You raise more points than I can answer, but let's start with the Jews.
I'm Jewish. I read the sociology books and the history books. I worked for Jewish organizations.
The Jews continually demanded handouts -- and got them. That's one of the reasons they succeeded.
The big wave of Jewish immigration was during and after WWI. The established German Jewish immigrants set up an elaborate social services system, which supported all the Jews with housing, work, education, and welfare if necessary.
New York City was heavily Jewish, and the City set up social services modeled on the Jewish (and Catholic) systems. Most significantly, they had City College, where anyone with good grades could get a free college education.
Fast forward to 1980. Ronald Reagan was president, and he put a lot of pressure on the Soviet Union to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate. That alone was a privilege, because people from other countries -- like Mexico -- weren't able to immigrate as freely. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and I met a lot of Soviet Jews. They got a pretty good reception. They got welfare, housing, education, job training, and job placement. It was easier for Soviet Jews off the boat to get a college education then than it is for college students today.
A (black) friend of mine worked for the welfare department. She said that the Soviet Jews came in with a sense of entitlement -- America owed them welfare. They demanded welfare.
I know where they were coming from. It's a Jewish tradition that the community has an obligation to provide for your welfare and get you a job.
To their credit, a lot of Jews extend this tradition to mean that the community has an obligation to provide for the welfare of everyone, and that's why Jews who became secular and joined the broader community have been so active in demanding the same rights for everyone else.
Prime example: The Jews were prominent in the Civil Rights movement. They basically taught the blacks how to demand and get the same thing the Jews were getting.
On the other hand, there were Jews who didn't have that social concern for others. There's an ultra-religious orthodox community in New York City that has developed a political machine which trades bloc voting for handouts. Rudolph Giuliani had a "liason to the Jewish community" named Bruce Teitelbaum, who was in the middle of some of the worst welfare corruption in New York City, and nobody was held to account. The Orthodox Jews had families of 5, sometimes 8 children, and milked the welfare system for all it was worth. They had offices which helped people apply for welfare and get as much as they could. Teitelbaum's friends were setting up phony day care centers, and getting paid with government money for salaries of employees who didn't exist. The New York Daily News had some exposes. You can Google "Bruce Teitelbaum" and get the stories.
One of the starkest examples of hypocrisy was the favored treatment of German Jewish slaves in Nazi Germany during WWII, compared to the black slaves in America. Our government used every lever of manipulation to get more compensation from the German and Swiss government for Jewish slaves (even though most of the money didn't go to the same people who were slaves or their descendants, and huge fees were diverted to lawyers). They demanded it and they got it. However, no major politician has supported compensation for black slaves.
So I'm sick and tired of that excuse, "the Jews did it, why can't the blacks do it?" If (when) the blacks had the same government handouts and opportunities that Jews did, they were as successful as the Jews. And the Jews have in general wanted to share their success with everybody else.
Unfortunately the conservatives have taken over this country and they're busy destroying the government social system that made this country so successful.
I didn't say scientists alone should decide what research is acceptable.
If you want to decide whether something is right or wrong, the first thing you have to do is get the facts. Then you get the scientific opinions. Then you may have some other way of deciding whether it's right or wrong.
There's a method to science. They appoint committees and find out what facts and arguments everybody brings to bear.
Bush destroyed that method. He packed the panel. He kicked people like Elizabeth Blackburn off the panel, because he (or more likely his advisers) didn't want to consider her ideas, even though she was representative of a lot of scientists. It's like getting rid of a referee because you don't like his calls.
That's wrong. And it's anti-science. And the Republicans do it consistently, even more than the Democrats.
So you'd prefer to have the doctor who is there because he got into medical school through his father's connections? That's the way it is in much of medicine.
The reason the Supreme Court finally allowed making race a consideration is because they heard evidence about the alumni's son preference.
There used to be a lot of medical schools that had quotas on Jews. There were medical schools that didn't accept blacks at all.
I've met a few black doctors and they're very good. There are a lot more blacks who worked twice as hard as a white guy to get through medical school than there are incompetents who got in through quotas.
There aren't a lot of black doctors in America. About 10% of the American population is black, and about 5% of doctors are black. The reason for that is clearly 100 years of slavery, and 100 years of Jim Crow. Black people couldn't even vote in most of the South until around 1968, and they're still having trouble. Black schools were segregated and inferior in the South.
I think people who suffered violations of their rights like that should be compensated. If you want to give $1 million to everyone who suffered because his ancestor was a slave, and forget about affirmative action, that would be fair. Unfortunately restitution doesn't seem to be politically possible. As a compensation, there are a few affirmative action programs, but they don't really provide that much. It's better than nothing.
Girls are told from infancy that people such as themselves like pink, and that people such as themselves don't like math, and that females who do like math and computers, or who (horrors) take an interest in asserting their rights, are dreary unnatural creatures who don't get invited to parties. "Interest" in a subject isn't an innate immutable quality in a child. It reflects the child's training.
That's a testable hypothesis. There was a natural experiment in which, because of a birth defect, boys were surgically and medically converted to girls, and brought up as girls from infancy. It was a failure. They were brought up as girls in every possible way, by parents who were told by doctors that their children were girls, and parents who were committed to bringing them up as girls. But from birth, they expressed male preferences in toys and play (such as rougher play and favoring toy weapons). This was in contrast to their sisters, who were brought up the same environment by the same parent, but engaged in typical female behavior. As a result of this study, sex conversion surgery for boys with bladder exstrophy has been discredited and abandoned.
There's an environmental component and a genetic component. But the genetic component is clearly strong and sometimes overcomes the environmental component.
Read this article and tell me if you still think it's all environment.
Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males with Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth
William G. Reiner, M.D., and John P. Gearhart, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2004; 350:333-341January 22, 2004
Background
Cloacal exstrophy is a rare, complex defect of the entire pelvis and its contents that occurs during embryogenesis and is associated with severe phallic inadequacy or phallic absence in genetic males. For about 25 years, neonatal assignment to female sex has been advocated for affected males to overcome the issue of phallic inadequacy, but data on outcome remain sparse.
