Some of the speech was libelous (as far as I understand it), because the comments were made with complete disregard for whether or not the statements were true. Other comments could reasonably be seen as threatening. Most of them seem to be the sort that could get people barred from practicing law or otherwise thrown out of a professional society.
There is a huge difference between saying something "bad" about someone, and this.
You seem to be implying that the women being ogled were participants on the forum, and that they were only worried about their reputation within that forum. Neither of those things is true.
Sure, there are limits to freedom of speech. Not every communicative act should be protected. I can't lie under oath. I can't publicly lie about another person. I can't make a false report to 911 operators. I can't say that my new aromatherapeudic corn flakes can cure cancer. Not only are such communications illegal, but our overall freedom is increased because they are illegal.
We'd like to think so, but really, that line of reasoning comes from the same one that lets people say "advertising doesn't affect me at all." It presumes that we are in complete, conscious control over how our opinions and feelings towards people get formed. In reality, I think that even baseless anonymous accusations can cause people to lose respect for you, even if they're consciously trying to be impartial.
>> Do you not think that an estimated 90 Billion dollars in clean energy research would be a good idea? Would that compromise work for you?
It would.
As to the rest of your points:
* Demonstrating that you can grow a single crop on oil-producing land without danger to the humans eating it (which--"common sense" or no--you haven't done) is a far different thing than proving that oil extraction can be done without significant harm to an ecosystem.
* "Organic certified" doesn't mean jack to me, given the FDA's exceedingly loose standards.
* Using square miles as a unit of distance? Not remotely kosher.
* I'm sure the Alaskan delegation is pressuring for drilling. What I said was, if the oil companies weren't standing to make a lot of money off drilling, the Alaskans would be pretty much alone in that desire.
* I'm not against people making money. I'm not against people living well. I even believe that some inequity is necessary to motivate effort. But when a CEO is making several hundred times what his average worker does, and when half the corporate stock in this country is owned by the wealthiest 1% of the population, and when corporations seem hell-bent on doing whatever earns them money regardless of the cost to the environment or the people their decisions affect, then your song and dance about "making money is a great thing for everybody" wears tiresome. If despising the current kleptocracy that basically runs America today makes me Karl Marx's love child in your eyes, I could care less.
>> I remember driving from Lansing MI to Traverse City and seeing an oil derek right in the middle of a corn field. We eat that corn!
You're seriously comparing oil extraction's effects on the ANWR (a complex, interdependent ecosystem) with its effects on a man-made corn monoculture, where fertilizers and pesticides are the norm? Further, you're seriously asking me to base my opinion on something you once saw driving in Michigan? How does your over-the-dashboard view of this field qualify as a comprehensive ecological study, demonstrating the harmlessness of oil extraction?
>> First, the ecology in ANWR has no effect on the ecology in Juno, much less N. Dakota or the rest of the states. The ecology in ANWR effects the ecology in ANWR, nothing more.
The healthy ecology of the ANWR increases the overall biodiversity of the globe, which is an increasingly scarce resource. Like every other protected wilderness area, its plant life sucks down CO2 and releases oxygen, which affects the ecology everywhere. Like every protected wilderness area, animals migrate in and out of it, and plants cross-pollinate with plants outside its boundaries. And like any previously pristine area, there is a huge risk of economic development bringing in invasive species (a single one of which has the potential to wreck an ecology). Nothing more? Hell, that's the short list.
I firmly believe that proponents like you are intentionally and seriously understating the damage that extraction will cause. But even if I could be convinced that the damage was "acceptable," I would still object to drilling on two grounds. First, because where it sits now, the oil under ANWR represents a sizeable carbon sequestration, which would take ungodly sums of money to duplicate. Second, because right now we would be burning off this reserve as a matter of convenience, not survival. Keeping it around for emergencies is like pretending that your bank balance is $2000 lower than it actually is. Forget it exists, and it will always be there in case it's needed. Which it will be, so long as your side keeps running interference for the oil industry the way it has been.
>> You are correct that it is about money, but not about people getting rich. This is on National land, therefor, it's National oil. The government hires companies to pump it out (after a bidding process) and the government keeps the profits.
So, you're saying that the oil companies are going to drill ANWR pro bono? That all the pressure to drill ANWR is coming from the Alaskan congressional delegation? That the government never uses its power and influence to funnel money into corporate coffers?
It sounds to me like you're using some Sean Hannity clone for your talking points. If the oil companies weren't going to make a nice fortune off the contract, they wouldn't sign it.
>> Still, if the problem is with oil, then why not do something about it. Plant a windmill and solar panels in your back yard and disconnect from the grid.
Ah, I see. Your solution isn't to start changing the system, but for the 0.1% of people who can and want to do so to disconnect from it, leaving the overall system basically unaltered.
I'd give you my rant about the futility of individual solutions to systemic problems, but it would take too long.
>> Of course, you'll have to sell your car and grow your own food (how else do you think food gets to the store?).
I thought food magically appeared in the grocery store, through a process possibly involving faerie dust.
You're not making any friends here by talking to me like I'm stupid.
>> Yes, we dependent on oil. There is nothing we can do about that except voluntarily turn ourselves into a starving third world country.
Don't even pretend that the only options on the table are "Drill ANWR" or "mass starvation". Hybrids, increases in CAFTA standards, electric vehicles, increased mass transit, telecommuting, procurement of more food fr
Why is "you don't even visit the ANWR" a valid objection to demanding its protection? The whole point of the environmental movement is understanding that everything is interconnected. The Greenland ice shelf keeps the ocean twenty feet lower than it would otherwise be, which helps Floridans who have never set foot on it. The Amazon rainforests scrub the air everyone breathes, not just the air for visiting tourists. The ANWR provides wildlife habitat, which is critical to the overall health of the ecology and therefore benefits you even if you don't give a rat about moose.
Drilling the ANWR will not create a secure domestic oil supply. In your own words, "it wouldn't even make a fucking dent". At current consumption rates, there is estimated to be about a year's worth of oil in the protected area. But it wouldn't start producing for another ten years, and reach its peak for another decade. So you have to spread that number out over twenty or thirty years. Compared to the security that would come from higher fuel economy standards and other conservation efforts, the ANWR gives you nothing but petroleum-covered elk.
Drilling the ANWR will have three effects. First, it will allow us to delay the transition away from oil for a negligible amount of time. This leads to the second effect: a relatively small increase in CO2 emissions. The third effect? Oil companies will make a whole bunch of money that they wouldn't have made otherwise.
ANWR is irrelevant, because we can never become an energy-independent nation until we break the oil addiction. But there is money to be made by businesses, so the right wing and their amply-funded but empty-headed think tanks are screaming to get the drilling going.
