Uh, no, it's not, which is why I used the phrase "valid exceptions". I have yet to see anyone argue that people who are legitimately allergic to the vaccines and/or immune compromised should be forced to take something that is very likely to cause harm. What we're against is allowing just anyone to opt out (and risk becoming a disease vector) because they heard on TV that vaccination might give their child autism.
To give more perspective, the last time I checked, the entire federal budget for non-NASA basic scientific research (including cancer, infectious diseases, clean energy, etc.) didn't even come to that much.
governments health agencies don't do their jobs in proper science or oversight
Government health agencies like the FDA have a very difficult job. For every person complaining that they're in bed with industry and allow dangerous medications to kill people, there's someone else - usually either a "patient's rights" advocate or an especially dogmatic libertarian - complaining that they're withholding lifesaving medications and therefore killing people. It's also extremely difficult to identify every possible side effect from relatively limited clinical trials. From my perspective - as a scientist who is sympathetic to libertarian ideals, but also a realist - the FDA does about as well as can be expected most of the time. But they're never going to make every call correctly.
But just make vaccinations mandatory. Simple as that. No more BS opting out on religious grounds, no more opting out because Jenny said not to, no more trusting in herd immunity while actively undermining it. Get your kids vaccinated, period, end of story; don't like it, too bad.
There will always be valid exceptions. Some people (immune-compromised, usually) simply can't handle vaccination - it really would kill them. This is a recognized problem for which there is no solution. And which vaccines should be required? I happen to think that immunization against HPV is a good idea, but you can't get HPV because the kid next to you didn't cover his mouth when he sneezed.
There is historical precedent for your proposal, however: this is what was done with smallpox, which is why no one has caught smallpox since before I was born. But smallpox makes measles look like a mild cold in comparison.
What tax bracket were you in 2012? Did you pay 20%? 25%? Maybe 33%? Google pays 14%. . . Has it occurred to you that those kids (along with others all over the country that Google will not be helping) might not be so poor if the government services set up to help them had not gone unfunded due of lack of tax revenue?
Google employees, however, generally have to pay the same tax rate that the rest of us do (excluding capital gains from stock holdings, but most of them will get the vast majority of their income from their salary). And if they're living in the city (and spending in the city), that will increase SF's tax revenue.
First off, the most environmentally sound solution would be for these tech workers to live in the suburbs to begin with. The jobs themselves are in the suburbs, and the workers are commuting from the city to the suburbs simply because it's hip and trendy to (be able to afford to) live in San Francisco proper.
And because the suburbs artificially restrict the housing supply (just as SF does, to be fair). As someone who lives near both Silicon Valley and SF, I'd much rather live in the latter myself if the rent wasn't hopelessly out of reach. It has nothing to do with being hip or trendy, because I will never be anything other than a hopeless dork; I simply like the city better.
I would very much like to see the city change the laws so that Google pays for its use of public bus stops,
Google is paying for its use of the public bus stops, after enough people complained. But I believe there's a statutory cap on how much they can be made to pay - the city can't arbitrarily make Google buy a puppy for every SF resident each time they use a Muni stop.
Czechoslovakia's strong production was providing a great deal of war supplies to the Germany (one in three panzers were produced there)
There was no "Czechoslovakia" any more by the time the war actually started - the Czech half of the country had been invaded by Germany (with Slovakia left as a puppet state). You're blaming the victim here.
It's easy -- because in many ways "science" has become a religion to many. However, many people lack a firm understanding of scientific principles and methods. So, if something looks "science-y" with Latin words, molecular drawings and other intelligent-sounding but hard-to-understand descriptions.
Hmmm, I don't think the attraction to homeopathy has anything to do with an affinity towards science, since scientists and doctors are in nearly universal agreement that homeopathy is complete nonsense. If anything, the people who practice homeopathy are suspicious of modern (Western) medical science and scientists, which is why debates over this issue, or vaccines, or EM radiation, quickly devolve into accusations of complicity with the evil Big Pharma and reminders of thalidomide, etc. Basic laws of physics and scientific principles like double-blind placebo-controlled trials are sneered at. It's really difficult as a scientist in a notoriously left-wing part of the country, because I see this all the time, but on the other hand, I don't have sanctimonious busybodies offering to pray for my soul either.
