on stuff that makes your life better.

Think about exactly why you would be outraged if millions of people died of hunger or cold (think Pakistan) in your country, yet this is not such a big deal if it happens far enough away.

Think about how much suffering could be prevented if you gave 10% of your income, how little suffering that would cause you, and why you (like most people) consider it okay to give much less than that.

International Red Cross
Médécins sans frontières
UN World Food Programme

..but I can't help but think that maybe the money should be split up and be given to other organisations aswell. For example 100.000$ to the MSF ( http://www.msf.org/ ) would SAVE allot of people from death. After a certain amount , around 200.000$ , you really need some people with experience organizing when and to whom the money should go. Dumping 500.000$ at once at an organisation that is not used to handling that kind of money isn't efficient .

  Don't get me wrong I admire the PA guys for doing this , I just think that if this turns out to be such a big thing every year , they should change their "model" a bit.

  Anyway a big bravo to everyone involved in this!

There are children starving because of me. Dying. Seriously. I either have to not think, be okay with that, or go insane. I'm wavering between the first two.

Then I'm glad to offer you a way out: You could support: Oxfam, or Save the Children, or Medecins Sans Frontiers, or any of countless others.

Seriously, $10.00 can buy the antibiotics to save someone's life in for example, Bangledesh. Give that once a month and at the end of the year think to yourself there are twelve people alive because of you.

Sure, I'm preaching, but don't pretend there's nothing you can do. :)

Yup, Médecins Sans Frontières are at the top of my donations list. Mainly because they go to all the places no-one else wants to go, and do the crap work that no-one else wants to do.

"Doctors without borders" are correctly called by their French name "Medecins Sans Frontieres".

Their site is here

if we are not the primary reservoir of the disease, then it probably doesn't spread that easily among humans

We are not the primary reservoir of influenza. Or bubonic plague. Contrary to your statement, ebola is highly contagious. An antibiotic-resistant strain of bubonic plague would also be quite nasty. Mortality from bubonic plague is 50-90%

In any case, there is currently no known natural disease that would be capable of eradicating the majority of the population around the globe. Smallpox probably comes closest, but even it is "only" 30% fatal and we have known preventative measures.

I don't get your point. Are you saying that this makes natural diseases such as ebola, anthrax, and bubonic plague not a concern as bioterror weapons? From all accounts, previous pandemics of these diseases were pretty terrifying. Are or you suggesting that transgenic diseases are likely to have this property? This is far less likely than the accidental evolution of an epidemic disease. Expecting some protein from a different species to create a disease capable of wiping out the majority of the population is a bit like imagining that taking the carburetor of a Toyota and bolting it under the hood of a Ford will create a car capable of winning the Le Mans. The real threat of natural diseases is their genetic diversity. Even though the chances of any one mutant or hybrid having properties of high infectivity and mortality, natural diseases will have millions of variants, and the most infectious will propagate. A transgenic variant created by man would not have this property. People have been incorporating foreign genes into bacteria for decades. It is not a high containment activity. There is not a single known case of accidental creation of a dangerous disease.

And what's the harm of being careful? It doesn't take a lot of effort to destroy waste from biologial research.

There is no harm in being careful. But an exaggerated notion of risk is an impediment to progress. There is certainly some risk that the green stuff in the back of your refrigerator could create a global epidemic, but we don't call out the CDC to clean out refrigerators.

While creating antibiotics resistant bacteria is not nice, it is not a huge threat--even if we didn't have antibiotics at all, we'd be back in the 19th century; medically unpleasant, but not incompatible with civilized life.

I suggest that you read up on the Black Death. I'd say that "unpleasant" is a bit of an understatement.

you implicitly assume that the old techniques, selection, breeding, mutagenesis, etc., are "OK" and proven harmless because people have been using them for so long.

On the contrary, my point is as far as bioterror/biowarfare are concerned, these techniques are the greatest threat: they are easy, low tech, and have been proved to work.

Furthermore, we already know that the association with domesticated animals and the creation of new kinds of plants has had serious medical and environmental consequences.

However these are breeds that have experienced many generations of selection for health and survival, taking advantage of the genetic variability of natural populations. The ecological hazards of laboratory created species--genetically identical, not optimized for the presence of a foreign gene--are certain to be much less than the hazards posed by domesticated or geographically transposed natural species.

Yes, quite right: transgenic technology is a shortcut. It's a shortcut to let humans make things happen within a span of a few years that might otherwise take millions or even hundreds of millions of years to happen in the normal course of evolution, or even through directed breeding.

Or, when talking about short generation microorganisms, a few months.

Many companies have measures in place to guard against just such a hostile takeover, though I don't know about SCO specifically. Also, note that once everyone starts buying SCO stock, its share price (and thus the amount necessary to gain a controlling stake) will start to rise.

It would be a far better use of time and money, if you ask me, to sell SCOX short and donate your profits, once the SCO lawsuit implodes, to the EFF or some other worthy cause.

MSF is French and stands for Médecins Sans Frontières.

Go to MSF.org for more information.

... the only problem is that ThinkCycle has been implemented already in a more effective manner: it's called volunteerism. No, it dosen't have fancy buzzwords like "distributed brainpower" or "open-source", but it has already proven it's success for centuries across many continents. People have been part of "distributed efforts" working on some of the world's larger problems by volunteering internationally, for the United Nations, or in their own communities. I have to say that Thinkcycle has their hearts in the right place, but good people with expertise have already thought of a more effective, old-fashioned implementation. Want global interconnectivity for using spare brain-cycles of professionals on far-away problems? Medecins Sans Frontières and Engineers Without Borders have been consulting like this for years with amazing technologies such as the 'telephone' and through 'mail' and even on the 'internet'

My God, that's pathetic.

First of all, I can think of few employers that wouldn't let you take a year off for something like that. Personally, I've never had problems getting extended leaves even for entirely hedonistic pursuits such as long-term travel - even when working for the government.

Secondly, you really think it's all "out of work hippies" donating time? Ever heard of United Nations Volunteers? Medecins Sans Frontieres? These organizations bring some of the world's most capable and accomplished people out into the field to do constructive, beneficial work.

If you really can't see past the short-term minutiae of buzzword retraining in the face of proven opportunities to make a real difference in the world, you are doomed to a shallow and useless life.

My country is under siege! Help us stop them !! It will affect you, as well.

There are a number of groups working against government terrorism and torture and trying to stop the damage from wars.
Medecins sans Frontieres, aka Doctors Without Borders" is an international medical relief group. The Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines is a related organization.