It's standard industry practive to fire one's selves and then move the whole operation to India for a couple of years, before moving it back to your native country...
No, not really, but almost all infections (well viral infections anyway) have some sort of incubation period, which is probably what i should have said. Ebola has a 10-14 day incubation period followed by muscle aches, fever, etc, etc, followed by all the classic jazz...
The thing with Ebola is that we still don't know a lot about transmission in human populations, so it's not really known if it's contageous at the early stages (because people aren't bleeding all over each other then, and the typical strains (Zaire and Sudan) are not really all that contageous anyway), but when a new strain comes along that's passed along differently these variables all change. You may recall that Ebola Reston was a monkey-only disease (otherwise a lot of people may have died) however some of the Reston Facility workers eventually showed seroreactivity to other Ebola strains...
Sorry, i should have been more specific and/or accurate,:)
Also in your defense: TB is not highly transmitable via air, generally people must be living in close proximity with an infected person in order to become infected, probably because of the mycobacterium's fastidious nature; so TB's really not a great example of something that's highly lethal and easily contracted via air...
Of course (and here's the catch), this all changes if you're immunocompramised, which is why TB rates skyrocket once the HIV prevalence passes a certain threshold (i've heard numbers anywhere from 5-10%), people contract it much more easily and NEVER get rid of it once they have it...
According to Burnette and White's theories, a few hundred to a few thousand years from now TB might be non lethal.
Yea, because people and armadillos (for whatever reason) are its only hosts, i question whether people will be around in a few hundred thousand years. But seriously, that's probably accurate, although there's good reason to assume that the virulent bacteria perhaps less-so than viruses. Staph, and Strep have probably been killers of man ever since our origins and it looks as though evolution is making them more not less dangerous - consider beta-hemolytic strep (a common cause of infections), it's hard to imagine that its ability to lyse red blood cells is a trait that's on its way out the door, i'm sure you've heard of streptokinase (clot buster), i'm not up to sniff enough on my bacteriology to think of more examples, but i'm sure they exist. Viruses on the other hand display evidence to the contrary, Herpes viruses are a good example of something that was probably once virulent but now is not as we are the decendants of those who were not killed off. Recent evidence of this may be seen with the Duncans (sp?) which was a family in the UK who couldn't clear EBV (HHV 4 in case you don't recall:) infections, obviously there aren't many (any?) of them left anymore. The presence of Transposons, as well as Hypervariable regions in T-lymphocyte genomes are also good indicators that viruses may realize the greatest survival advantages by being benign... Of course this is only 1 strategy of many, perhaps the best long-term? i dunno...
Influenza's the real wild card though, you'll be hard pressed to find someone (other than an idiot) that'll claim that an Influenza strain popping up within the next year that kills 90% of the people on the planet isn't a very real possibility. Save that bottle of Scotch, it'll be worth a lot if that happens!
Cheers, nice chatting with ya' - it's 09:00 and i haven't slept yet, so i've got to run. (ps that should've read "depo provera" not "depo medrol" in my previous post.)
The problem is that Burnette and White's views are based on airborne diseases which are frequently transmitted one strain at a time and require the host to be fit enough to walk around in order to pass on the disease, thus selecting against very deadly diseases in most circumstances.
While this may be true in a general sense when trying to apply these models to HIV, i might point out that Influenza and TB are both airborne, and both very large health threats. Also Ebola Reston was airborne. Latency is the key....
Also, (on a related note), keep in mind that any statistics for Africa are based entirely on symptoms. They don't do tests for viruses or antibodies, since they don't have the cash. And immune deficiency can be caused by things other than HIV. I'm sure the incidence of AIDS in Africa is high, but you have to be careful when making conclusions based on very tenuous statistics gathered in third world countries.
Not necessarily, most African HIV estimates are based upon antenatal patient sampling, which is not symptom based - a symptom based diagnosis is inappropriate for estimating prevalence of a disease with such a long latency, also the selection bias is probably stronger than that of antenatal sampling.