This leads to a two-class system where the scientists that collect the data (and understand the techniques and limitations) are treated as technicians while those that perform high-level analysis of others' results get the publications.
Maybe in some fields, but in genomics and molecular biology, the result tends to be exactly the opposite: the experimentalists (and their collaborators) get top-tier publications, while the unaffiliated bioinformaticists mostly publish in specialty journals.
is it true that they are that big? Their web site [plos.org] wasn't much help in terms of information on subscriptions or article numbers, or I simply missed it. Can anyone familiar with them provide any input?
Some of these data sets require decades of time and millions of dollars to produce, and the primary investigators want to use the data they've generated for multiple projects. . . There are plenty of scientists out there who poach free online data sets and mine them for additional findings.
I work in a field (structural biology) that had this debate back when I was still in grade school: the issue was whether journals should require deposition of the molecular coordinates in a public database, or later, should these data be released immediately on publication, or could the authors keep them private for a limited time. The responses at the time were very instructive: one of the foremost proponents of data sharing was accused of trying to "destroy crystallography as we know it", to which his response was yes, of course, but how was that a bad thing? Skipping to the punchline: nearly every journal now requires immediate release of coordinates and underlying experimental data immediately upon publication, during which time the field has grown exponentially and there have been at least six Nobel prizes awarded for crystallography (at least one of which went to an early opponent of data sharing). The top-tier journals (Science, Nature) average about a paper per week reporting a new structure. Not only did the predicted dire consequences never happen, the availability of a large collection of protein structures has actually accelerated the field by making it easier to solve related sturctures (and easier to test new methods), and facilitated the emergence of protein structure prediction and design as a major field in its own right.
The question I'm worried about: what form do the data need to take? Curating and archiving derived data (coordinates and structure factors) is already handled by the Protein Data Bank, but the raw images are a few orders of magnitude larger, and there is no public database available. Most experimental labs simply do not have the resources to make these data easily available. (The exceptions are a few structural genomics initiatives with dedicated computing support, but those are going away soon.)
Name me a rich, non-white CEO/trust fund baby/rich asshole family that is doing anything like this.
I don't think Stanley O'Neal has done anything exactly like this, but he's an excellent example of a plutocrat with no shame, humility, or sense of self-awareness, and a now-legendary asshole responsible for destroying countless billions of other people's investments. He's also black.
Over the past decade or so I understand there has been a shift away from the ones he was writing about to less toxic drugs
Longer than that; the search for HIV-specific drugs has been going on since the 1980s. The first antiretroviral came out the same year (1987) that Duesberg made his first complaint; new HIV therapies started to hit the market in the mid-1990s. The reason we didn't have anything sooner wasn't because doctors enjoy giving AZT to patients, it's because developing new drugs is not a famously speedy process.
We could keep people alive "almost indefinitely" back in the 80s.
No, the mortality rate for AIDS patients was quite high back in the 80s (and 90s, for that matter; I lost a teacher that way), and the quality of life much lower.
Huge amounts of money have spent searching for it, quite a bit of time has passed, it doesnt seem to be any closer than it was back then, and we still hear the same thing about how HIV is so unique, it does things no other virus can, we still dont really understand it. Maybe it really is the special snowflake. Or maybe there is something fundamentally wrong about the assumptions we are working from.
If that were the case, than there would have been plenty of other evidence pointing to it - in particular, the many therapies developed to stall (rather than prevent) HIV infection would have failed miserably, and many more people would have died. And it really is difficult to trick the immune system into fighting a virus that propagates by also tricking the immune system.
All these years later, and assuming for the sake of argument that HIV does indeed cause AIDS and that Duesberg and the other skeptics were all dead wrong on that - treating them like scientists who are supposed to remain skeptical, rather than priests who are supposed to remain orthodox, would not have hurt and might well have helped.
Why should we waste time on people who selectively ignore evidence (without presenting any of their own) and continue to make the same argument over and over again for years? Duesberg isn't reviled simply because he went against the prevailing scientific opinion - it's because after all those years, and all that counter-evidence, he refused to admit what any reasonable person would have recognized almost immediately. Scientists generally aren't known for their social skills, and we tend to be particularly intolerant of people who make extravagant (and contrarian) claims that most first-year grad students would be embarrassed to say out loud. This is just common sense - if you're going to publicly state that, in essence, "Professor So-and-so is full of shit", you'd better have really solid evidence our you're going to be ripped to shreds.