Oil sucks. It pollutes the atmosphere, raises the temperature of the globe, and keeps us dependent on a resource that--ANWR or no--will be gone soon. There. I've been "honest" by your reckoning--as though environmentalists were insincere about wanting to protect wilderness. Now why don't you be honest? Your entire approach to government policy is nothing more than an unthinking assent to the ludicrous idea that, so long as we let wealthy industrialists do exactly as they like, they'll bring utopia to the rest of us.
So we're going to judge our actions towards the planet based on whether or not they're severe enough to ensure that multicellular life can never evolve again?
Either this is sophistry of the worst sort, or neither Charleton Heston nor Michael Crichton have children.
I found a source for this speech. Rush Limbaugh's commentary on the speech lays a few more layers of sophistic nonsense atop it:
RUSH: That's the key: We haven't the humility.
This wraps up this whole global warming argument. We so lack in humility -- and it's a contradiction, too. On the one hand, the environmentalist wackos consider us irrelevant. We're no more important than the average rat or dog or insect, and in the other moment we are so powerful and we're so negative and we are so destructive that we, humans, are destroying the planet.
Don't get confused. Global warming people, they're not worried about what it will do to humanity. That's not the way they pitch it. They pitch it that the world, the fragility of our climate is in crisis. Of course, Charlton Heston, reading from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, puts this in a great perspective. In fact, that passage is one of the things that helped form my whole thinking on the concept of the complexity of all of this that is our planet and the impotence that we really have to do anything about it.
The idea that by improving our standards of living, that those characteristics of our existence will destroy us, is, frankly, just absurd. I contend you cannot believe in God and believe what the global warming crowd believes. You can't. The two do not go hand in hand. You have to actively not believe in God and believe in something else as a replacement, in order to hold this catastrophic climate crisis view that they all have.
Heston is beating up on a limp strawman, and it is this strawman that Limbaugh says "has formed his whole thinking": Because we are currently incapable of breaking down the entire planet into its constitutent atoms, and smearing them into a diffuse ring around the Sun (a pretty high bar for destroying the planet), then we are basically incapable of having a real effect on the world.
There is no hint of science to this worldview, just an increasingly irrelevant ideological tenet. We are small and puny in the face of God and His creations, so thinking about our responsibilities towards that creation is as absurd as a water molecule thinking about its responsibilities towards the ocean. No evidence can be brought out to convince Limbaugh's ilk otherwise, whether it be rising temperatures, shrinking forests, vanishing species, or increasing pollution. As an ideological tenet, it isn't subject to analysis; it is simply a fact that all reasoning and all conclusions must be molded to fit.
Hand in hand with this, we have a purely theological tenet: God is guiding life on this planet, and God made this planet for our use. Mix this with the idea that the planet is infinite in its ability to supply our needs, and you end up with a worldview that should horrify not only environmentalists, but all reasonable people: providing a quality of life is merely a function of using resources as quickly as possible, thereby "improving our standard of living," and no matter how quickly we burn through those resources, there will always be ample for our needs, and there will always be plenty of places to harmlessly stash the byproducts.
It's almost as though Limbaugh feels that the suburban, middle-class lifestyle is not only optimum for our happiness (ignoring the studies showing that we're not any happier than we were fifty years ago, when we had and used far less), but given special dispensation from God Almighty. How else to explain the fact that Limbaugh so quickly jumps from Heston's "We couldn't possibly eradicate all life on the planet" to his own "We couldn't possibly be affecting the globe in a wa
With manufacturers putting less toxins into the computers, and with landfill space not exactly being at a premium, I really don't get your point. The harm comes from the extraction of resources, the manufacturing process, and the use of the computer. I think the biggest harm that comes from throwing the computer out is the fact that its materials aren't recycled, so we have to extract functionally equivalent resources all over again.
Can't argue with that. But given that we're not going to stop churning out silicon wafers, the best thing we can do is look into making the process more eco-friendly.
What really blows my mind is that this is a new manufacturing plant, located in the U.S., and that its low resource usage is a big part of what makes it cost-competitive with sending the work overseas.
Guess what? You're generating lots of CO2 every hour you're working to pay off the price tag of that not-so "green PC"
Are you trying to suggest that the best way to limit our effects on the planet might be to reduce our overall level of economic activity? Or are you saying that we might be happier if we worked less and lived more?
The problem is, in order to achieve the 7.2 gigawatt savings you describe, you need to replace 600M power supplies. Factor in transportation, $30/hr for labor (many people would have to rentageek to accomplish these savings), etc., and maybe it still works out to a net gain, but it's probably not the biggest net gain available. Such a big gain requires a commensurately large effort.
Compare this to the situation we'd have within a few years if hardware manufacturers adopted Google's suggestions for redesigning power supplies. First, the energy savings would be far larger than we'd get if every computer owner did as you suggest. Second, the effort required would be far less than would be needed to make this transition; new computers are being manufactured all the time, and old ones going to landfills. Also, the gains would occur throughout the life of the computer, where retrofitting would only save energy for about half the life of the computer (on average).
Amdahl's Law says that, when you improve part of a system, the maximum amount of improvement you can achieve is no greater than the fraction of resources the improved part used originally. If you write a program that spends 5% of its time in a subroutine, no matter how cleverly you optimize that subroutine, you can never make the program more than 5% faster. The implication is that, when deciding on an optimizing strategy, you usually can make the biggest gains by spending your time optimizing the code that the program exercises the most.
The same principle holds for trying to reduce the energy you're using. For most people, computers are not their biggest home energy sinks. Refrigerators and air conditioners are much bigger users. So Amdahl's Law suggests that it might be more effective for 60M people to replace their ugly, yellow 1980's-era fridge with a modern high-efficiency model than it would be for 600M people to attempt to retrofit their computers (especially considering that fridges generally have longer lives than computers, and are running 24/7). Replacing old or inefficient air conditioners would probably yield amazing results as well.
While I'm happy to do everything that I can in my own life to reduce carbon emissions, it's impossible to get that same commitment out of everyone. I find it highly unlikely that you could ever motivate a large fraction of computer users to retrofit their computers. If we could find a way to get that many people that motivated, it would be an absolute tragedy to waste that motivation on such an incremental improvement in efficiency. A tiny fraction of that commitment to change would be sufficient to get the major manufacturers to make sure that every box they ship was more energy efficient in the first place, and we could spend the surplus motivation on whiskey and hookers.
That would be really cool in an "ancient artifact" sort of way. But I don't think stone would be the best building material, and the human labor costs wouldn't ever be paid back. The efficiency of these things is directly related to the temperature differential, which is usually determined by the height. In short, these things have to be very, very tall (as in, "measured in fractions of a mile" tall).
Just build them the old fashioned way: with big honkin' robots!
Story summary is one of the interesting (and highly intractable) problems in language processing. In all the competitions that have been held on the subject, I don't believe any program has done more than a tiny bit better than "Given a news article, return the first sentence/paragraph."