Methods
We assessed all 16 genetic males in our cloacal-exstrophy clinic at the ages of 5 to 16 years. Fourteen underwent neonatal assignment to female sex socially, legally, and surgically; the parents of the remaining two refused to do so. Detailed questionnaires extensively evaluated the development of sexual role and identity, as defined by the subjects' persistent declarations of their sex.
Results
Eight of the 14 subjects assigned to female sex declared themselves male during the course of this study, whereas the 2 raised as males remained male. Subjects could be grouped according to their stated sexual identity. Five subjects were living as females; three were living with unclear sexual identity, although two of the three had declared themselves male; and eight were living as males, six of whom had reassigned themselves to male sex. All 16 subjects had moderate-to-marked interests and attitudes that were considered typical of males. Follow-up ranged from 34 to 98 months.
Conclusions
Routine neonatal assignment of genetic males to female sex because of severe phallic inadequacy can result in unpredictable sexual identification. Clinical interventions in such children should be reexamined in the light of these findings....
The parents of all 14 subjects assigned to female sex stated that they had reared their child as a female. Twelve of these subjects have sisters: parents described equivalent child-rearing approaches and attitudes toward the subjects and their sisters. However, parents described a moderate-to-pronounced unfolding of male-typical behaviors and attitudes over time in these subjects — but not in their sisters. Parents reported that the subjects typically resisted attempts to encourage play with female-typical toys or with female playmates or to behave as parents thought typical girls might be
I have to retract that. Since I last researched the subject, the regulations have changed and apparently manufacturers can voluntarily label their food as genetically engineered or not genetically engineered.
I want you to imagine you are a science teacher pounding your head against the wall because you were trying to get gurlz interested in hard science and they just didn't care.
I read an article in Science a while back about a well-funded project to get gurlz interested in physics. Nothing worked. The boys were all over the pendulums and electric motors and the gurlz didn't care. They tried having a woman dressed up as Wonder Woman ride a motorcycle over an acrobatic loop. That didn't work.
They are interested in biology. That's why over half the doctors in the US are women.
Lest you think I'm just quoting books and don't use the experimental method, I went through the same thing with my niece. At about the age of 5, we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with her friend. Any 5-year-old boy would be all over the world's biggest Erector set. But two 5-year-old girls couldn't wait to get to the other side. I've heard similar stories from my friends. And these are highly-selected friends, who are women trying to get their nieces interested in electronics and physics.
Try it yourself. Try to get a randomly-chosen precollege girl interested in physics or electronics. There are a few, but I'd estimate that they're 5%.
This is not something that I'm happy with. If there are effective ways to get more girls interested in science, we should do it. But there's an underlying reality that most girls are less interested in the hard technical sciences than most boys.
You want to promote science? Look up Thomas Henry's story green apples. Try it out yourself. Green apples are sour, and girls don't like hard sciences.
In Iraq NATO got the regime changed, put in place a democracy, built up the military to defend the fledgeling regime from terrorists (sponsored from neighboring countries) and then left. There new regime is still shaky, but not really in danger of falling a part despite the Americans leaving Baghdad almost a year ago.
You have a pretty low bar for democracy. In Iraq we killed somewhere between 150,000 and 600,000 people, most of them civilians, and drove millions out of their homes and outside the country. There were entire neighborhoods in which Shiites massacred Sunni or vice versa, leaving segregated neighborhoods like the (Christian) Northern Ireland. The entire professional class left. Doctors were regularly being kidnapped for ransom and killed anyway. (Iraq had the best health care systems in the Arab mideast, and it was basically destroyed.) Political opponents are regularly assassinated. A lot of Iraqis are now saying that they wanted Saddam to leave, but things are now so bad that they wish he was back.
They don't have democratic votes as the founders of our country defined the term. People just vote for candidates of their religion or tribe (which is why the Sunnis are doing so badly). Millionaires and warlords run the country (OK, I admit millionaires run the US too).
George W. Bush was basically the dictator of Iraq. He could set up any kind of government he wanted. He thought he would be an FDR or Truman. He failed spectacularly.
GWB thought that it was easy. All you have to do is unleash the free market. “Think of Iraq as being like a computer. And think of Saddam as like a processor. We just take out the old processor, and put in a new one–Chalabi.” http://www.juancole.com/2007/02/3-month-record-for-us-troops-killed.html
You better hope the Republicans never get a chance to install their free-market solutions here.
I was alive when US nuked Japan. Parent statement sounds right to me.
I just happened to be reading the U.S. military's strategic bombing report of the atomic bombing of Japan. I also read a recent hospital report on a severe burn victim.
I don't see any difference between being burned to death (or killed when a building collapses) in a nuclear blast or in a conventional firebombing. It's a long painful process in either case. The best you could hope for would be enough morphine to put you out, and they didn't have much morphine after those attacks.
The AC's comment is part of a bad Internet practice of calling everything that you disagree with "inane drivel", as a substitute for thinking about it and making an intelligent comment.
Under the FDA regulations last time I looked into this, food companies were not allowed to label or advertise their products as non-GM, even if they wanted to and even if they had customers who wanted to buy non-GM food.
I feel pretty comfortable calling Leon Kass anti-science, because of the arguments he presented against stem cell research on the President's Council on Bioethics (President Bush, that is). He argued for the "logic of disgust," which was that he could oppose something just because he personally was disgusted by it. Kass also violated the scientific ethos of free and open discussion, by refusing to discuss his ideas in an open forum.
Bush also kicked 2 distinguished scientists off the Presidential Commission, just because they didn't come to the conclusions he wanted. http://chronicle.com/article/Nobel-Laureate-in-Medicine/48714/ One of them was Elizabeth Blackburn, who later won a Nobel prize in medicine for her work on telomeres. That's like firing the referee because he didn't give you the calls you wanted, or firing your doctor because you don't like his prognosis. Blackburn was pretty outspoken in denouncing the Bush administration.
Blackburn didn't simply object to the conservative opposition to stem cell research; she objected to the way they did it, by packing a scientific advisory committee and getting rid of the dissenters who disagreed with him. That's not the method of science. Why bother to have a scientific panel if you're going to hand-pick them to give you the results you wanted in the first place?
Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter did a lot of things that scientists criticized, and lots of Democrats have a tendency to compromise their principles, but GW Bush was something else. There were editorials in the usually nonpartisan Science magazine about how the Bush Administration's ignorance and defiance of science was unprecedented. It's not often that scientists criticize the people that give them funding. Read Elizabeth Blackburn's articles.
Based on my regular reading of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I think there's a better a argument that the right-wing is anti-science. Read Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science. Creationism, anyone? Stem cell research?
I've talked to a lot of scientists on both sides, and read a lot of the literature, and I'm convinced enough that GM food is harmless to eat it myself. But I think people have the right to make their own choices.
You say that people who want non-GM food should go through the market. That's the problem. The FDA forbid food processors from labeling their food as GM or non-GM. So people who don't want GM food don't have a choice in the marketplace. They may be wrong, they may be naive, but they have a right to make their own decisions.
I live in New York and half the food in my local supermarket is labeled as Kosher. If you know what to look for, you can find a Kosher symbol on most nationally-marketed products, since it's often cheaper to make everything Kosher. I just noticed a "U" (for Union of Orthodox Rabbis) on a bottle of soy sauce. Apparently orthodox Jews believe that corn syrup is not Kosher for Passover, so Pepsi-Cola markets one version labeled Kosher for Passover, and another version labeled non-Kosher for Passover. Ridiculous as the whole thing may be, the FDA allows food processors to label their food as Kosher, so I don't see why they can't label food as non-GM too.
On your second point, there's a sharp line between GM and non-GM food. If it was deliberately created by inserting a DNA sequence with a viral or other vector into a plant or animal, it's GM. Maybe it's inconsistent, maybe it isn't, but if people want to buy non-GM food, or Kosher food, foolish as they may be, they should have that right.
It's more of a problem for me that Monsanto irrationally pressured the government to prohibit labeling. There were a few articles in the New York Times about the heavy-handed campaign by Monsanto and Dupont to impugn and mock the people who wanted GM labeling, under their old management. I don't have the specific details in front of me, but if you want to see people prey on public misunderstanding and emotion, look them up. I don't feel sorry for them. They're getting what they deserve.
I think that GM food is safe, but of course I could be wrong. It's not for me to make decisions for others about what they should eat, and it's not for Monsanto either. You want to sell GM food? Sell it in a free market to an informed consumer.
You used "socialism" like the right wing uses it, as an epithet you don't understand, in a different way than the history and economics textbooks use it, to invoke a generalized fear of government, and confuse the issues. That's why they call Obama a "socialist".
You're not using it in the sense that 99% of the readers understand it, if those readers ever understood a high school history or economics class.
It certainly is productive to have precise definitions. Otherwise, you can't communicate. Everybody else has a specific definition of socialism, and you're using it to mean something else. You wind up speaking (literally) nonsense.
Under socialism, there are no private health insurance companies, so you don't pay premiums and no one raises your premiums. The government pays for all or most health care. There are lots of socialist health care systems around the world, they all do genetic testing, and none of them charge more money for people with genetic diseases. I read medical studies that were done in England, which has socialized medicine, and they give very expensive treatments to people with genetic defects, and it's all paid out of the general taxes. We should be so lucky as to have socialized medicine.
When you talk about socialism like that, you send a strong signal that you don't understand the issues.
What abuses are you subject to if you join a medical study that gives you the best treatment available and also studies your outcomes?
If you go to the doctor with a life-threatening disease like cancer or heart failure, you want the best treatment available, based on the experience of doctors treating this disease over the last hundred years. You're benefiting from their spending the last hundred years recording the records of patients, and aggregating them for study.
The death rate from heart disease is about a third today what it was 50 years ago. That's the benefit. I don't see how it hurts anyone to have doctors record their outcomes. It helps them. It prevents them from taking useless or harmful treatments, and it allows them to take effective treatments. How is that abuse?
Henrietta Lacks got the best treatment available at the time, free, and unfortunately it couldn't save her. In exchange, the doctors used a sample of her tumor to save patients in the future. What's wrong with that?
People live a lot longer these days, because of research like this. Do you want to go back to medicine as it was in 1900?
I once read a study done in Sweden to find out how accurate a prostate cancer test was.
30 years ago, they had done a study of cholesterol, and saved the blood samples. So they could go back, thaw out the blood samples, and see what the PSA level was. Then using Sweden's wonderful medical records, they could find out how many of them had died of prostate cancer at each level of PSA.
This was very useful. If you go to a doctor, and he tells you you have an elevated PSA, you want to know whether it's something you can safely ignore or whether you have to get surgery (which leaves you impotent about half the time and with urinary incontinence about half the time).
If they had laws like the ones proposed here, they just couldn't have done it. It's one thing to have a collection of 100,000 blood samples that you can feed into an automated testing machine. Its another thing entirely (and much more expensive) to have to track down 100,000 subjects from a 30-year-old research project, many of whom have died (including the very people whose blood is most important to test).
Or suppose you turn 60 years old and go to the doctor for a routine exam. Your blood test results come back and he tells you you have chronic lymphocytic leukema. Some people die in 6 years. Other people die in 30 years. He can't tell how long you've got.
Well, now he can tell how long you've got. There's a DNA test. People with one mutation live 6 years, and people with another mutation live 30 years.
Obviously they didn't get signed permission from people with leukemia to test their DNA and follow them for 30 years. They went back and tested stored blood samples of people who died after 6 years and people who died after 30 years.
I don't want to oversell genetic studies. They're at a very early stage. But there are a lot of successful results. Doctors can tell who needs dangerous, debilitating medication in order to have a chance to live a little longer, and who can just skip the medication. They can get clues to new drugs. There are great promising results too complicated to explain here. But if they had to go through these specific informed consent forms described in the Nature article, they simply couldn't do it. It's like prohibiting stem cell research.