By the way, Duesberg hasn't only made an ass of himself over AIDS - his theories on cancer are just as controversial. What's really depressing is that he may be half right ("chromosomal abnormalities are a hallmark and possible cause of cancer"), but he's so spectacularly wrong on the other half ("mutations do not cause cancer") that he has trouble getting anyone to listen to him. And as with AIDS, people who would otherwise be dead today are still alive thanks to drugs that were developed based on the hypothesis that Duesberg claims is false.
On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.
This is another good example of being decades behind and/or batshit insane. HIV is one of the best-characterized viruses in history - the genome, structure, and pathology have all been extensively studied for 30 years, and while the human genome does have some elements that are probably leftover retroviral junk, there is nothing that would explain HIV away as an experimental artifact.
Worse because the "cocktails" used - many of which he trialed and rejected in his pioneering cancer research - are toxic and cause great damage in and of themselves.
This is ancient history. The modern anti-HIV cocktails are largely drugs that were invented long after Duesberg's research career fizzled out, and as far as I know were never considered for use against cancer. AZT was indeed very toxic, not unlike chemotherapy - but AZT isn't front-line treatment against AIDS and hasn't been for many years, at least not in the US.
His hypothesis may well be wrong, but simply being wrong would not justify the negative reaction he has received.
No, but being wrong and continuing to say the same thing over and over again for decades is a pretty good way to piss people off. And traveling to South Africa to meet with Mbeki and advocate against trying to cure the millions of South Africans with AIDS, well, that's just sick.
Oh, btw, where is that cure?
For people who can afford to pay for the treatment, AIDS basically is cured - we can't totally eliminate HIV from the system, but patients can survive almost indefinitely with a reasonable quality of life. Those therapies were developed by ignoring lunatics like Duesberg and targeting the molecular mechanisms of HIV. We don't have a cure for the flu either, despite knowing about it for much long than HIV, but that doesn't mean that mainstream science is wrong about the flu virus.
Why does the media spend so much time vilifying Venezuela's democracy when our friends in Saudi Arabia chop off the head of a princess in a car park, ban women from driving and do not have elections but have a rather nasty dictator?
I've got news for you: it's very, very difficult to find any US media outlet praising Saudi Arabia, and extremely easy to find US media describing what a hellhole the country is. My favorite example is the notoriously right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page: I've seen them put out some venomously anti-Saudi screeds. (None of which I disagreed with, by the way.) The big difference, of course, is that Hollywood celebrities and other limousine lefties don't travel to Saudi Arabia and return to the US brimming with stories about what an excellent example it is for the rest of the world. So beating on Saudi Arabia is sort of pointless, because no one wants to defend it beyond whatever extent our embarrassing relationship with it is seen as a necessary evil.
Though in America's defense, the governments (yes, plural) are required to compensate you at fair market value.
"Fair market value" is defined somewhat loosely, unfortunately; there isn't really much room for property owners to challenge the price that the government is willing to pay, with the result that the governments can ignore prevailing market rates. In the aftermath of the now-infamous Kelo v. New London Supreme Court decision, the city of New London decided that they would only pay as much as the market value when the case started five years previously, rather than the actual value at the time. This was especially egregious since the property was going to be handed over for private development, which means that "fair market value" really should have been "however much the property owners could extract from the developers."
The practical result of this vagueness is that developers tend to circumvent the market by appealing to local governments - it's much easier than negotiating with the property owners. The New York Times Company did this a few years ago when they wanted to take over a building in Manhattan.
Always looking for water looking for life, or where the 6 building blocks for life as we know it could form.
I'll summarize the standard reply to this: we're looking for these signs because that's all that we know enough to look for. Every life form we've encountered is carbon-based and requires liquid water and a certain temperature range. We also know that O2 in the atmosphere indicates photosynthetic activity. Now, it's theoretically possible that somewhere, there exist silicon-based, chlorine-breathing lifeforms. But since we've never encountered these, we have absolutely no idea what constitutes habitable conditions, or what chemical signatures to search for. So, rather than guess wildly and look for something we can't identify, we focus on the environments that are most conducive to known forms of life, because we have some confidence that we could detect something interesting. Is this really that difficult to grasp?
history shows you can't have both apid advancement and massive government inyrusion.