But the "take them off the road guy" is definitely pitching an absurd position, and you're describing a scenario that's completely useless for people who use the vehicles in a more rural setting. Guess I'm sticking to my approach, here.
That's perfectly understandable. These sharing systems only really work well in densely populated areas (certainly more dense than where I live), and are certainly facilitated by a comprehensive mass transit system (makes it easier to get to cars, and less likely that you'll need them).
Regarding competition for scarce SUVs, I've always wondered how to reconcile my "ideal" mass transit/car sharing system with, say, the evacuation of a major city. It's not hard to imagine people grabbing the lifeboats for themselves, leaving most everyone else to face the coming catastrophe. That's one big advantage to private ownership: failure mode isn't too far removed from standard operations. So long as there is space on the road and gas in the tank, you can probably escape.
I don't think everyday contention is as big an issue. The people operating the system should be able to allocate enough vehicles that 99% of the time your request (or first alternate) can be fulfilled, and still take a huge number of vehicles off the road.
People take care of rental cars, even though they don't own them, because they know they'll get charged if they damage it, or do something else to screw over the next driver. The feeling of "owning the car" is less important than the feeling of "owning the damage." Unintentional damage caused by a lack of familiarity with your vehicle is a slightly different (and obviously more difficult) problem. Some of the harm could be mitigated by better driver education, but most of the drivers don't expect long-term damage to ever be traced back to them. Still, though the problem may be more prevalent in car-sharing systems, there are plenty of people who don't understand how to drive the vehicle they own in an effective way.
True, there is mercury in CFLs (I think about.05 grams). But you have to weigh that against the mercury being put out by the coal-fired plants that light the bulbs. The numbers I've seen indicate that a CFL produces much less mercury (about a quarter the amount?) than an incandescent over its life, once you take that into account.
Still, making incandescents as efficient as CFLs would go a long way to reducing mercury pollution. I just hope the new incandescents aren't using something just as noxious.
You and the "take SUVs off the road" guy are both arguing over a false dichotomy. You're clearly right, in that there are times when a big honkin' SUV is the only way to get the job done. He's clearly right, in that most SUV usage is clearly wasteful. Probably much of yours is, but you need it for the times when it works.
You're bragging about how your SUV mostly just sits there, as though this was a good state of affairs. Sure, it's great that you're not using it for trivial things, but on the other hand, all the resources needed to build it and all the expense needed to maintain it are going towards a vehicle that only gets used a tiny percentage of the time.
Hence, the idea of car sharing is taking off in a lot of areas. I saw quite a few ZipCars in San Francisco last summer. Another system charges $4/hr plus $0.44/mile, which covers gas, insurance, and parking. Anyhow, with a good service, you could drive a hybrid when conditions warranted, and an SUV for making major trips. Meanwhile, the vehicle needn't be sitting idle until you decide to use it again, which frees up parking and reduces resource use. After all, if your car is being driven half the time, converting to a hybrid will save a lot more gas than if your car sits in a parking space 95% of the time. Other benefits: not having to worry about your own car repair, having your insurance covered, and always driving a relatively new vehicle.
The downside is, other customers keep messing with your pre-sets.
I'm not saying it's best for you. Right now, you only see these services in areas of dense population. But I think it makes sense to have an interest in a variety of cars, rather than complete ownership of a single car, which you're forced to use even if it's not the best tool for the job at hand.
Blah blah blah, those Arabs don't respect human life like we do blah blah probably not even circumsized.
>> 1) You talk about "the best interest" of the Iranian government as if they held the same value system as we do.
Governments don't necessarily believe their own propaganda.
>> Was it any different when the allies were trying to appease Nazi Germany?
Well, for one thing, the Nazis were Germans. Who lived in Germany, and drove German cars.
Oh, and they also had a military that posed a very real threat to the rest of the world. All Iran has is oil, and the potential to maybe get nuclear weapons in the near future. Not to minimize the threat posed by nuclear weapons, but only the threat of using the weapons can actually accomplish their goals. Actually using them? Mutually Assurred Destruction still works.
Your assumption is that Iran wants to "wipe Israel off the map" with nuclear weapons, regardless of the price they'll pay to do so. I don't buy that.
>> Do you honestly believe that there was any way to appease Nazi Germany to stop its hostilities?
Probably not, but the Nazis never would have come to power had the Treaty of Versailles not been so brutally punitive. Peacenikkery works from time to time.
>> Iran, by their own admission, is an Islamic nation. They believe (again, see national TV broadcasts) that every Muslim who dies "fighting the infidels" goes to heaven with 72 virgins and they preach this to no end.
Do you always take government propaganda at face value?
>> Why is it that you think they would care how many of their people potentially die in the name of wiping out Israel and the USA?
See the previous question. The Iranian government wants its people to believe that their nation is engaged in a historic struggle with the West, to distract them from their own heavy-handed incompetence. The parallels to U.S. policies are pretty uncanny.
>> Just take a look at Iraq, they are slaughtering their own people without a care in the world.
"Their own people?" You're assuming that the Iraqis see themselves as a united nation, rather than three separate and mutually hostile ethnicities. In short, you're analyzing the situation based on the same stupid mistake that made Bush think this war was a good idea in the first place. Just because the Brits drew some borders on a map back in the '20s, it didn't help the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds set aside their differences. If anything, it exacerbated them.
>> It doesn't take a genius to figure out what happens if you blow up a truck bomb in a market full of civilians.
No, it doesn't. So I'm curious as to why you brought it up.
>> I'm not saying all Shia muslims think this way, but the extremists among them certainly do.
>> 2) This has absolutely nothing to do with "insulting their sovereignty". Every single time the UN or Europe has politely requested that Iran allow more supervision of its nuclear development (as required by treaties they have signed) and/or negotiation to temporarily cease such development they got a threat back from their government.
Yes, hence the sanctions.
>> The EU has repeatedly offered to supply Iran with energy to its heart's content (generated abroad, shipped to Iran) and also allowing Iran to have nuclear power plants but they'd have to ship the resulting biproduct back to Europe and they have refused on both counts.
The first offer misses the point. It basically says, "In exchange for giving up your nuclear program, we'll make your country reliant on a power source that the West can turn off with the flip of a switch." I'm less clear on their objections to the s
Maybe Iran is just really committed to stopping climate change.
All right, maybe that's a bit unlikely. But there are options that lie between "Peaceful nuclear power for fluffy bunnies" and "Die, Great Satan, die!" For example, having seen what the U.S. does to countries that lack a nuclear deterrent (Iraq) and contrasting that with its behavior towards those that probably do (North Korea), they may have decided to get in on the deterrent game.
One thing to realize is that America-bashing is the national sport of Iran. Or maybe it was soccer. Whatever, it's popular. This brings up two points:
1) The Iranian government talks the talk when it comes to their "Death to America" campaign platform. But they know damned well that actually following up on such a threat wouldn't be in their best interests.