First, you often can't find people. There was an article in the New England Journal of Medicine by a doctor who made the point that it's often impossible to find patients, once they walk out the hospital door. The hospital had treated an infant, then afterwards somebody decided that there was a slight possibility that the infant had a life-threatening but treatable condition. They called the cell phone number the mother had given in her hospital intake, and it was disconnected. She had given the name of somebody to call in case of emergency, and that number didn't work either. With the end of landlines, it's much harder to find people. They frantically tried to track her down, and finally found her because of a lucky break.
Then there's the problem that when you're researching fatal diseases, the people you're trying to find are often dead. So they can't give permission.
Their relatives often move. Sometimes a doctor calls them and they just don't want to talk about it any more.
A lot of people don't want strangers to track them down, so they make it difficult. A lot of people are worried about debt collectors (often because they have big unpaid medical bills), process servers, police, immigration authorities, etc. So when you call somebody's mother, she may not want to give the person's new address.
Furthermore, it's not just a matter of calling up and getting permission on the phone. It has to be in writing. Does the signature have to be witnessed? Notarized? What do you do, send a witness over to their house with a notary?
It has to be informed consent, so you can't just have a minimum-wage clerk do it, you need somebody to explain the risks and benefits.
You could wind up spending more money getting permission than you do on the actual tests.
One of the big problems with getting permission is that you get a biased sample. For example, the people who are dead can't give permission. So you might wind up getting the DNA sequences of people with a less aggressive disease.
I don't know what private schools you're talking about. In New York City, most private schools have tuition of $30,000 or more, compared to (I think) a cost of about $8,000 per student in the public schools.
There are a few private schools that are cheaper. They're usually selective. It's easy and cheap to teach good students. The problem, and the big expense, comes from teaching students who have handicaps, learning disabilities, behavior problems, and other problems. The factor most strongly associated with school achievement, according to all the researchers, is family income. Rich kids are (ironically) cheaper to teach. Poor kids are expensive to teach. The low-cost private schools don't take kids with handicaps, learning disabilities, and certainly not behavior problems. If they had to teach the same students, their costs would be as high.
They also cut their expenses by paying their teachers less, and as a result teachers don't stay for more than 2-3 years (as Steve Brill found out in that book of his). Almost everybody who studies education agrees that teachers are much better in their second year, and generally experienced teachers are better. So they have poorer teachers. That may be why they score worse in the NAEP tests.
If anybody really wants the facts on this, they should do a Google search for Diane Ravitch. She started out as an assistant secretary of education for George H.W. Bush, and believed in all this charter school, privatization and anti-union stuff. Then she looked at the facts and saw that it didn't work, and was actually producing worse schools. She explains it better than I can.
The one exception to private schools were the Catholic schools. They had (1) Nuns who were willing to spend their lives working on subsistence wages, living in dormitories, dedicated to education (2) Lots of real estate, which is the other big cost of education (3) No taxes. Unfortunately, the free ride is over. When's the last time you met a Catholic girl (under age 50) who wanted to be a nun?
I'm perfectly happy to see the private sector compete with government services. Privatization doesn't seem to be be the panacea that Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand predicted. The private sector is better in certain competitive markets, like manufacturing computer components. but not in other markets, like health care or public education. Even the public colleges, like City College of New York and the University of California, were the equal of any of the private colleges, until the budget cuts.
Charging the insurance company $150 for a 5-minute visit to refill a prescription sounds a bit high, but I don't know the recent rates and my insurance company doesn't tell me how much they pay for routine office visits. Medicare, which is the lowest payer, pays about $50 for a simple 10-minute office visit (CPT Code 99212). The average income of a general practitioner (not a specialist) is around $100,000 a year (which is about $40/hour). For every hour a doctor spends, they have to pay 3 or more staff people -- receptionist, physician's assistant, nurse, etc., plus rent, equipment, supplies, and all the other expenses of runnng a business, so a gross income of $200/hour (which is $50 for a 15-minute office visit) or more, is reasonable. Specialists like oncologists or neurologists average around $300,000, and they can make much more if they're good at the business side of their practice.
Most other developed countries do spend considerably less for health care. Canada spends close to half as much. The reasons are somewhat lower physician income, less technology, and less aggressive treatments. We have a lot of unnecessary prostate cancer surgery in the U.S. (for which the rate of sexual impotence is about 50%). The Canadians and the British put a lot of effort into doing scientific studies of the effectiveness of different treatments, which is why they're not spending $100,000 for Avastin for breast cancer. The government-run health care systems in Canada and the U.K. do cost/benefit analyses that are actually more efficient than the free-market system in the U.S. And those are the reasons they spend so much less. Obama tried to appoint Donald Berwick, who wanted to do the same kind of cost/benefit analysis, as administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, but he got sandbagged by the Republicans.
When you pay $40 for an office visit to a private doctor who runs his own clinic in a Communist country in Southeast Asia where most people can't afford health care, you're not really getting the same kind of treatment you get in the U.S. There are patients who survive in American hospitals who would have died in third-world hospitals.
American hospitals have neurosurgeons and vascular surgeons on call. Take an abdominal aortic aneurysm. A surgeon who does 50 cases a year might have a survival rate of, say, 60%, while a surgeon who does 2 or 3 cases a year might have a survival rate of 30%. A doctor in a third-world clinic may be a great humanitarian, but if he hasn't done an abdominal aortic aneurysm since medical school, your chance of survival won't be too good.
Salbutamol is a special case. They had to stop using CFC propellants, and the pharmaceutical companies do seem to have taken advantage of the situation. I don't understand why the generic companies couldn't invent around it, although it is expensive to do the studies that are required to get FDA approval for a new propellant. In other countries, the government is the major purchaser, and they can negotiate prices, but here the Republicans wrote laws that prevent Medicare and Medicaid from negotiating.
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Big disparities in wealth are unjust.
They're also inefficient. More egalitarian societies have more efficient economic production.
You raise more points than I can answer, but let's start with the Jews.
I'm Jewish. I read the sociology books and the history books. I worked for Jewish organizations.
The Jews continually demanded handouts -- and got them. That's one of the reasons they succeeded.
