No, they're not the VA... That's just government funding through the universities that uses the VA as test subjects.
The VA is involved to the extent that they provide people with those injuries along with the funding from the federal government to do the work. But the actual brains are supplied by the universities and the private medical firms.
That's not true. I've read the studies. I've talked to the doctors.
Basically, Obama and the advisers he picked decided that the only way to pass a health care bill was to give the Republicans and the corporations everything they wanted.
Riiiight. Which is why every single Republican Senator and Congressman voted against it.
If you read that Washington Post article I linked above, you will see that the complaint of the progressives is that Obama gave the Republicans everything they said they wanted, but they still opposed it. The progressives thought that Obama was making a stupid, unnecessary compromise that wouldn't even work, and they turned out to be right. Even when Obama gave away the store, the Republicans still opposed him in every way they could.
What really happened was the exact opposite of what you say. Obama and his advisors crafted a heath care bill which was so liberal, not only did it lose all the Republicans, it was in danger of losing a good chunk of the moderate-center Democrats as well. All the compromises you claim were made to appease Republicans, were in fact put in to appease moderate Democrats. Most of them didn't like it either, but were under enormous pressure by the far-left wing of the Democrat party to get this passed while they still had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (10 months from 2009-2010).
I don't know where you get your idea of "far-left wing." I went to City College of New York at a time when I could sit at one lunchroom table with the Communists, another table with the Trotskyites, and another table with the Socialist Workers Party. Those were the people who were supporting Fidel Castro, fighting against the Vietnam war, and sitting in with Martin Luther King (and getting arrested in the process). So maybe you could call them far-left.
The left wing of the Democratic Party in Congress is probably represented by the Progressive Caucus, which includes Bernie Sanders and John Conyers. I don't know why you call them "far" left, unless it just makes you feel good to throw out inflammatory adjectives.
The Progressive Caucus supports a single-payer, Canadian-style system, where the government replaces the insurance companies, and negotiates with drug companies. That's not Obamacare. The Progressive Caucus members weren't even allowed into Obama's White House Health Care Summit in 2009, until they complained. Obama first promised them a single payer option, and then took it back when Karen Ignani, head of the insurance industry lobbying organization, threatened to pull another "Harry and Louise." Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, was always hostile to the Democratic left and in one famous incident called them "fucking retarded." (Which you can look up on Google.)
You can't blame this one on the Republicans. Its legacy will rest entirely upon the Democrats because it was 100% Democrat-drafted, passed, and signed.
Obamacare was modeled on a Heritage Foundation plan. I can blame it on the conservatives, Democrat and Republican:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Busin... The irony of Republican disapproval of Obamacare The Democrat's version of health insurance would have been cheaper, simpler and more popular. But we enacted the Republican version. So why are they so upset? Because it an achievement for the Obama administration. By Robert Reich October 28, 2013
1. I don't believe that it is impossible to find equal or superior care for those sorts of injuries outside the VA.
I'd like to know where. All the major research is published by people from the VA (and they collaborate with the best people around the world). I read the studies and I really am impressed by the work of the VA.
Can J Surg. 2015 Jun;58(3):S104-7. Cervical spine injury in dismounted improvised explosive device trauma. Taddeo J1, Devine M2, McAlister VC3. Author information
1The Maine Veterans' Affairs Medical Center, Augusta, Maine.
2The Canadian Armed Forces Health Services, Ottawa, Ont.
3The Canadian Armed Forces Health Services, Ottawa, Ont. and the Department of Surgery, Western University, London, Ont.
PLoS One. 2015 May 11;10(5):e0126110. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0126110. eCollection 2015. Cognitive Improvement after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Measured with Functional Neuroimaging during the Acute Period. Wylie GR1, Freeman K2, Thomas A2, Shpaner M2, OKeefe M2, Watts R2, Naylor MR2. Author information
1Rocco Ortenzio Neuroimaging Center, Kessler Foundation, West Orange, NJ, United States of America; Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Rutgers University Medical School, Newark, NJ, United States of America; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans' Affairs, East Orange, NJ, United States of America.
2Department of Psychiatry, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
JAMA Neurol. 2014 Dec;71(12):1490-7. doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2014.2668. Dementia risk after traumatic brain injury vs nonbrain trauma: the role of age and severity. Gardner RC1, Burke JF2, Nettiksimmons J3, Kaup A4, Barnes DE5, Yaffe K6. Author information
1Memory and Aging Center, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco2Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California.
2Department of Neurology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor4Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Affairs Center for Clinical Management and Research, Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
3Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California5Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco.
4Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California6Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco.
5Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California5Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco6Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisc.
6Memory and Aging Center, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco2Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California5Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of.
Ann Biomed Eng. 2015 May;43(5):1071-88. doi: 10.1007/s10439-014-1171-9. Epub 2014 Oct 25. Head rotational acceleration characteristics influence behavioral and diffusion tensor imaging outcomes following concussion. Stemper BD1, Shah AS, Pintar FA, McCrea M, Kurpad SN, Glavaski-Joksimovic A, Olsen C, Budde MD. Author information
1Department of Neurosurgery, Medical College of Wisconsin, Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Milwaukee, WI, USA, bstemper@mcw.edu.
2. All you're saying here is that the military budget got cut and there we
First, the hospitals do not bid rates generally. They only tell the insurance companies what their price lists are and that is the only place those prices are really negotiated.
Virtually all insurance companies negotiate with all hospitals. http://www.npr.org/sections/he... (You can also look up Steven Brill's articles about the Chargemaster.) That's the way the free market works. If I buy ketchup from Heinz, they'll charge me $5 a bottle. If McDonald's buys ketchup from Heinz, they'll negotiate.
If I needed a certain type of treatment... not right now... but in a week or two... I'd have time to shop around. And the medical system could offer rates just like anything else is offered with rates. The fact that they're not is one of the reasons the market has a hard time controlling costs. Lets say a hospital 400 miles away is willing to do an operation that would cost me 50k where I am for only 25k? Now assuming quality is comparable, I then do a cost benefit analysis...
I've talked to doctors and economists about this. I've read their articles (and written a few myself).
Here's the flaw in your reasoning: "Now assuming quality is comparable"...
You can't possibly tell whether quality is comparable (unless you know as much about medicine as a doctor, and maybe not even then).
For a coronary bypass operation, some surgeons will have a death rate of (say) 1%, and some surgeons will have a death rate of 2%. How do you find out their death rate? Do you think you can call their office and ask their secretary? Try that some day.
Let's assume you can find out their death rate. In socialist U.K., they're required to post their death rates on the hospital web site, so patients can make their own choices. In the U.S., you can sometimes get Medicare data.
Are you going to pick the doctor with the lowest death rate, the way you'd pick a hard drive with the lowest failure rate? That doesn't work.
A British surgeon told me, "It's very easy for me to get good numbers. Just operate on easy cases."
Younger patients have lower death rates. Older patients have higher death rates. Smokers, people with lung disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and other diseases, have higher death rates.
Some doctors specialize in tough cases. So if one surgeon has a 2% death rate, and another has a 1% death rate, the 2% surgeon may be the one who does the tough cases, and the 1% surgeon may be a worse surgeon.
Some people say, "Well, we'll correct for all those risk factors." The problem with that is, there's no way to correct for all those factors. Do you think a surgeon can print out a list for you of all of his patients, with their age, lung function, kidney function, blood sugar, and everything else you need, so that you can compare it to all the other surgeons? Ask his secretary and tell me what she says. Doctors don't even agree on what factors are important, or how much weight to give them. How important is age, smoking, diabetes? Nobody knows.
Surgeons get the best results in patients who are absolutely healthy. That is, they get the best results in patients who don't actually need surgery in the first place. They get the best results with unnecessary surgery. That happens a lot, for example in carotid artery surgery, in prostate cancer surgery, in hysterectomies. The suckers don't know the difference. The surgeon says, "The operation was a success!" The patient says, "This is the doctor who saved my life," and recommends the doctor to his friends.
The best thing that could happen to you is to go to a doctor who examines you and gives you tests and says, "You know, you're healthy. You don't need this surgery." Of course, in the free market, surgeons like that will make less money. So the invisible hand will replace them with surgeons who operate on people who don't nee
Here is the best model I can find for what you'd get in the US.
The VA hospital system. This is a medical system set up for US soldiers in the US. It is entirely operated by the US federal government and it is widely regarded to be some mixture of corrupt and incompetent. There have been quite a few scandals with it recently.
Mostly stuff about putting people on wait lists forever. A lot of soldiers die waiting for treatment in the system.
When I hear "lets socialize the US healthcare system"... I think of the VA hospitals.
I've studied the VA system, and they're getting a bad rap.
First, you have to judge them by their main purpose: When a soldier comes back from Iraq with a brain injury, their job is to keep him alive and get him functioning as well as possible. They do the best job in the world. There is no place in the world that can treat head wounds as well as the U.S. military. Nobody. Same with the guys who have a foot blown off by a land mine.