Having spent time in South African government hospitals i can say that they certainly did do HIV tests on patients (it was actually unusual for people to be in the hospital without HIV), and unlike the US they just ran the tests without the patients even knowing. Since HIV/AIDS is such a stigma there the doctors and medical personel would call it "RVD" (Retroviral Disease) or "immunodefficiency" or other such code-words. Must've been a cultural or taboo type thing, but none of the patients even knew they had AIDS even when it was painfully obvious they did (like they had invasive KS leasions invading the lungs through the chest wall, or intractable candidiasis of the scalp or whathaveyou)...
Reminds me of the way that all the girls got put on birth control (depo medrol generally) immediately after their first period, but no one ever talked to them about HIV.
Not so SMART... . . . when it meets the business end of an SUV or Hummer in an accident
Then the only "smart" thing to drive (extrapolating from your statement) would then be another Hummer or behemoth SUV, which i sure as fuck would not be driving.
The numbers above represent the probabilities that either candidate wins enough votes on the Electoral College to be elected President, as of the latest available polls. They do not represent actual vote counts or direct poll results, but are inferred from poll results.
This is my problem with these sorts of things. While the polls are always statistically sound i have a 800-lb gorilla-sized sneaking suspicion that the polls being conducted do not accurately represent the electorate, in which case the statistical rigor gives way to a sort of bias in these results.
I've thought for a long time (since last spring) that Bush will lose by a not unsizable margin and people may actually be surprised on election day by the way the polls had failed to capture the public's true intent.
This is all purely anecdotal of course but i just think that since all of these polls are via land-lines (at who knows what time of day), they no longer capture a validly random sample. After all a shrinking percentage of people i know (all of whom vote) even have a land-line, and far fewer actually talk to any pollsters or their ilk - the urge to hang-up on these sorts of callers is just too overwhelming...
Though it may very well be me who is surprised on election day this is what has been brewing in my head lately...
We'll see, although i would bet that there'll be partying in the streets around the world on Nov. 2nd/3rd should Bush lose.
About 15,000 demonstrators attend the annual vigil, demanding the closing of a school they allege teaches Latin American soldiers to violate the human rights of poor people in their home countries. The facility at Fort Benning was once known as the School of the Americas, but reopened in January 2001 as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
It doesn't sound to me like they were going to actually be going inside the instillation, i usually think of vigils as a bunch of people standing in the street, of course i could very well be wrong....
In case anyone is still unaware of the School of the Americas: here is an exerpt from a website with the stated intent of closing said school (soaw.org).
SOA graduates have included many of the most notorious human rights abusers from Latin America. SOA graduates have led military coups and are responsible for massacres of hundreds of people. Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. SOA graduates were responsible for the Uraba massacre in Colombia, the El Mozote massacre of 900 civilians in El Salvador, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and the Jesuit massacre in El Salvador, the La Cantuta massacre in Peru, the torture and murder of a UN worker in Chile, and hundreds of other human rights abuses. In September 1996, under intense pressure from religious and grassroots groups, the Pentagon released seven Spanish-language training manuals used at the SOA until 1991. The New York Times reported, "Americans can now read for themselves some of the noxious lessons the United States Army taught thousands of Latin Americans... [The SOA manuals] recommended interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned."
In other words, SOA has long stood accused of training people in tactics which are illegal in this country, not to mention internationally, and then sending them abroad to do their dirty work. There are also accusations that the US government sends some of its prisoners to other countries to be tourtured since it's illegal here, and also that those doing the torturing are largely American-trained.
You find it hard to believe that anyone of the hundreds of protestors was being violent or aggressive with the police? Hell when you get that many angry people together I would find it hard to believe.
Have you ever BEEN in a protest? There are always people who just want to fuck things up and make a scene.
Yes, like Bloody Sunday, where the word of the paratroopers *totally* justified the 27 people they shot, 13 of which were killed... Police PR tactics typically play the "blame the victm" game, which i'm just saying is fallacious, and generally untrustworthy.