2) When we threaten Iran, insult their sovereignty, etc., we play into their hands. The scarier we try to be, the better President Ahmadinejad looks when he blusters and postures and refuses to give ground.
The rhetoric on both sides has been the same: We dare not compromise, or let our enemies think we are afraid. We dare not show weakness in the face of such an evil and intractable enemy. I wish the Bushes and Ahmedinejads of the world could find another way to work out their insecurities, but I really don't see that happening anytime soon.
Given that we have an obligation to stop Iran because they might gain the ability to kill millions of Israelis, what is our obligation towards a country with thousands of nuclear weapons, which has already caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? You don't need to convince me that a nuclear-armed Iran could be a region-wide catastrophe. What you need to do is convince me that this administration isn't trying to start a war with Iran under the pretense of non-proliferation. It would also be nice if you could convince me that they're not doing what they appear to be doing: compounding lie upon lie by trying to convince the American people that Shiite Iran is providing weapons that kill American soldiers. I know that Bush didn't know his Shiites from his Sunnis when he sent us into this quagmire, but with four years of mismanagement under his belt, he has to know better by now.
As I understand the situation, Iran has the right to enrich uranium under the NNPT, so long as their program is open to comprehensive inspections. Rather than pushing for greater transparency and more inspections, we're demanding that they cease enrichment, all based on our suspicions, which don't appear to be based on real intelligence. You talk about how we can't abide any U.N. actions or treaty obligations that violate our soveriegnty, but other nations should obey our whim or risk military force, even when there is no legal basis for our demands. What makes the U.S. so special?
Oh, because we pay 60% of the U.N.'s budget. Actually, it's 22% of general revenues, 28% of the peacekeeping budget.* But in either case, our contributions are in our financial interest when they result in successful peacekeeping operations. Also, saying that we're entitled to special consideration because of our contributions is like the kid who demands a discount on Park Place because he brought the game board.
I didn't mean to imply you'd quoted Horowitz. I've just found that every time I encourage anyone to give Chomsky a fair hearing, they brush the suggestion off by claiming that Horowitz or Postal has already thoroughly debunked him. If you were familiar with Chomsky, you wouldn't need to ask for evidence for America's "we don't give a shit" attitude towards international law; you'd already be familiar with the evidence that we simple-minded, "truth-doesn't-matter", easily bustdownable lefties use to support the assertion.
Wait wait wait wait wait. We have to stand up to Iran because they're a bunch of potentialmassmurderers?
As for the "we don't give a shit" comment, you are wasting your time demanding an exact quote. Basic reading comprehension would indicate it to be merely an accurate summary of American (and especially right-wing) attitudes towards foreign policy. Just one glaring example: we went into Iraq without a resolution from the U.N. Security Council. According to the U.N. Charter (which, as a founding member, we might have signed), no member state is authorized to use military force against another member state without such authorization.
Just one example, mind you. We have clearly shown that we only use the U.N. when it is to our advantage to do so, and we'll happily use treaties to browbeat other countries, while ignoring our own obligations under the same treaties. And folks like you happily undermine the entire idea of international cooperation by saying that the United States alone should be free from international obligations that impinge on its autonomy. If Iran isn't living up to its obligations under the NNPT, we start whispering "invasion," ignoring the fact that we're supposed to be dismantling our warheads under Article IV of the same treaty.
Plus, we sent John Bolton as our ambassador to the U.N. If that doesn't say, "we don't give a shit," I'm not sure what does.
Gotta run. For further information, read your Chomsky (rather than selected, out-of-context quotes from David Horowitz), and look up the definition of the term "American Exceptionalism".
To wit, the US, Britain, and the other original nuclear powers must work to reduce their nuclear weapons stockpiles (which they are doing)...
Not true. At least, not recently, and not applicable to the United States. Over the last decade, our disarmament rate has dwindled down to zilch. Meanwhile, we're funding huge computer simulations to teach us how to build better nukes, and the people in the western states had to fight like mad to stop a simulated nuclear "bunker buster" using conventional explosives. It's called Divine Strake, if you want to google for it.
I understand that both are probably legal under the NNPT, but they certainly make our intentions clear. Add to that the fact that we're giving nuclear reactor technology to India, despite their insistence on keeping their nukes and not signing on to the NNPT, and it's hard to believe that we're serious about non-proliferation.
You and Colbert aren't even making the same argument. His argument is that it's silly to think that the vaccine is going to encourage kids to get it on. I fully agree.
Your argument (I'm assuming you mean the tooth decay analogy) is arguing something different, and something that I don't necessarily agree with. For example, if the vaccine prevents tooth decay, but costs $4000 per dose, it may be that the old treatment is better. The same might be true for HPV, given that cervical cancer is relatively rare (about 1% of all women's cancer deaths), highly preventable with early detection, and (here's the kicker) really expensive for a vaccine (about $360/dose).
Now, I'm going to present some figures gathered via the anal extraction method: Say that widespread use of this vaccine would cost $400,000,000 a year, and reduces the number of deaths from cervical cancer from 4000/year to 500/year (as the vaccine doesn't catch all forms of cancer-causing HPV). Alternatively, we could fund an early detection program that would reduce the deaths from 4000/year to 1000/year, for a cost of $40,000,000. That extra $360,000,000 could be channeled into a program that would save many thousands more lives. Obviously, the latter course of action would be better.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't adopt the vaccine as a matter of public policy, or that many of the anti-vaccine crowd aren't using arguments like this to cloak their real motives. I would just like some assurances that we aren't overlooking much more cost-effective ways of saving large numbers of lives.
While a person who gets HPV is unlikely to get cervical cancer, virtually all cases of cervical cancer are caused by HPV.
It sounds like your source is written with a clear agenda:
1) keep it simple and accessible to laymen.
2) reassure women who have just found out that they have HPV.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it does make it useless in formulating broader public policy.
One thing your source gets wrong: There are actually 100 strains of HPV, only 30 of which are sexually transmitted. About a dozen strains cause cancer, and the vaccine is tailored to protect against the most common of those. So if your entire argument is that this is a useless public health measure because so few HPV sufferers get cancer, you should instead focus on the fraction of cases involving the strains that actually increase the risk of cancer.
Nothing in your post constitutes a chain of logic that warrants your conclusion. For example, while the risk of spina bifida is less than.1%, it's still enough to justify a public health intervention to prevent it. In this case, it's the very cheap measure of adding folic acid to most flour. But the mere fact that spina bifida a rare disorder (only a few thousand cases every year) doesn't necessarily mean that it's not worth intervening to fix it.
Currently, the HPV vaccine is extremely expensive, on the order of $360/dose. So it's possible that running the numbers would demonstrate that we could do something more effective with our health care dollars. But if the cost were reduced to a few dollars a dose, it would render your argument nonsensical.