The big wave of Jewish immigration was during and after WWI. The established German Jewish immigrants set up an elaborate social services system, which supported all the Jews with housing, work, education, and welfare if necessary.
New York City was heavily Jewish, and the City set up social services modeled on the Jewish (and Catholic) systems. Most significantly, they had City College, where anyone with good grades could get a free college education.
Fast forward to 1980. Ronald Reagan was president, and he put a lot of pressure on the Soviet Union to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate. That alone was a privilege, because people from other countries -- like Mexico -- weren't able to immigrate as freely. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and I met a lot of Soviet Jews. They got a pretty good reception. They got welfare, housing, education, job training, and job placement. It was easier for Soviet Jews off the boat to get a college education then than it is for college students today.
A (black) friend of mine worked for the welfare department. She said that the Soviet Jews came in with a sense of entitlement -- America owed them welfare. They demanded welfare.
I know where they were coming from. It's a Jewish tradition that the community has an obligation to provide for your welfare and get you a job.
To their credit, a lot of Jews extend this tradition to mean that the community has an obligation to provide for the welfare of everyone, and that's why Jews who became secular and joined the broader community have been so active in demanding the same rights for everyone else.
Prime example: The Jews were prominent in the Civil Rights movement. They basically taught the blacks how to demand and get the same thing the Jews were getting.
On the other hand, there were Jews who didn't have that social concern for others. There's an ultra-religious orthodox community in New York City that has developed a political machine which trades bloc voting for handouts. Rudolph Giuliani had a "liason to the Jewish community" named Bruce Teitelbaum, who was in the middle of some of the worst welfare corruption in New York City, and nobody was held to account. The Orthodox Jews had families of 5, sometimes 8 children, and milked the welfare system for all it was worth. They had offices which helped people apply for welfare and get as much as they could. Teitelbaum's friends were setting up phony day care centers, and getting paid with government money for salaries of employees who didn't exist. The New York Daily News had some exposes. You can Google "Bruce Teitelbaum" and get the stories.
One of the starkest examples of hypocrisy was the favored treatment of German Jewish slaves in Nazi Germany during WWII, compared to the black slaves in America. Our government used every lever of manipulation to get more compensation from the German and Swiss government for Jewish slaves (even though most of the money didn't go to the same people who were slaves or their descendants, and huge fees were diverted to lawyers). They demanded it and they got it. However, no major politician has supported compensation for black slaves.
So I'm sick and tired of that excuse, "the Jews did it, why can't the blacks do it?" If (when) the blacks had the same government handouts and opportunities that Jews did, they were as successful as the Jews. And the Jews have in general wanted to share their success with everybody else.
Unfortunately the conservatives have taken over this country and they're busy destroying the government social system that made this country so successful.
I didn't say scientists alone should decide what research is acceptable.
If you want to decide whether something is right or wrong, the first thing you have to do is get the facts. Then you get the scientific opinions. Then you may have some other way of deciding whether it's right or wrong.
There's a method to science. They appoint committees and find out what facts and arguments everybody brings to bear.
Bush destroyed that method. He packed the panel. He kicked people like Elizabeth Blackburn off the panel, because he (or more likely his advisers) didn't want to consider her ideas, even though she was representative of a lot of scientists. It's like getting rid of a referee because you don't like his calls.
That's wrong. And it's anti-science. And the Republicans do it consistently, even more than the Democrats.
So you'd prefer to have the doctor who is there because he got into medical school through his father's connections? That's the way it is in much of medicine.
The reason the Supreme Court finally allowed making race a consideration is because they heard evidence about the alumni's son preference.
There used to be a lot of medical schools that had quotas on Jews. There were medical schools that didn't accept blacks at all.
I've met a few black doctors and they're very good. There are a lot more blacks who worked twice as hard as a white guy to get through medical school than there are incompetents who got in through quotas.
There aren't a lot of black doctors in America. About 10% of the American population is black, and about 5% of doctors are black. The reason for that is clearly 100 years of slavery, and 100 years of Jim Crow. Black people couldn't even vote in most of the South until around 1968, and they're still having trouble. Black schools were segregated and inferior in the South.
I think people who suffered violations of their rights like that should be compensated. If you want to give $1 million to everyone who suffered because his ancestor was a slave, and forget about affirmative action, that would be fair. Unfortunately restitution doesn't seem to be politically possible. As a compensation, there are a few affirmative action programs, but they don't really provide that much. It's better than nothing.
Girls are told from infancy that people such as themselves like pink, and that people such as themselves don't like math, and that females who do like math and computers, or who (horrors) take an interest in asserting their rights, are dreary unnatural creatures who don't get invited to parties. "Interest" in a subject isn't an innate immutable quality in a child. It reflects the child's training.
That's a testable hypothesis. There was a natural experiment in which, because of a birth defect, boys were surgically and medically converted to girls, and brought up as girls from infancy. It was a failure. They were brought up as girls in every possible way, by parents who were told by doctors that their children were girls, and parents who were committed to bringing them up as girls. But from birth, they expressed male preferences in toys and play (such as rougher play and favoring toy weapons). This was in contrast to their sisters, who were brought up the same environment by the same parent, but engaged in typical female behavior. As a result of this study, sex conversion surgery for boys with bladder exstrophy has been discredited and abandoned.
There's an environmental component and a genetic component. But the genetic component is clearly strong and sometimes overcomes the environmental component.
Read this article and tell me if you still think it's all environment.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa022236 [free]
Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males with Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth
William G. Reiner, M.D., and John P. Gearhart, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2004; 350:333-341January 22, 2004
Background
Cloacal exstrophy is a rare, complex defect of the entire pelvis and its contents that occurs during embryogenesis and is associated with severe phallic inadequacy or phallic absence in genetic males. For about 25 years, neonatal assignment to female sex has been advocated for affected males to overcome the issue of phallic inadequacy, but data on outcome remain sparse.
Methods
We assessed all 16 genetic males in our cloacal-exstrophy clinic at the ages of 5 to 16 years. Fourteen underwent neonatal assignment to female sex socially, legally, and surgically; the parents of the remaining two refused to do so. Detailed questionnaires extensively evaluated the development of sexual role and identity, as defined by the subjects' persistent declarations of their sex.