Jacksonville City Administrator Paul Wyntergreen said the protest was peaceful until a few people started pushing police.
99% of the time this is utter bullshit, reminds me of when a cop calls someone a "stupid fucking nigger" and when someone points out that the cop's a racist asshole, he/she's arrested for "harassing an officer" or some such other nonesense.
Pity, I was rather interested in why the Green party (or many people for that matter) are so heavily against genetically modified foods. I was hoping for something a little more insightful than name-calling.
This post is VERY insightful. The idea that genetically modified foods are in some way fundamentally unsafe, wrong, or whathaveyou is, IMHO, without merit.
The truth is that we've been doing genetic manipulation on our crops for hundreds, probably thousands, of years; a cow, tomato, or watermellon that we consume today is about the most unnatural thing i could think of to eat. Unless one goes out and kills his/her own food from the great outdoors (not much of an option for those of us living in a city (unless we kill people, which i don't view as natural either)) he/she's is probably consuming solely frankenfoods already.
I don't think anyone is argueing for irresponsibly adding random genes to things, however i don't see many arguements against, Yellow Rice for instance, where its harm outweighs its benefit...
The monopolistic and imperial actions of multi-national ag companies is one thing, the desire to make foods better are another.
Freedom is a problem because it allows people to act in manners contradictory to human welfare. Privacy is a problem because it means society cannot hold a person accountable for his wrongdoings.
totalitarianism is a problem because it allows people to act in manners contradictory to human welfare.
Lack of Privacy is a problem because it means the wrongdoings of society may be used to justify punishing an individual for his/her differences of opinion.
The politics of tokenism
Aug 12th 2004
From The Economist print edition
The Republicans have made a bad mistake in pitting Alan Keyes against Barack Obama
THREE weeks ago in Boston, the Democrats witnessed the birth of a new black star in Barack Obama, their candidate for the open Senate seat in Illinois. Now the Republicans have conjured up a black star of their own to do battle with the self-described skinny guy with an odd name. Alan Keyes, talk-show host, holy-roller social conservative, Maryland resident and sometime presidential candidate, will take Mr Obama on.
The thinking behind this is beguiling in its simplicity: the Democrats have a black man who can give a rafter-raising speech, so we had better find a rafter-raising black man too. Beguiling, but stupid. Mr Keyes's Senate run will produce nothing but disaster--humiliation for Mr Keyes, more pie on the face of the already pie-covered Illinois Republican Party, and yet another setback for Republican efforts to woo minority voters.
Mr Keyes's problems start with his personality. The Republicans' new champion is the very opposite of cool. In 1996 he chained himself to the front door of a television station in Atlanta, Georgia, to protest against a decision to exclude him from a presidential debate (he was then mounting the first of his two bids for the presidency). His speeches can certainly be eloquent. But they can also be intemperate and plain weird, particularly on the subject of gays.
Mr Keyes's politics are of a piece with his personality. He is a genuine intellectual, a disciple of the great Allan Bloom, and has a PhD in political science from Harvard. But his intellectualism drives him to take absolutist positions on some of the most divisive subjects in American politics. He doesn't just call for a reduction of taxes; he calls for the complete abolition of the "slave" income tax. He doesn't just want to blur the line between church and state like George Bush; he argues that the division between church and state has no basis in the constitution. He doesn't just disagree with Mr Obama on abortion; he castigates him for holding "the slaveholder's position" on the subject.
This sort of absolutism doesn't go down well anywhere in America outside an eccentric fringe. But it goes down particularly badly in the meat-and-potatoes mid-west, where people expect politicians to solve real problems--as the Daleys have done so spectacularly in Chicago, perhaps America's best-run city--rather than waffle on about the meaning of the constitution. The Republicans who have flourished in the region have been middle-of-the-road pragmatists such as Jim Edgar and James Thompson, both former governors of Illinois.