Sure you can. The economic (and human) costs may be severe in many cases, but there are numerous examples of rapid advancement being directly tied to government involvement. In the 20th century, we have the invention of digital computers, nuclear power, radar, jet engines, satellites, GPS, the Internet... of course these technologies were later extensively developed by private enterprise, to the benefit of everyone (especially consumers), but their genesis was in government programs.
However what happens in practice is usually a long way from that ideal, vested interests and group think often result in new, fresh ideas not being published (older academics pulling up the ladder) and mutual back scratching is very common.
I can't defend the current system, which is broken for more reasons than I can count, but it's important to keep in mind that we really do need some kind of community-enforced quality control. Outsiders tend to see this from a negative perspective: groupthink is suppressing new ideas! But there is also a vast quantity of crap that gets caught at this stage - not necessarily shoddy results (although there are certainly plenty of those), but wild and fanciful interpretations that should embarrass any first-year grad student with half a brain. In fact, the more common argument within the scientific community is that peer review often isn't a rigorous enough filter.
To pick a recent counter-example, the Science paper reporting bacteria that supposedly depend on arsenic was a perfect case of a revolutionary new idea that made it past peer review despite many serious flaws that should have made it unpublishable.
doctor shortages, long wait times for doctor visits, tests and treatments, sick people routinely dying while waiting for diagnosis and treatment, intrusive government probing into lifestyles, far more denials of services than existed before Obamacare, bureaucratic indifference by all healthcare staff, covered treatments being decided by political correctness not medical necessity and, ultimately, a bankruptcy of the entire society
Sorry, but for a very large fraction of the country, much of what you're complaining about was already a reality before the ACA. This is especially true for the people who can't even afford treatment to begin with. I don't want to have to defend the law on its merits, because both the concept and the implementation have serious problems. But I find most of the right-wing whining ludicrous, because it idealizes a system that was already a hugely expensive disaster. (It also ignores the fact that the genesis of the ACA was originally a conservative plan.)
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Yes, but the reality is place like Chicago where dead people vote; or Nevada where Harry Reid buses in incoherent people from nursing homes to vote.
Or the deep South, where they go out of their way to prevent brown people from voting.
That's the kind of thing you are advocating.
Uh, no, it's not, which is why I used the phrase "valid exceptions". I have yet to see anyone argue that people who are legitimately allergic to the vaccines and/or immune compromised should be forced to take something that is very likely to cause harm. What we're against is allowing just anyone to opt out (and risk becoming a disease vector) because they heard on TV that vaccination might give their child autism.
The NSA's budget is about 52 billion dollars.
To give more perspective, the last time I checked, the entire federal budget for non-NASA basic scientific research (including cancer, infectious diseases, clean energy, etc.) didn't even come to that much.
governments health agencies don't do their jobs in proper science or oversight
Government health agencies like the FDA have a very difficult job. For every person complaining that they're in bed with industry and allow dangerous medications to kill people, there's someone else - usually either a "patient's rights" advocate or an especially dogmatic libertarian - complaining that they're withholding lifesaving medications and therefore killing people. It's also extremely difficult to identify every possible side effect from relatively limited clinical trials. From my perspective - as a scientist who is sympathetic to libertarian ideals, but also a realist - the FDA does about as well as can be expected most of the time. But they're never going to make every call correctly.
But just make vaccinations mandatory. Simple as that. No more BS opting out on religious grounds, no more opting out because Jenny said not to, no more trusting in herd immunity while actively undermining it. Get your kids vaccinated, period, end of story; don't like it, too bad.
There will always be valid exceptions. Some people (immune-compromised, usually) simply can't handle vaccination - it really would kill them. This is a recognized problem for which there is no solution. And which vaccines should be required? I happen to think that immunization against HPV is a good idea, but you can't get HPV because the kid next to you didn't cover his mouth when he sneezed.
There is historical precedent for your proposal, however: this is what was done with smallpox, which is why no one has caught smallpox since before I was born. But smallpox makes measles look like a mild cold in comparison.
What tax bracket were you in 2012? Did you pay 20%? 25%? Maybe 33%? Google pays 14%. . . Has it occurred to you that those kids (along with others all over the country that Google will not be helping) might not be so poor if the government services set up to help them had not gone unfunded due of lack of tax revenue?