Of course, portions of your argument were nonsensical to begin with. To equate the HPV vaccine to a cure for restless leg syndrome or hair loss is simply uninformed. Just because cervical cancer is the worst possible complication of HPV, it doesn't mean that it is an otherwise inconsequential disease.
Possibly true. The American Cancer Society says that there are about 12,000 cases of cervical cancer every year, leading to about four thousand deaths. Further, virtually all of those deaths could be prevented by early detection (cervical cancer is highly treatable in the early stages). Given that we would have to vaccinate millions of women, and that the vaccine currently costs hundreds of dollars, it might make more sense to spend some fraction of those dollars on aggressive early detection programs.
But someone would have to run the numbers, factoring in the costs of the competing approaches (including the possibility of as yet unknown risks from the vaccine itself). And if the vaccine ever becomes significantly cheaper (say, on the order of $10-20/shot) a vaccination program would probably be a no-brainer.
[Note: I don't know squat. Factual claims in this post come primarily from this article.]
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Some of the speech was libelous (as far as I understand it), because the comments were made with complete disregard for whether or not the statements were true. Other comments could reasonably be seen as threatening. Most of them seem to be the sort that could get people barred from practicing law or otherwise thrown out of a professional society.
There is a huge difference between saying something "bad" about someone, and this.
You seem to be implying that the women being ogled were participants on the forum, and that they were only worried about their reputation within that forum. Neither of those things is true.
Sure, there are limits to freedom of speech. Not every communicative act should be protected. I can't lie under oath. I can't publicly lie about another person. I can't make a false report to 911 operators. I can't say that my new aromatherapeudic corn flakes can cure cancer. Not only are such communications illegal, but our overall freedom is increased because they are illegal.
No need to be so binary in your thinking.
We'd like to think so, but really, that line of reasoning comes from the same one that lets people say "advertising doesn't affect me at all." It presumes that we are in complete, conscious control over how our opinions and feelings towards people get formed. In reality, I think that even baseless anonymous accusations can cause people to lose respect for you, even if they're consciously trying to be impartial.
>> Do you not think that an estimated 90 Billion dollars in clean energy research would be a good idea? Would that compromise work for you?
It would.
As to the rest of your points:
* Demonstrating that you can grow a single crop on oil-producing land without danger to the humans eating it (which--"common sense" or no--you haven't done) is a far different thing than proving that oil extraction can be done without significant harm to an ecosystem.
* "Organic certified" doesn't mean jack to me, given the FDA's exceedingly loose standards.
* Using square miles as a unit of distance? Not remotely kosher.
* I'm sure the Alaskan delegation is pressuring for drilling. What I said was, if the oil companies weren't standing to make a lot of money off drilling, the Alaskans would be pretty much alone in that desire.
* I'm not against people making money. I'm not against people living well. I even believe that some inequity is necessary to motivate effort. But when a CEO is making several hundred times what his average worker does, and when half the corporate stock in this country is owned by the wealthiest 1% of the population, and when corporations seem hell-bent on doing whatever earns them money regardless of the cost to the environment or the people their decisions affect, then your song and dance about "making money is a great thing for everybody" wears tiresome. If despising the current kleptocracy that basically runs America today makes me Karl Marx's love child in your eyes, I could care less.
>> I remember driving from Lansing MI to Traverse City and seeing an oil derek right in the middle of a corn field. We eat that corn!
You're seriously comparing oil extraction's effects on the ANWR (a complex, interdependent ecosystem) with its effects on a man-made corn monoculture, where fertilizers and pesticides are the norm? Further, you're seriously asking me to base my opinion on something you once saw driving in Michigan? How does your over-the-dashboard view of this field qualify as a comprehensive ecological study, demonstrating the harmlessness of oil extraction?
>> First, the ecology in ANWR has no effect on the ecology in Juno, much less N. Dakota or the rest of the states. The ecology in ANWR effects the ecology in ANWR, nothing more.
The healthy ecology of the ANWR increases the overall biodiversity of the globe, which is an increasingly scarce resource. Like every other protected wilderness area, its plant life sucks down CO2 and releases oxygen, which affects the ecology everywhere. Like every protected wilderness area, animals migrate in and out of it, and plants cross-pollinate with plants outside its boundaries. And like any previously pristine area, there is a huge risk of economic development bringing in invasive species (a single one of which has the potential to wreck an ecology). Nothing more? Hell, that's the short list.
I firmly believe that proponents like you are intentionally and seriously understating the damage that extraction will cause. But even if I could be convinced that the damage was "acceptable," I would still object to drilling on two grounds. First, because where it sits now, the oil under ANWR represents a sizeable carbon sequestration, which would take ungodly sums of money to duplicate. Second, because right now we would be burning off this reserve as a matter of convenience, not survival. Keeping it around for emergencies is like pretending that your bank balance is $2000 lower than it actually is. Forget it exists, and it will always be there in case it's needed. Which it will be, so long as your side keeps running interference for the oil industry the way it has been.
>> You are correct that it is about money, but not about people getting rich. This is on National land, therefor, it's National oil. The government hires companies to pump it out (after a bidding process) and the government keeps the profits.
So, you're saying that the oil companies are going to drill ANWR pro bono? That all the pressure to drill ANWR is coming from the Alaskan congressional delegation? That the government never uses its power and influence to funnel money into corporate coffers?
It sounds to me like you're using some Sean Hannity clone for your talking points. If the oil companies weren't going to make a nice fortune off the contract, they wouldn't sign it.
>> Still, if the problem is with oil, then why not do something about it. Plant a windmill and solar panels in your back yard and disconnect from the grid.
Ah, I see. Your solution isn't to start changing the system, but for the 0.1% of people who can and want to do so to disconnect from it, leaving the overall system basically unaltered.
I'd give you my rant about the futility of individual solutions to systemic problems, but it would take too long.
>> Of course, you'll have to sell your car and grow your own food (how else do you think food gets to the store?).
I thought food magically appeared in the grocery store, through a process possibly involving faerie dust.
You're not making any friends here by talking to me like I'm stupid.
>> Yes, we dependent on oil. There is nothing we can do about that except voluntarily turn ourselves into a starving third world country.
Don't even pretend that the only options on the table are "Drill ANWR" or "mass starvation". Hybrids, increases in CAFTA standards, electric vehicles, increased mass transit, telecommuting, procurement of more food fr
Why is "you don't even visit the ANWR" a valid objection to demanding its protection? The whole point of the environmental movement is understanding that everything is interconnected. The Greenland ice shelf keeps the ocean twenty feet lower than it would otherwise be, which helps Floridans who have never set foot on it. The Amazon rainforests scrub the air everyone breathes, not just the air for visiting tourists. The ANWR provides wildlife habitat, which is critical to the overall health of the ecology and therefore benefits you even if you don't give a rat about moose.