This is hardly an auspicious start. But Mr Keyes brings two further disadvantages to his late-term Senate bid. The first is the charge of "carpetbagging". Illinois is the sort of state where politicians are expected to cultivate their constituencies for years, and where people reminisce about the Cook County political machine's legendary operating style in Chicago in the 1960s. The Democrats are cheerfully claiming that the Republicans are so bereft of talent in a state of 12.5m people that they have to go to Maryland to find any. And they are gleefully reminding everyone of Mr Keyes's pompous scolding of Hillary Clinton, on Fox News in 2000, for running for the Senate in "a state she doesn't even live in".
The Keyes candidacy also smacks of tokenism. The candidate routinely denounces affirmative action as a form of racial discrimination. But what other than racial discrimination can explain the Illinois Republican Party's decision to shortlist two blacks for the Illinois slot--and eventually to choose Mr Keyes? He brings no powerful backers or deep pockets, and was thrashed in his two runs for the Senate in Maryland.
Desperate measures
The Illinois Republicans are not just guilty of tokenism. They are guilty of last-minute scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel t
IIRC Berkshire Hathaway (the Warren Buffet company) once had shares worth $38,000+ each.
Most companies choose to issue/split/consolidate shares in such a way as to keep shares between $10 and $80, in large part due to the psychology of investors putting more than $80/share down. Also people get nervous about "cheap" stocks, especially when they're less than $5/share.
I'm no expert by any means, but this is what i've gathered from my online travels.
it took a while for Lucas to figure out his new old movies (ep 4-6) would not be making as much money as first anticipated. Given the post 2000 (equity) market decline, and the leveling off of the 2003 run-up momentum, Lucas was left with no other alternative but to re-sell something popular.
is what we called them, although i don't believe them to be, in fact, bears.
i thought there was also some deal where the size of their red stripe (or black stripe?) dictates how shitty the winter is going to be (i live in Minnesota) the following year, although i am unsure if this claim is scientifically rigorous, or just a rumour.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux has also failed, over the past decade, to make a GUI that the average* person can actually use. I have been most disappointed.
* Average =! anyone who is reading this on slashdot.
-tid242
This is known as Convergent evolutio.... er... rather: Convergent Intelligent Design.
-tid242
-tid242
Do STDs make unprotected sex with prostitutes any less fun?
-tid242
Mobile phones don't work worth shit there, can't imagine they'd work with copper/aluminum paint either...
-tid242
No, not really, but almost all infections (well viral infections anyway) have some sort of incubation period, which is probably what i should have said. Ebola has a 10-14 day incubation period followed by muscle aches, fever, etc, etc, followed by all the classic jazz...
The thing with Ebola is that we still don't know a lot about transmission in human populations, so it's not really known if it's contageous at the early stages (because people aren't bleeding all over each other then, and the typical strains (Zaire and Sudan) are not really all that contageous anyway), but when a new strain comes along that's passed along differently these variables all change. You may recall that Ebola Reston was a monkey-only disease (otherwise a lot of people may have died) however some of the Reston Facility workers eventually showed seroreactivity to other Ebola strains...
Sorry, i should have been more specific and/or accurate, :)
Also in your defense: TB is not highly transmitable via air, generally people must be living in close proximity with an infected person in order to become infected, probably because of the mycobacterium's fastidious nature; so TB's really not a great example of something that's highly lethal and easily contracted via air...
Of course (and here's the catch), this all changes if you're immunocompramised, which is why TB rates skyrocket once the HIV prevalence passes a certain threshold (i've heard numbers anywhere from 5-10%), people contract it much more easily and NEVER get rid of it once they have it...
According to Burnette and White's theories, a few hundred to a few thousand years from now TB might be non lethal.