Google employees, however, generally have to pay the same tax rate that the rest of us do (excluding capital gains from stock holdings, but most of them will get the vast majority of their income from their salary). And if they're living in the city (and spending in the city), that will increase SF's tax revenue.
First off, the most environmentally sound solution would be for these tech workers to live in the suburbs to begin with. The jobs themselves are in the suburbs, and the workers are commuting from the city to the suburbs simply because it's hip and trendy to (be able to afford to) live in San Francisco proper.
And because the suburbs artificially restrict the housing supply (just as SF does, to be fair). As someone who lives near both Silicon Valley and SF, I'd much rather live in the latter myself if the rent wasn't hopelessly out of reach. It has nothing to do with being hip or trendy, because I will never be anything other than a hopeless dork; I simply like the city better.
I would very much like to see the city change the laws so that Google pays for its use of public bus stops,
Google is paying for its use of the public bus stops, after enough people complained. But I believe there's a statutory cap on how much they can be made to pay - the city can't arbitrarily make Google buy a puppy for every SF resident each time they use a Muni stop.
Czechoslovakia's strong production was providing a great deal of war supplies to the Germany (one in three panzers were produced there)
There was no "Czechoslovakia" any more by the time the war actually started - the Czech half of the country had been invaded by Germany (with Slovakia left as a puppet state). You're blaming the victim here.
It's easy -- because in many ways "science" has become a religion to many. However, many people lack a firm understanding of scientific principles and methods. So, if something looks "science-y" with Latin words, molecular drawings and other intelligent-sounding but hard-to-understand descriptions.
Hmmm, I don't think the attraction to homeopathy has anything to do with an affinity towards science, since scientists and doctors are in nearly universal agreement that homeopathy is complete nonsense. If anything, the people who practice homeopathy are suspicious of modern (Western) medical science and scientists, which is why debates over this issue, or vaccines, or EM radiation, quickly devolve into accusations of complicity with the evil Big Pharma and reminders of thalidomide, etc. Basic laws of physics and scientific principles like double-blind placebo-controlled trials are sneered at. It's really difficult as a scientist in a notoriously left-wing part of the country, because I see this all the time, but on the other hand, I don't have sanctimonious busybodies offering to pray for my soul either.
This leads to a two-class system where the scientists that collect the data (and understand the techniques and limitations) are treated as technicians while those that perform high-level analysis of others' results get the publications.
Maybe in some fields, but in genomics and molecular biology, the result tends to be exactly the opposite: the experimentalists (and their collaborators) get top-tier publications, while the unaffiliated bioinformaticists mostly publish in specialty journals.
is it true that they are that big? Their web site [plos.org] wasn't much help in terms of information on subscriptions or article numbers, or I simply missed it. Can anyone familiar with them provide any input?
"In 2013, PLOS ONE published 31,500 papers."
Some of these data sets require decades of time and millions of dollars to produce, and the primary investigators want to use the data they've generated for multiple projects. . . There are plenty of scientists out there who poach free online data sets and mine them for additional findings.
I work in a field (structural biology) that had this debate back when I was still in grade school: the issue was whether journals should require deposition of the molecular coordinates in a public database, or later, should these data be released immediately on publication, or could the authors keep them private for a limited time. The responses at the time were very instructive: one of the foremost proponents of data sharing was accused of trying to "destroy crystallography as we know it", to which his response was yes, of course, but how was that a bad thing? Skipping to the punchline: nearly every journal now requires immediate release of coordinates and underlying experimental data immediately upon publication, during which time the field has grown exponentially and there have been at least six Nobel prizes awarded for crystallography (at least one of which went to an early opponent of data sharing). The top-tier journals (Science, Nature) average about a paper per week reporting a new structure. Not only did the predicted dire consequences never happen, the availability of a large collection of protein structures has actually accelerated the field by making it easier to solve related sturctures (and easier to test new methods), and facilitated the emergence of protein structure prediction and design as a major field in its own right.
The question I'm worried about: what form do the data need to take? Curating and archiving derived data (coordinates and structure factors) is already handled by the Protein Data Bank, but the raw images are a few orders of magnitude larger, and there is no public database available. Most experimental labs simply do not have the resources to make these data easily available. (The exceptions are a few structural genomics initiatives with dedicated computing support, but those are going away soon.)
Name me a rich, non-white CEO/trust fund baby/rich asshole family that is doing anything like this.