Results
Eight of the 14 subjects assigned to female sex declared themselves male during the course of this study, whereas the 2 raised as males remained male. Subjects could be grouped according to their stated sexual identity. Five subjects were living as females; three were living with unclear sexual identity, although two of the three had declared themselves male; and eight were living as males, six of whom had reassigned themselves to male sex. All 16 subjects had moderate-to-marked interests and attitudes that were considered typical of males. Follow-up ranged from 34 to 98 months.
Conclusions
Routine neonatal assignment of genetic males to female sex because of severe phallic inadequacy can result in unpredictable sexual identification. Clinical interventions in such children should be reexamined in the light of these findings. ...
The parents of all 14 subjects assigned to female sex stated that they had reared their child as a female. Twelve of these subjects have sisters: parents described equivalent child-rearing approaches and attitudes toward the subjects and their sisters. However, parents described a moderate-to-pronounced unfolding of male-typical behaviors and attitudes over time in these subjects — but not in their sisters. Parents reported that the subjects typically resisted attempts to encourage play with female-typical toys or with female playmates or to behave as parents thought typical girls might be
I have to retract that. Since I last researched the subject, the regulations have changed and apparently manufacturers can voluntarily label their food as genetically engineered or not genetically engineered.
I want you to imagine you are a science teacher pounding your head against the wall because you were trying to get gurlz interested in hard science and they just didn't care.
I read an article in Science a while back about a well-funded project to get gurlz interested in physics. Nothing worked. The boys were all over the pendulums and electric motors and the gurlz didn't care. They tried having a woman dressed up as Wonder Woman ride a motorcycle over an acrobatic loop. That didn't work.
They are interested in biology. That's why over half the doctors in the US are women.
Lest you think I'm just quoting books and don't use the experimental method, I went through the same thing with my niece. At about the age of 5, we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with her friend. Any 5-year-old boy would be all over the world's biggest Erector set. But two 5-year-old girls couldn't wait to get to the other side. I've heard similar stories from my friends. And these are highly-selected friends, who are women trying to get their nieces interested in electronics and physics.
Try it yourself. Try to get a randomly-chosen precollege girl interested in physics or electronics. There are a few, but I'd estimate that they're 5%.
This is not something that I'm happy with. If there are effective ways to get more girls interested in science, we should do it. But there's an underlying reality that most girls are less interested in the hard technical sciences than most boys.
You want to promote science? Look up Thomas Henry's story green apples. Try it out yourself. Green apples are sour, and girls don't like hard sciences.
look at things from Iran's view for a second.
Something we don't do too much in our national discussion.
In Iraq NATO got the regime changed, put in place a democracy, built up the military to defend the fledgeling regime from terrorists (sponsored from neighboring countries) and then left. There new regime is still shaky, but not really in danger of falling a part despite the Americans leaving Baghdad almost a year ago.
You have a pretty low bar for democracy. In Iraq we killed somewhere between 150,000 and 600,000 people, most of them civilians, and drove millions out of their homes and outside the country. There were entire neighborhoods in which Shiites massacred Sunni or vice versa, leaving segregated neighborhoods like the (Christian) Northern Ireland. The entire professional class left. Doctors were regularly being kidnapped for ransom and killed anyway. (Iraq had the best health care systems in the Arab mideast, and it was basically destroyed.) Political opponents are regularly assassinated. A lot of Iraqis are now saying that they wanted Saddam to leave, but things are now so bad that they wish he was back.
They don't have democratic votes as the founders of our country defined the term. People just vote for candidates of their religion or tribe (which is why the Sunnis are doing so badly). Millionaires and warlords run the country (OK, I admit millionaires run the US too).
George W. Bush was basically the dictator of Iraq. He could set up any kind of government he wanted. He thought he would be an FDR or Truman. He failed spectacularly.
GWB thought that it was easy. All you have to do is unleash the free market. “Think of Iraq as being like a computer. And think of Saddam as like a processor. We just take out the old processor, and put in a new one–Chalabi.” http://www.juancole.com/2007/02/3-month-record-for-us-troops-killed.html
You better hope the Republicans never get a chance to install their free-market solutions here.
I was alive when US nuked Japan. Parent statement sounds right to me.
I just happened to be reading the U.S. military's strategic bombing report of the atomic bombing of Japan. I also read a recent hospital report on a severe burn victim.
I don't see any difference between being burned to death (or killed when a building collapses) in a nuclear blast or in a conventional firebombing. It's a long painful process in either case. The best you could hope for would be enough morphine to put you out, and they didn't have much morphine after those attacks.
The AC's comment is part of a bad Internet practice of calling everything that you disagree with "inane drivel", as a substitute for thinking about it and making an intelligent comment.
They don't have the right.
Under the FDA regulations last time I looked into this, food companies were not allowed to label or advertise their products as non-GM, even if they wanted to and even if they had customers who wanted to buy non-GM food.
I don't think that's justified.
I feel pretty comfortable calling Leon Kass anti-science, because of the arguments he presented against stem cell research on the President's Council on Bioethics (President Bush, that is). He argued for the "logic of disgust," which was that he could oppose something just because he personally was disgusted by it. Kass also violated the scientific ethos of free and open discussion, by refusing to discuss his ideas in an open forum.
Bush also kicked 2 distinguished scientists off the Presidential Commission, just because they didn't come to the conclusions he wanted. http://chronicle.com/article/Nobel-Laureate-in-Medicine/48714/ One of them was Elizabeth Blackburn, who later won a Nobel prize in medicine for her work on telomeres. That's like firing the referee because he didn't give you the calls you wanted, or firing your doctor because you don't like his prognosis. Blackburn was pretty outspoken in denouncing the Bush administration.
Blackburn didn't simply object to the conservative opposition to stem cell research; she objected to the way they did it, by packing a scientific advisory committee and getting rid of the dissenters who disagreed with him. That's not the method of science. Why bother to have a scientific panel if you're going to hand-pick them to give you the results you wanted in the first place?
Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter did a lot of things that scientists criticized, and lots of Democrats have a tendency to compromise their principles, but GW Bush was something else. There were editorials in the usually nonpartisan Science magazine about how the Bush Administration's ignorance and defiance of science was unprecedented. It's not often that scientists criticize the people that give them funding. Read Elizabeth Blackburn's articles.
Based on my regular reading of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I think there's a better a argument that the right-wing is anti-science. Read Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science. Creationism, anyone? Stem cell research?
I've talked to a lot of scientists on both sides, and read a lot of the literature, and I'm convinced enough that GM food is harmless to eat it myself. But I think people have the right to make their own choices.
You say that people who want non-GM food should go through the market. That's the problem. The FDA forbid food processors from labeling their food as GM or non-GM. So people who don't want GM food don't have a choice in the marketplace. They may be wrong, they may be naive, but they have a right to make their own decisions.
I live in New York and half the food in my local supermarket is labeled as Kosher. If you know what to look for, you can find a Kosher symbol on most nationally-marketed products, since it's often cheaper to make everything Kosher. I just noticed a "U" (for Union of Orthodox Rabbis) on a bottle of soy sauce. Apparently orthodox Jews believe that corn syrup is not Kosher for Passover, so Pepsi-Cola markets one version labeled Kosher for Passover, and another version labeled non-Kosher for Passover. Ridiculous as the whole thing may be, the FDA allows food processors to label their food as Kosher, so I don't see why they can't label food as non-GM too.
On your second point, there's a sharp line between GM and non-GM food. If it was deliberately created by inserting a DNA sequence with a viral or other vector into a plant or animal, it's GM. Maybe it's inconsistent, maybe it isn't, but if people want to buy non-GM food, or Kosher food, foolish as they may be, they should have that right.
It's more of a problem for me that Monsanto irrationally pressured the government to prohibit labeling. There were a few articles in the New York Times about the heavy-handed campaign by Monsanto and Dupont to impugn and mock the people who wanted GM labeling, under their old management. I don't have the specific details in front of me, but if you want to see people prey on public misunderstanding and emotion, look them up. I don't feel sorry for them. They're getting what they deserve.
I think that GM food is safe, but of course I could be wrong. It's not for me to make decisions for others about what they should eat, and it's not for Monsanto either. You want to sell GM food? Sell it in a free market to an informed consumer.
Cops are always saying that they don't have a right to search a location based on the "Find My iPhone" signal.
After you've tracked down the location, and you bring the cops along, can you make the iPhone call out at top volume, "HELP! POLICE! SAVE ME!"?
So why not use a textbook?
When I don't understand a chapter, I can repeat it as many times as I like.
I'm interested in investing in that teaching program.
You used "socialism" like the right wing uses it, as an epithet you don't understand, in a different way than the history and economics textbooks use it, to invoke a generalized fear of government, and confuse the issues. That's why they call Obama a "socialist".
You're not using it in the sense that 99% of the readers understand it, if those readers ever understood a high school history or economics class.
It certainly is productive to have precise definitions. Otherwise, you can't communicate. Everybody else has a specific definition of socialism, and you're using it to mean something else. You wind up speaking (literally) nonsense.
Under socialism, there are no private health insurance companies, so you don't pay premiums and no one raises your premiums. The government pays for all or most health care. There are lots of socialist health care systems around the world, they all do genetic testing, and none of them charge more money for people with genetic diseases. I read medical studies that were done in England, which has socialized medicine, and they give very expensive treatments to people with genetic defects, and it's all paid out of the general taxes. We should be so lucky as to have socialized medicine.
When you talk about socialism like that, you send a strong signal that you don't understand the issues.
What abuses are you subject to if you join a medical study that gives you the best treatment available and also studies your outcomes?
If you go to the doctor with a life-threatening disease like cancer or heart failure, you want the best treatment available, based on the experience of doctors treating this disease over the last hundred years. You're benefiting from their spending the last hundred years recording the records of patients, and aggregating them for study.
The death rate from heart disease is about a third today what it was 50 years ago. That's the benefit. I don't see how it hurts anyone to have doctors record their outcomes. It helps them. It prevents them from taking useless or harmful treatments, and it allows them to take effective treatments. How is that abuse?
Henrietta Lacks got the best treatment available at the time, free, and unfortunately it couldn't save her. In exchange, the doctors used a sample of her tumor to save patients in the future. What's wrong with that?
People live a lot longer these days, because of research like this. Do you want to go back to medicine as it was in 1900?
I once read a study done in Sweden to find out how accurate a prostate cancer test was.
30 years ago, they had done a study of cholesterol, and saved the blood samples. So they could go back, thaw out the blood samples, and see what the PSA level was. Then using Sweden's wonderful medical records, they could find out how many of them had died of prostate cancer at each level of PSA.
This was very useful. If you go to a doctor, and he tells you you have an elevated PSA, you want to know whether it's something you can safely ignore or whether you have to get surgery (which leaves you impotent about half the time and with urinary incontinence about half the time).
If they had laws like the ones proposed here, they just couldn't have done it. It's one thing to have a collection of 100,000 blood samples that you can feed into an automated testing machine. Its another thing entirely (and much more expensive) to have to track down 100,000 subjects from a 30-year-old research project, many of whom have died (including the very people whose blood is most important to test).
Or suppose you turn 60 years old and go to the doctor for a routine exam. Your blood test results come back and he tells you you have chronic lymphocytic leukema. Some people die in 6 years. Other people die in 30 years. He can't tell how long you've got.
Well, now he can tell how long you've got. There's a DNA test. People with one mutation live 6 years, and people with another mutation live 30 years.
Obviously they didn't get signed permission from people with leukemia to test their DNA and follow them for 30 years. They went back and tested stored blood samples of people who died after 6 years and people who died after 30 years.
I don't want to oversell genetic studies. They're at a very early stage. But there are a lot of successful results. Doctors can tell who needs dangerous, debilitating medication in order to have a chance to live a little longer, and who can just skip the medication. They can get clues to new drugs. There are great promising results too complicated to explain here. But if they had to go through these specific informed consent forms described in the Nature article, they simply couldn't do it. It's like prohibiting stem cell research.