Yea, because people and armadillos (for whatever reason) are its only hosts, i question whether people will be around in a few hundred thousand years. But seriously, that's probably accurate, although there's good reason to assume that the virulent bacteria perhaps less-so than viruses. Staph, and Strep have probably been killers of man ever since our origins and it looks as though evolution is making them more not less dangerous - consider beta-hemolytic strep (a common cause of infections), it's hard to imagine that its ability to lyse red blood cells is a trait that's on its way out the door, i'm sure you've heard of streptokinase (clot buster), i'm not up to sniff enough on my bacteriology to think of more examples, but i'm sure they exist. Viruses on the other hand display evidence to the contrary, Herpes viruses are a good example of something that was probably once virulent but now is not as we are the decendants of those who were not killed off. Recent evidence of this may be seen with the Duncans (sp?) which was a family in the UK who couldn't clear EBV (HHV 4 in case you don't recall:) infections, obviously there aren't many (any?) of them left anymore. The presence of Transposons, as well as Hypervariable regions in T-lymphocyte genomes are also good indicators that viruses may realize the greatest survival advantages by being benign... Of course this is only 1 strategy of many, perhaps the best long-term? i dunno...
Influenza's the real wild card though, you'll be hard pressed to find someone (other than an idiot) that'll claim that an Influenza strain popping up within the next year that kills 90% of the people on the planet isn't a very real possibility. Save that bottle of Scotch, it'll be worth a lot if that happens!
Cheers, nice chatting with ya' - it's 09:00 and i haven't slept yet, so i've got to run. (ps that should've read "depo provera" not "depo medrol" in my previous post.)
-tid242
While this may be true in a general sense when trying to apply these models to HIV, i might point out that Influenza and TB are both airborne, and both very large health threats. Also Ebola Reston was airborne. Latency is the key....
Also, (on a related note), keep in mind that any statistics for Africa are based entirely on symptoms. They don't do tests for viruses or antibodies, since they don't have the cash. And immune deficiency can be caused by things other than HIV. I'm sure the incidence of AIDS in Africa is high, but you have to be careful when making conclusions based on very tenuous statistics gathered in third world countries.
Not necessarily, most African HIV estimates are based upon antenatal patient sampling, which is not symptom based - a symptom based diagnosis is inappropriate for estimating prevalence of a disease with such a long latency, also the selection bias is probably stronger than that of antenatal sampling.
Having spent time in South African government hospitals i can say that they certainly did do HIV tests on patients (it was actually unusual for people to be in the hospital without HIV), and unlike the US they just ran the tests without the patients even knowing. Since HIV/AIDS is such a stigma there the doctors and medical personel would call it "RVD" (Retroviral Disease) or "immunodefficiency" or other such code-words. Must've been a cultural or taboo type thing, but none of the patients even knew they had AIDS even when it was painfully obvious they did (like they had invasive KS leasions invading the lungs through the chest wall, or intractable candidiasis of the scalp or whathaveyou)...
Reminds me of the way that all the girls got put on birth control (depo medrol generally) immediately after their first period, but no one ever talked to them about HIV.
-tid242
Then the only "smart" thing to drive (extrapolating from your statement) would then be another Hummer or behemoth SUV, which i sure as fuck would not be driving.
Let's not be a part of the problem.
-tid242
Looks to me like Neurontin (gabapentin) 300mg Caps...
Of course there're more than just 1 kind of yellow capsule, it's what lept immediately into my mind though...
-tid242
This is my problem with these sorts of things. While the polls are always statistically sound i have a 800-lb gorilla-sized sneaking suspicion that the polls being conducted do not accurately represent the electorate, in which case the statistical rigor gives way to a sort of bias in these results.
I've thought for a long time (since last spring) that Bush will lose by a not unsizable margin and people may actually be surprised on election day by the way the polls had failed to capture the public's true intent.
This is all purely anecdotal of course but i just think that since all of these polls are via land-lines (at who knows what time of day), they no longer capture a validly random sample. After all a shrinking percentage of people i know (all of whom vote) even have a land-line, and far fewer actually talk to any pollsters or their ilk - the urge to hang-up on these sorts of callers is just too overwhelming...
Though it may very well be me who is surprised on election day this is what has been brewing in my head lately...