I don't think Stanley O'Neal has done anything exactly like this, but he's an excellent example of a plutocrat with no shame, humility, or sense of self-awareness, and a now-legendary asshole responsible for destroying countless billions of other people's investments. He's also black.
Over the past decade or so I understand there has been a shift away from the ones he was writing about to less toxic drugs
Longer than that; the search for HIV-specific drugs has been going on since the 1980s. The first antiretroviral came out the same year (1987) that Duesberg made his first complaint; new HIV therapies started to hit the market in the mid-1990s. The reason we didn't have anything sooner wasn't because doctors enjoy giving AZT to patients, it's because developing new drugs is not a famously speedy process.
We could keep people alive "almost indefinitely" back in the 80s.
No, the mortality rate for AIDS patients was quite high back in the 80s (and 90s, for that matter; I lost a teacher that way), and the quality of life much lower.
Huge amounts of money have spent searching for it, quite a bit of time has passed, it doesnt seem to be any closer than it was back then, and we still hear the same thing about how HIV is so unique, it does things no other virus can, we still dont really understand it. Maybe it really is the special snowflake. Or maybe there is something fundamentally wrong about the assumptions we are working from.
If that were the case, than there would have been plenty of other evidence pointing to it - in particular, the many therapies developed to stall (rather than prevent) HIV infection would have failed miserably, and many more people would have died. And it really is difficult to trick the immune system into fighting a virus that propagates by also tricking the immune system.
All these years later, and assuming for the sake of argument that HIV does indeed cause AIDS and that Duesberg and the other skeptics were all dead wrong on that - treating them like scientists who are supposed to remain skeptical, rather than priests who are supposed to remain orthodox, would not have hurt and might well have helped.
Why should we waste time on people who selectively ignore evidence (without presenting any of their own) and continue to make the same argument over and over again for years? Duesberg isn't reviled simply because he went against the prevailing scientific opinion - it's because after all those years, and all that counter-evidence, he refused to admit what any reasonable person would have recognized almost immediately. Scientists generally aren't known for their social skills, and we tend to be particularly intolerant of people who make extravagant (and contrarian) claims that most first-year grad students would be embarrassed to say out loud. This is just common sense - if you're going to publicly state that, in essence, "Professor So-and-so is full of shit", you'd better have really solid evidence our you're going to be ripped to shreds.
By the way, Duesberg hasn't only made an ass of himself over AIDS - his theories on cancer are just as controversial. What's really depressing is that he may be half right ("chromosomal abnormalities are a hallmark and possible cause of cancer"), but he's so spectacularly wrong on the other half ("mutations do not cause cancer") that he has trouble getting anyone to listen to him. And as with AIDS, people who would otherwise be dead today are still alive thanks to drugs that were developed based on the hypothesis that Duesberg claims is false.
On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.
This is another good example of being decades behind and/or batshit insane. HIV is one of the best-characterized viruses in history - the genome, structure, and pathology have all been extensively studied for 30 years, and while the human genome does have some elements that are probably leftover retroviral junk, there is nothing that would explain HIV away as an experimental artifact.
Worse because the "cocktails" used - many of which he trialed and rejected in his pioneering cancer research - are toxic and cause great damage in and of themselves.
This is ancient history. The modern anti-HIV cocktails are largely drugs that were invented long after Duesberg's research career fizzled out, and as far as I know were never considered for use against cancer. AZT was indeed very toxic, not unlike chemotherapy - but AZT isn't front-line treatment against AIDS and hasn't been for many years, at least not in the US.
His hypothesis may well be wrong, but simply being wrong would not justify the negative reaction he has received.
No, but being wrong and continuing to say the same thing over and over again for decades is a pretty good way to piss people off. And traveling to South Africa to meet with Mbeki and advocate against trying to cure the millions of South Africans with AIDS, well, that's just sick.
Oh, btw, where is that cure?
For people who can afford to pay for the treatment, AIDS basically is cured - we can't totally eliminate HIV from the system, but patients can survive almost indefinitely with a reasonable quality of life. Those therapies were developed by ignoring lunatics like Duesberg and targeting the molecular mechanisms of HIV. We don't have a cure for the flu either, despite knowing about it for much long than HIV, but that doesn't mean that mainstream science is wrong about the flu virus.