You can't process 10 forms per hour.
First, you often can't find people. There was an article in the New England Journal of Medicine by a doctor who made the point that it's often impossible to find patients, once they walk out the hospital door. The hospital had treated an infant, then afterwards somebody decided that there was a slight possibility that the infant had a life-threatening but treatable condition. They called the cell phone number the mother had given in her hospital intake, and it was disconnected. She had given the name of somebody to call in case of emergency, and that number didn't work either. With the end of landlines, it's much harder to find people. They frantically tried to track her down, and finally found her because of a lucky break.
Then there's the problem that when you're researching fatal diseases, the people you're trying to find are often dead. So they can't give permission.
Their relatives often move. Sometimes a doctor calls them and they just don't want to talk about it any more.
A lot of people don't want strangers to track them down, so they make it difficult. A lot of people are worried about debt collectors (often because they have big unpaid medical bills), process servers, police, immigration authorities, etc. So when you call somebody's mother, she may not want to give the person's new address.
Furthermore, it's not just a matter of calling up and getting permission on the phone. It has to be in writing. Does the signature have to be witnessed? Notarized? What do you do, send a witness over to their house with a notary?
It has to be informed consent, so you can't just have a minimum-wage clerk do it, you need somebody to explain the risks and benefits.
You could wind up spending more money getting permission than you do on the actual tests.
One of the big problems with getting permission is that you get a biased sample. For example, the people who are dead can't give permission. So you might wind up getting the DNA sequences of people with a less aggressive disease.
The hypothesis that charter schools can provide better education has been tested and disproven (if you believe in standardized testing). http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/charter/
I don't know what private schools you're talking about. In New York City, most private schools have tuition of $30,000 or more, compared to (I think) a cost of about $8,000 per student in the public schools.
There are a few private schools that are cheaper. They're usually selective. It's easy and cheap to teach good students. The problem, and the big expense, comes from teaching students who have handicaps, learning disabilities, behavior problems, and other problems. The factor most strongly associated with school achievement, according to all the researchers, is family income. Rich kids are (ironically) cheaper to teach. Poor kids are expensive to teach. The low-cost private schools don't take kids with handicaps, learning disabilities, and certainly not behavior problems. If they had to teach the same students, their costs would be as high.
They also cut their expenses by paying their teachers less, and as a result teachers don't stay for more than 2-3 years (as Steve Brill found out in that book of his). Almost everybody who studies education agrees that teachers are much better in their second year, and generally experienced teachers are better. So they have poorer teachers. That may be why they score worse in the NAEP tests.
If anybody really wants the facts on this, they should do a Google search for Diane Ravitch. She started out as an assistant secretary of education for George H.W. Bush, and believed in all this charter school, privatization and anti-union stuff. Then she looked at the facts and saw that it didn't work, and was actually producing worse schools. She explains it better than I can.
The one exception to private schools were the Catholic schools. They had (1) Nuns who were willing to spend their lives working on subsistence wages, living in dormitories, dedicated to education (2) Lots of real estate, which is the other big cost of education (3) No taxes. Unfortunately, the free ride is over. When's the last time you met a Catholic girl (under age 50) who wanted to be a nun?
I'm perfectly happy to see the private sector compete with government services. Privatization doesn't seem to be be the panacea that Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand predicted. The private sector is better in certain competitive markets, like manufacturing computer components. but not in other markets, like health care or public education. Even the public colleges, like City College of New York and the University of California, were the equal of any of the private colleges, until the budget cuts.
Charging the insurance company $150 for a 5-minute visit to refill a prescription sounds a bit high, but I don't know the recent rates and my insurance company doesn't tell me how much they pay for routine office visits. Medicare, which is the lowest payer, pays about $50 for a simple 10-minute office visit (CPT Code 99212). The average income of a general practitioner (not a specialist) is around $100,000 a year (which is about $40/hour). For every hour a doctor spends, they have to pay 3 or more staff people -- receptionist, physician's assistant, nurse, etc., plus rent, equipment, supplies, and all the other expenses of runnng a business, so a gross income of $200/hour (which is $50 for a 15-minute office visit) or more, is reasonable. Specialists like oncologists or neurologists average around $300,000, and they can make much more if they're good at the business side of their practice.
Most other developed countries do spend considerably less for health care. Canada spends close to half as much. The reasons are somewhat lower physician income, less technology, and less aggressive treatments. We have a lot of unnecessary prostate cancer surgery in the U.S. (for which the rate of sexual impotence is about 50%). The Canadians and the British put a lot of effort into doing scientific studies of the effectiveness of different treatments, which is why they're not spending $100,000 for Avastin for breast cancer. The government-run health care systems in Canada and the U.K. do cost/benefit analyses that are actually more efficient than the free-market system in the U.S. And those are the reasons they spend so much less. Obama tried to appoint Donald Berwick, who wanted to do the same kind of cost/benefit analysis, as administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, but he got sandbagged by the Republicans.
When you pay $40 for an office visit to a private doctor who runs his own clinic in a Communist country in Southeast Asia where most people can't afford health care, you're not really getting the same kind of treatment you get in the U.S. There are patients who survive in American hospitals who would have died in third-world hospitals.
American hospitals have neurosurgeons and vascular surgeons on call. Take an abdominal aortic aneurysm. A surgeon who does 50 cases a year might have a survival rate of, say, 60%, while a surgeon who does 2 or 3 cases a year might have a survival rate of 30%. A doctor in a third-world clinic may be a great humanitarian, but if he hasn't done an abdominal aortic aneurysm since medical school, your chance of survival won't be too good.
Salbutamol is a special case. They had to stop using CFC propellants, and the pharmaceutical companies do seem to have taken advantage of the situation. I don't understand why the generic companies couldn't invent around it, although it is expensive to do the studies that are required to get FDA approval for a new propellant. In other countries, the government is the major purchaser, and they can negotiate prices, but here the Republicans wrote laws that prevent Medicare and Medicaid from negotiating.
With Chinese solar panels.