Drilling the ANWR will not create a secure domestic oil supply. In your own words, "it wouldn't even make a fucking dent". At current consumption rates, there is estimated to be about a year's worth of oil in the protected area. But it wouldn't start producing for another ten years, and reach its peak for another decade. So you have to spread that number out over twenty or thirty years. Compared to the security that would come from higher fuel economy standards and other conservation efforts, the ANWR gives you nothing but petroleum-covered elk.
Drilling the ANWR will have three effects. First, it will allow us to delay the transition away from oil for a negligible amount of time. This leads to the second effect: a relatively small increase in CO2 emissions. The third effect? Oil companies will make a whole bunch of money that they wouldn't have made otherwise.
ANWR is irrelevant, because we can never become an energy-independent nation until we break the oil addiction. But there is money to be made by businesses, so the right wing and their amply-funded but empty-headed think tanks are screaming to get the drilling going.
Oil sucks. It pollutes the atmosphere, raises the temperature of the globe, and keeps us dependent on a resource that--ANWR or no--will be gone soon. There. I've been "honest" by your reckoning--as though environmentalists were insincere about wanting to protect wilderness. Now why don't you be honest? Your entire approach to government policy is nothing more than an unthinking assent to the ludicrous idea that, so long as we let wealthy industrialists do exactly as they like, they'll bring utopia to the rest of us.
Either this is sophistry of the worst sort, or neither Charleton Heston nor Michael Crichton have children.
I found a source for this speech. Rush Limbaugh's commentary on the speech lays a few more layers of sophistic nonsense atop it:
Heston is beating up on a limp strawman, and it is this strawman that Limbaugh says "has formed his whole thinking": Because we are currently incapable of breaking down the entire planet into its constitutent atoms, and smearing them into a diffuse ring around the Sun (a pretty high bar for destroying the planet), then we are basically incapable of having a real effect on the world.
There is no hint of science to this worldview, just an increasingly irrelevant ideological tenet. We are small and puny in the face of God and His creations, so thinking about our responsibilities towards that creation is as absurd as a water molecule thinking about its responsibilities towards the ocean. No evidence can be brought out to convince Limbaugh's ilk otherwise, whether it be rising temperatures, shrinking forests, vanishing species, or increasing pollution. As an ideological tenet, it isn't subject to analysis; it is simply a fact that all reasoning and all conclusions must be molded to fit.
Hand in hand with this, we have a purely theological tenet: God is guiding life on this planet, and God made this planet for our use. Mix this with the idea that the planet is infinite in its ability to supply our needs, and you end up with a worldview that should horrify not only environmentalists, but all reasonable people: providing a quality of life is merely a function of using resources as quickly as possible, thereby "improving our standard of living," and no matter how quickly we burn through those resources, there will always be ample for our needs, and there will always be plenty of places to harmlessly stash the byproducts.
It's almost as though Limbaugh feels that the suburban, middle-class lifestyle is not only optimum for our happiness (ignoring the studies showing that we're not any happier than we were fifty years ago, when we had and used far less), but given special dispensation from God Almighty. How else to explain the fact that Limbaugh so quickly jumps from Heston's "We couldn't possibly eradicate all life on the planet" to his own "We couldn't possibly be affecting the globe in a wa
Eh?
With manufacturers putting less toxins into the computers, and with landfill space not exactly being at a premium, I really don't get your point. The harm comes from the extraction of resources, the manufacturing process, and the use of the computer. I think the biggest harm that comes from throwing the computer out is the fact that its materials aren't recycled, so we have to extract functionally equivalent resources all over again.
Can't argue with that. But given that we're not going to stop churning out silicon wafers, the best thing we can do is look into making the process more eco-friendly.
What really blows my mind is that this is a new manufacturing plant, located in the U.S., and that its low resource usage is a big part of what makes it cost-competitive with sending the work overseas.
Stop emboldening Mother Nature, you un-American!
The problem is, in order to achieve the 7.2 gigawatt savings you describe, you need to replace 600M power supplies. Factor in transportation, $30/hr for labor (many people would have to rentageek to accomplish these savings), etc., and maybe it still works out to a net gain, but it's probably not the biggest net gain available. Such a big gain requires a commensurately large effort.
Compare this to the situation we'd have within a few years if hardware manufacturers adopted Google's suggestions for redesigning power supplies. First, the energy savings would be far larger than we'd get if every computer owner did as you suggest. Second, the effort required would be far less than would be needed to make this transition; new computers are being manufactured all the time, and old ones going to landfills. Also, the gains would occur throughout the life of the computer, where retrofitting would only save energy for about half the life of the computer (on average).
Amdahl's Law says that, when you improve part of a system, the maximum amount of improvement you can achieve is no greater than the fraction of resources the improved part used originally. If you write a program that spends 5% of its time in a subroutine, no matter how cleverly you optimize that subroutine, you can never make the program more than 5% faster. The implication is that, when deciding on an optimizing strategy, you usually can make the biggest gains by spending your time optimizing the code that the program exercises the most.
The same principle holds for trying to reduce the energy you're using. For most people, computers are not their biggest home energy sinks. Refrigerators and air conditioners are much bigger users. So Amdahl's Law suggests that it might be more effective for 60M people to replace their ugly, yellow 1980's-era fridge with a modern high-efficiency model than it would be for 600M people to attempt to retrofit their computers (especially considering that fridges generally have longer lives than computers, and are running 24/7). Replacing old or inefficient air conditioners would probably yield amazing results as well.
While I'm happy to do everything that I can in my own life to reduce carbon emissions, it's impossible to get that same commitment out of everyone. I find it highly unlikely that you could ever motivate a large fraction of computer users to retrofit their computers. If we could find a way to get that many people that motivated, it would be an absolute tragedy to waste that motivation on such an incremental improvement in efficiency. A tiny fraction of that commitment to change would be sufficient to get the major manufacturers to make sure that every box they ship was more energy efficient in the first place, and we could spend the surplus motivation on whiskey and hookers.
Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
That would be really cool in an "ancient artifact" sort of way. But I don't think stone would be the best building material, and the human labor costs wouldn't ever be paid back. The efficiency of these things is directly related to the temperature differential, which is usually determined by the height. In short, these things have to be very, very tall (as in, "measured in fractions of a mile" tall).
Just build them the old fashioned way: with big honkin' robots!
Story summary is one of the interesting (and highly intractable) problems in language processing. In all the competitions that have been held on the subject, I don't believe any program has done more than a tiny bit better than "Given a news article, return the first sentence/paragraph."
But they're working on it.
Regarding competition for scarce SUVs, I've always wondered how to reconcile my "ideal" mass transit/car sharing system with, say, the evacuation of a major city. It's not hard to imagine people grabbing the lifeboats for themselves, leaving most everyone else to face the coming catastrophe. That's one big advantage to private ownership: failure mode isn't too far removed from standard operations. So long as there is space on the road and gas in the tank, you can probably escape.