We'll see, although i would bet that there'll be partying in the streets around the world on Nov. 2nd/3rd should Bush lose.
-tid242
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" source
i'd hate for this fabulous quote to get eventually get bastardised as Murphy's Law has been.
All in good faith, mind you, friend.
-tid242
It doesn't sound to me like they were going to actually be going inside the instillation, i usually think of vigils as a bunch of people standing in the street, of course i could very well be wrong ....
In case anyone is still unaware of the School of the Americas: here is an exerpt from a website with the stated intent of closing said school (soaw.org).
SOA graduates have included many of the most notorious human rights abusers from Latin America. SOA graduates have led military coups and are responsible for massacres of hundreds of people. Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. SOA graduates were responsible for the Uraba massacre in Colombia, the El Mozote massacre of 900 civilians in El Salvador, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and the Jesuit massacre in El Salvador, the La Cantuta massacre in Peru, the torture and murder of a UN worker in Chile, and hundreds of other human rights abuses. In September 1996, under intense pressure from religious and grassroots groups, the Pentagon released seven Spanish-language training manuals used at the SOA until 1991. The New York Times reported, "Americans can now read for themselves some of the noxious lessons the United States Army taught thousands of Latin Americans... [The SOA manuals] recommended interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned."
In other words, SOA has long stood accused of training people in tactics which are illegal in this country, not to mention internationally, and then sending them abroad to do their dirty work. There are also accusations that the US government sends some of its prisoners to other countries to be tourtured since it's illegal here, and also that those doing the torturing are largely American-trained.
-tid242
Have you ever BEEN in a protest? There are always people who just want to fuck things up and make a scene.
Yes, like Bloody Sunday, where the word of the paratroopers *totally* justified the 27 people they shot, 13 of which were killed... Police PR tactics typically play the "blame the victm" game, which i'm just saying is fallacious, and generally untrustworthy.
-tid242
99% of the time this is utter bullshit, reminds me of when a cop calls someone a "stupid fucking nigger" and when someone points out that the cop's a racist asshole, he/she's arrested for "harassing an officer" or some such other nonesense.
-tid242
Might depend.... Are you a person of color?
-tid242
This post is VERY insightful. The idea that genetically modified foods are in some way fundamentally unsafe, wrong, or whathaveyou is, IMHO, without merit.
The truth is that we've been doing genetic manipulation on our crops for hundreds, probably thousands, of years; a cow, tomato, or watermellon that we consume today is about the most unnatural thing i could think of to eat. Unless one goes out and kills his/her own food from the great outdoors (not much of an option for those of us living in a city (unless we kill people, which i don't view as natural either)) he/she's is probably consuming solely frankenfoods already.
I don't think anyone is argueing for irresponsibly adding random genes to things, however i don't see many arguements against, Yellow Rice for instance, where its harm outweighs its benefit...
The monopolistic and imperial actions of multi-national ag companies is one thing, the desire to make foods better are another.
-tid242
totalitarianism is a problem because it allows people to act in manners contradictory to human welfare.
Lack of Privacy is a problem because it means the wrongdoings of society may be used to justify punishing an individual for his/her differences of opinion.
-tid242
-tid242
Most companies choose to issue/split/consolidate shares in such a way as to keep shares between $10 and $80, in large part due to the psychology of investors putting more than $80/share down. Also people get nervous about "cheap" stocks, especially when they're less than $5/share.
I'm no expert by any means, but this is what i've gathered from my online travels.
-tid242
Which will also include a waffle maker, chia-pet, and 2 vouchers for Shimano Tiagra derailers on your next Trek road bike purchase.
-tid242
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is it actually un-funny? because it seems like it should be, but then i keep laughing.
-tid242
-tid242
i thought there was also some deal where the size of their red stripe (or black stripe?) dictates how shitty the winter is going to be (i live in Minnesota) the following year, although i am unsure if this claim is scientifically rigorous, or just a rumour.
-tid242