Why does the media spend so much time vilifying Venezuela's democracy when our friends in Saudi Arabia chop off the head of a princess in a car park, ban women from driving and do not have elections but have a rather nasty dictator?
I've got news for you: it's very, very difficult to find any US media outlet praising Saudi Arabia, and extremely easy to find US media describing what a hellhole the country is. My favorite example is the notoriously right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page: I've seen them put out some venomously anti-Saudi screeds. (None of which I disagreed with, by the way.) The big difference, of course, is that Hollywood celebrities and other limousine lefties don't travel to Saudi Arabia and return to the US brimming with stories about what an excellent example it is for the rest of the world. So beating on Saudi Arabia is sort of pointless, because no one wants to defend it beyond whatever extent our embarrassing relationship with it is seen as a necessary evil.
Though in America's defense, the governments (yes, plural) are required to compensate you at fair market value.
"Fair market value" is defined somewhat loosely, unfortunately; there isn't really much room for property owners to challenge the price that the government is willing to pay, with the result that the governments can ignore prevailing market rates. In the aftermath of the now-infamous Kelo v. New London Supreme Court decision, the city of New London decided that they would only pay as much as the market value when the case started five years previously, rather than the actual value at the time. This was especially egregious since the property was going to be handed over for private development, which means that "fair market value" really should have been "however much the property owners could extract from the developers."
The practical result of this vagueness is that developers tend to circumvent the market by appealing to local governments - it's much easier than negotiating with the property owners. The New York Times Company did this a few years ago when they wanted to take over a building in Manhattan.
Always looking for water looking for life, or where the 6 building blocks for life as we know it could form.
I'll summarize the standard reply to this: we're looking for these signs because that's all that we know enough to look for. Every life form we've encountered is carbon-based and requires liquid water and a certain temperature range. We also know that O2 in the atmosphere indicates photosynthetic activity. Now, it's theoretically possible that somewhere, there exist silicon-based, chlorine-breathing lifeforms. But since we've never encountered these, we have absolutely no idea what constitutes habitable conditions, or what chemical signatures to search for. So, rather than guess wildly and look for something we can't identify, we focus on the environments that are most conducive to known forms of life, because we have some confidence that we could detect something interesting. Is this really that difficult to grasp?
history shows you can't have both apid advancement and massive government inyrusion.
Sure you can. The economic (and human) costs may be severe in many cases, but there are numerous examples of rapid advancement being directly tied to government involvement. In the 20th century, we have the invention of digital computers, nuclear power, radar, jet engines, satellites, GPS, the Internet... of course these technologies were later extensively developed by private enterprise, to the benefit of everyone (especially consumers), but their genesis was in government programs.
However what happens in practice is usually a long way from that ideal, vested interests and group think often result in new, fresh ideas not being published (older academics pulling up the ladder) and mutual back scratching is very common.
I can't defend the current system, which is broken for more reasons than I can count, but it's important to keep in mind that we really do need some kind of community-enforced quality control. Outsiders tend to see this from a negative perspective: groupthink is suppressing new ideas! But there is also a vast quantity of crap that gets caught at this stage - not necessarily shoddy results (although there are certainly plenty of those), but wild and fanciful interpretations that should embarrass any first-year grad student with half a brain. In fact, the more common argument within the scientific community is that peer review often isn't a rigorous enough filter.
To pick a recent counter-example, the Science paper reporting bacteria that supposedly depend on arsenic was a perfect case of a revolutionary new idea that made it past peer review despite many serious flaws that should have made it unpublishable.
nobody's multi-billion dollar industry's reputation had potential to be damaged by the results.
doctor shortages, long wait times for doctor visits, tests and treatments, sick people routinely dying while waiting for diagnosis and treatment, intrusive government probing into lifestyles, far more denials of services than existed before Obamacare, bureaucratic indifference by all healthcare staff, covered treatments being decided by political correctness not medical necessity and, ultimately, a bankruptcy of the entire society
Sorry, but for a very large fraction of the country, much of what you're complaining about was already a reality before the ACA. This is especially true for the people who can't even afford treatment to begin with. I don't want to have to defend the law on its merits, because both the concept and the implementation have serious problems. But I find most of the right-wing whining ludicrous, because it idealizes a system that was already a hugely expensive disaster. (It also ignores the fact that the genesis of the ACA was originally a conservative plan.)
And of course, none of this ever happened before Obamacare. /sarcasm