I don't think everyday contention is as big an issue. The people operating the system should be able to allocate enough vehicles that 99% of the time your request (or first alternate) can be fulfilled, and still take a huge number of vehicles off the road.
People take care of rental cars, even though they don't own them, because they know they'll get charged if they damage it, or do something else to screw over the next driver. The feeling of "owning the car" is less important than the feeling of "owning the damage." Unintentional damage caused by a lack of familiarity with your vehicle is a slightly different (and obviously more difficult) problem. Some of the harm could be mitigated by better driver education, but most of the drivers don't expect long-term damage to ever be traced back to them. Still, though the problem may be more prevalent in car-sharing systems, there are plenty of people who don't understand how to drive the vehicle they own in an effective way.
True, there is mercury in CFLs (I think about .05 grams). But you have to weigh that against the mercury being put out by the coal-fired plants that light the bulbs. The numbers I've seen indicate that a CFL produces much less mercury (about a quarter the amount?) than an incandescent over its life, once you take that into account.
Still, making incandescents as efficient as CFLs would go a long way to reducing mercury pollution. I just hope the new incandescents aren't using something just as noxious.
You and the "take SUVs off the road" guy are both arguing over a false dichotomy. You're clearly right, in that there are times when a big honkin' SUV is the only way to get the job done. He's clearly right, in that most SUV usage is clearly wasteful. Probably much of yours is, but you need it for the times when it works.
You're bragging about how your SUV mostly just sits there, as though this was a good state of affairs. Sure, it's great that you're not using it for trivial things, but on the other hand, all the resources needed to build it and all the expense needed to maintain it are going towards a vehicle that only gets used a tiny percentage of the time.
Hence, the idea of car sharing is taking off in a lot of areas. I saw quite a few ZipCars in San Francisco last summer. Another system charges $4/hr plus $0.44/mile, which covers gas, insurance, and parking. Anyhow, with a good service, you could drive a hybrid when conditions warranted, and an SUV for making major trips. Meanwhile, the vehicle needn't be sitting idle until you decide to use it again, which frees up parking and reduces resource use. After all, if your car is being driven half the time, converting to a hybrid will save a lot more gas than if your car sits in a parking space 95% of the time. Other benefits: not having to worry about your own car repair, having your insurance covered, and always driving a relatively new vehicle.
The downside is, other customers keep messing with your pre-sets.
I'm not saying it's best for you. Right now, you only see these services in areas of dense population. But I think it makes sense to have an interest in a variety of cars, rather than complete ownership of a single car, which you're forced to use even if it's not the best tool for the job at hand.
>> This Holocaust Will Be Different: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid =1167467762531&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFu ll
Blah blah blah, those Arabs don't respect human life like we do blah blah probably not even circumsized.
>> 1) You talk about "the best interest" of the Iranian government as if they held the same value system as we do.
Governments don't necessarily believe their own propaganda.
>> Was it any different when the allies were trying to appease Nazi Germany?
Well, for one thing, the Nazis were Germans. Who lived in Germany, and drove German cars.
Oh, and they also had a military that posed a very real threat to the rest of the world. All Iran has is oil, and the potential to maybe get nuclear weapons in the near future. Not to minimize the threat posed by nuclear weapons, but only the threat of using the weapons can actually accomplish their goals. Actually using them? Mutually Assurred Destruction still works.
Your assumption is that Iran wants to "wipe Israel off the map" with nuclear weapons, regardless of the price they'll pay to do so. I don't buy that.
>> Do you honestly believe that there was any way to appease Nazi Germany to stop its hostilities?
Probably not, but the Nazis never would have come to power had the Treaty of Versailles not been so brutally punitive. Peacenikkery works from time to time.
>> Iran, by their own admission, is an Islamic nation. They believe (again, see national TV broadcasts) that every Muslim who dies "fighting the infidels" goes to heaven with 72 virgins and they preach this to no end.
Do you always take government propaganda at face value?
>> Why is it that you think they would care how many of their people potentially die in the name of wiping out Israel and the USA?
See the previous question. The Iranian government wants its people to believe that their nation is engaged in a historic struggle with the West, to distract them from their own heavy-handed incompetence. The parallels to U.S. policies are pretty uncanny.
>> Just take a look at Iraq, they are slaughtering their own people without a care in the world.
"Their own people?" You're assuming that the Iraqis see themselves as a united nation, rather than three separate and mutually hostile ethnicities. In short, you're analyzing the situation based on the same stupid mistake that made Bush think this war was a good idea in the first place. Just because the Brits drew some borders on a map back in the '20s, it didn't help the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds set aside their differences. If anything, it exacerbated them.
>> It doesn't take a genius to figure out what happens if you blow up a truck bomb in a market full of civilians.
No, it doesn't. So I'm curious as to why you brought it up.
>> I'm not saying all Shia muslims think this way, but the extremists among them certainly do.
>> 2) This has absolutely nothing to do with "insulting their sovereignty". Every single time the UN or Europe has politely requested that Iran allow more supervision of its nuclear development (as required by treaties they have signed) and/or negotiation to temporarily cease such development they got a threat back from their government.
Yes, hence the sanctions.
>> The EU has repeatedly offered to supply Iran with energy to its heart's content (generated abroad, shipped to Iran) and also allowing Iran to have nuclear power plants but they'd have to ship the resulting biproduct back to Europe and they have refused on both counts.
The first offer misses the point. It basically says, "In exchange for giving up your nuclear program, we'll make your country reliant on a power source that the West can turn off with the flip of a switch." I'm less clear on their objections to the s
Maybe Iran is just really committed to stopping climate change.
All right, maybe that's a bit unlikely. But there are options that lie between "Peaceful nuclear power for fluffy bunnies" and "Die, Great Satan, die!" For example, having seen what the U.S. does to countries that lack a nuclear deterrent (Iraq) and contrasting that with its behavior towards those that probably do (North Korea), they may have decided to get in on the deterrent game.
One thing to realize is that America-bashing is the national sport of Iran. Or maybe it was soccer. Whatever, it's popular. This brings up two points:
1) The Iranian government talks the talk when it comes to their "Death to America" campaign platform. But they know damned well that actually following up on such a threat wouldn't be in their best interests.
2) When we threaten Iran, insult their sovereignty, etc., we play into their hands. The scarier we try to be, the better President Ahmadinejad looks when he blusters and postures and refuses to give ground.
The rhetoric on both sides has been the same: We dare not compromise, or let our enemies think we are afraid. We dare not show weakness in the face of such an evil and intractable enemy. I wish the Bushes and Ahmedinejads of the world could find another way to work out their insecurities, but I really don't see that happening anytime soon.
Given that we have an obligation to stop Iran because they might gain the ability to kill millions of Israelis, what is our obligation towards a country with thousands of nuclear weapons, which has already caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? You don't need to convince me that a nuclear-armed Iran could be a region-wide catastrophe. What you need to do is convince me that this administration isn't trying to start a war with Iran under the pretense of non-proliferation. It would also be nice if you could convince me that they're not doing what they appear to be doing: compounding lie upon lie by trying to convince the American people that Shiite Iran is providing weapons that kill American soldiers. I know that Bush didn't know his Shiites from his Sunnis when he sent us into this quagmire, but with four years of mismanagement under his belt, he has to know better by now.
e _United_Nations. Of course it's Wikipedia, so you can up our contribution to 60% if you feel so inclined.
As I understand the situation, Iran has the right to enrich uranium under the NNPT, so long as their program is open to comprehensive inspections. Rather than pushing for greater transparency and more inspections, we're demanding that they cease enrichment, all based on our suspicions, which don't appear to be based on real intelligence. You talk about how we can't abide any U.N. actions or treaty obligations that violate our soveriegnty, but other nations should obey our whim or risk military force, even when there is no legal basis for our demands. What makes the U.S. so special?
Oh, because we pay 60% of the U.N.'s budget. Actually, it's 22% of general revenues, 28% of the peacekeeping budget.* But in either case, our contributions are in our financial interest when they result in successful peacekeeping operations. Also, saying that we're entitled to special consideration because of our contributions is like the kid who demands a discount on Park Place because he brought the game board.
I didn't mean to imply you'd quoted Horowitz. I've just found that every time I encourage anyone to give Chomsky a fair hearing, they brush the suggestion off by claiming that Horowitz or Postal has already thoroughly debunked him. If you were familiar with Chomsky, you wouldn't need to ask for evidence for America's "we don't give a shit" attitude towards international law; you'd already be familiar with the evidence that we simple-minded, "truth-doesn't-matter", easily bustdownable lefties use to support the assertion.
* Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_th
Wait wait wait wait wait. We have to stand up to Iran because they're a bunch of potential mass murderers?
As for the "we don't give a shit" comment, you are wasting your time demanding an exact quote. Basic reading comprehension would indicate it to be merely an accurate summary of American (and especially right-wing) attitudes towards foreign policy. Just one glaring example: we went into Iraq without a resolution from the U.N. Security Council. According to the U.N. Charter (which, as a founding member, we might have signed), no member state is authorized to use military force against another member state without such authorization.
Just one example, mind you. We have clearly shown that we only use the U.N. when it is to our advantage to do so, and we'll happily use treaties to browbeat other countries, while ignoring our own obligations under the same treaties. And folks like you happily undermine the entire idea of international cooperation by saying that the United States alone should be free from international obligations that impinge on its autonomy. If Iran isn't living up to its obligations under the NNPT, we start whispering "invasion," ignoring the fact that we're supposed to be dismantling our warheads under Article IV of the same treaty.
Plus, we sent John Bolton as our ambassador to the U.N. If that doesn't say, "we don't give a shit," I'm not sure what does.
Gotta run. For further information, read your Chomsky (rather than selected, out-of-context quotes from David Horowitz), and look up the definition of the term "American Exceptionalism".
I understand that both are probably legal under the NNPT, but they certainly make our intentions clear. Add to that the fact that we're giving nuclear reactor technology to India, despite their insistence on keeping their nukes and not signing on to the NNPT, and it's hard to believe that we're serious about non-proliferation.
You and Colbert aren't even making the same argument. His argument is that it's silly to think that the vaccine is going to encourage kids to get it on. I fully agree.
Your argument (I'm assuming you mean the tooth decay analogy) is arguing something different, and something that I don't necessarily agree with. For example, if the vaccine prevents tooth decay, but costs $4000 per dose, it may be that the old treatment is better. The same might be true for HPV, given that cervical cancer is relatively rare (about 1% of all women's cancer deaths), highly preventable with early detection, and (here's the kicker) really expensive for a vaccine (about $360/dose).
Now, I'm going to present some figures gathered via the anal extraction method: Say that widespread use of this vaccine would cost $400,000,000 a year, and reduces the number of deaths from cervical cancer from 4000/year to 500/year (as the vaccine doesn't catch all forms of cancer-causing HPV). Alternatively, we could fund an early detection program that would reduce the deaths from 4000/year to 1000/year, for a cost of $40,000,000. That extra $360,000,000 could be channeled into a program that would save many thousands more lives. Obviously, the latter course of action would be better.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't adopt the vaccine as a matter of public policy, or that many of the anti-vaccine crowd aren't using arguments like this to cloak their real motives. I would just like some assurances that we aren't overlooking much more cost-effective ways of saving large numbers of lives.
While a person who gets HPV is unlikely to get cervical cancer, virtually all cases of cervical cancer are caused by HPV.
.1%, it's still enough to justify a public health intervention to prevent it. In this case, it's the very cheap measure of adding folic acid to most flour. But the mere fact that spina bifida a rare disorder (only a few thousand cases every year) doesn't necessarily mean that it's not worth intervening to fix it.
It sounds like your source is written with a clear agenda:
1) keep it simple and accessible to laymen.
2) reassure women who have just found out that they have HPV.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it does make it useless in formulating broader public policy.
One thing your source gets wrong: There are actually 100 strains of HPV, only 30 of which are sexually transmitted. About a dozen strains cause cancer, and the vaccine is tailored to protect against the most common of those. So if your entire argument is that this is a useless public health measure because so few HPV sufferers get cancer, you should instead focus on the fraction of cases involving the strains that actually increase the risk of cancer.
Nothing in your post constitutes a chain of logic that warrants your conclusion. For example, while the risk of spina bifida is less than
Currently, the HPV vaccine is extremely expensive, on the order of $360/dose. So it's possible that running the numbers would demonstrate that we could do something more effective with our health care dollars. But if the cost were reduced to a few dollars a dose, it would render your argument nonsensical.
Of course, portions of your argument were nonsensical to begin with. To equate the HPV vaccine to a cure for restless leg syndrome or hair loss is simply uninformed. Just because cervical cancer is the worst possible complication of HPV, it doesn't mean that it is an otherwise inconsequential disease.
Possibly true. The American Cancer Society says that there are about 12,000 cases of cervical cancer every year, leading to about four thousand deaths. Further, virtually all of those deaths could be prevented by early detection (cervical cancer is highly treatable in the early stages). Given that we would have to vaccinate millions of women, and that the vaccine currently costs hundreds of dollars, it might make more sense to spend some fraction of those dollars on aggressive early detection programs.
But someone would have to run the numbers, factoring in the costs of the competing approaches (including the possibility of as yet unknown risks from the vaccine itself). And if the vaccine ever becomes significantly cheaper (say, on the order of $10-20/shot) a vaccination program would probably be a no-brainer.
[Note: I don't know squat. Factual claims in this post come primarily from this article.]