If some 60-year-old vet comes in with trouble urinating because of an enlarged prostate, they're going to take care of him, yes. But he may have to wait for somebody with a more urgent problem. Like a coronary bypass or stroke.
Second, Congress wanted to cut taxes. But they wanted first-class service from government agencies. They wanted everything but they didn't want to pay for it. So they ordered the VA to cut their waiting times. But they didn't give them the money to hire more doctors to do it. So what do managers do when you tell them they have to do the impossible or they'll be fired? As any MBA will tell you, they cheat. They fudged their appointment records, just as any private business manager in the same situation would do. (Hello Enron?)
Third, the VA system does some of the best medical research in the world. When they do a treatment hundreds of thousands of times a year, they do a study to find out which treatment works better, which hospital gets better results, and which doctors get better results. (No, they don't fire the doctors with worse results, they retrain them.) They do that for heart disease, stroke, cancer, eye disease, amputations, everything. I went to a lot of medical conferences, and they're always talking about "the VA study" in their field, which is usually the best study available.
For example, I just read a study about how the VA was trying to figure out how to give pain-killing drugs to vets in severe pain. If you don't give them enough drugs, they're in pain. If you give them too much, and if you give them opioids, they can die from an overdose. The VA doctors figured out how to optimize it.
So yes, if I had a heart attack outside a VA medical center, I'd feel comfortable that I was getting the best care in the world. I'd trust them to make a tough diagnosis, and to treat a serious, life-threatening disease. If you were crippled, I'd trust them to get you walking again, if anybody could do it.
Don't whine to me because you can't get an appointment this month. Tell Congress to give them enough money to hire more doctors.
We spend about 834 billion a year on government healthcare subsidies.
Actually, plenty of people do want to cut that budget, but can't for ideological reasons.
The US spends just over 17% of GDP on health care, which is a figure only exceeded by Tuvalu. Most developed countries (e.g. most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan) the figure is around 9-10% of GDP. Even France spends less than 12%.
So, yes, you could cut that figure by a third simply by building a real public health system.
For every dollar in premiums you pay your insurance company, they spend 15-20 cents in administrative costs and profits. (You can see that if you read an insurance company annual report on their web site. The "loss ratio," usually 80-85%, is the money they pass on to the doctor or hospital.)
Then your doctor gets 80 cents. He has to spend another 20 cents in administrative costs to deal with the insurance company. (Compared to less than 5 cents on Medicare.)
So if you just cut out the insurance companies, you'd save 35% right there. Other big expenses here are the cost of drugs, hospital services, and doctor services.
I don't know if Obamacare has helped or will help in any significant way. Given that the AMA supported it, probably not.
There was a good story in the Washington Post, based on a Netroots Nation meeting, which gave a reasonably good brief explanation of how Obamacare got here and why it will fail.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Liberal activists see Bernie Sanders as champion for causes failed by Obama By David Weigel July 20, 2015
Basically, Obama and the advisers he picked decided that the only way to pass a health care bill was to give the Republicans and the corporations everything they wanted. They struck a deal with the insurance companies, the drug companies, the hospitals, the doctors' organizations, etc. to give them everything they wanted. So you have to buy your Obamacare through a private insurer, instead of having the choice of a public option.
The problem with Obamacare is that the premiums and copayments are enormous. A single person making $27,000 a year would have to pay one month's income a year for the premiums. Then (depending on the plan) the insurance wouldn't kick in until she spent $2,000 or $3,000. Then she might have to pay 20% or 40% of the costs, until she reached the maximum, which is $8,000. It benefits somebody who has more than $8,000 a year of medical expenses.
In other words, you wind up paying twice as much as they do in Canada. And in this country, the burden falls most heavily on the lower middle class. It's a regressive tax.
And what you'll find is that they started to get bad when a lot of welfare programs were released that disincentivized work, disincentivized a stable household, undermined the quality of inner city public education, and a tediously long list of things that really hurt those people. And it was all government action. And it was all with good intentions.
Are you saying that the the center city neighborhoods throughout the country were filled with happy, hard-working black people until Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program came along in the 1960s and gave them government money?
You don't know too much about segregation in the U.S. Black people couldn't even vote in most parts of the formerly Confederate states until the Voting Rights Act of 1964, and even then they were often killed when they tried to register to vote. Black schools were far worse than white schools. When the courts ordered them to integrate their schools, they shut down the public schools entirely and opened private "segregation academies."
The federal government efforts (and money) to improve minority education had good results. Black (and hispanic) math and reading scores rose from 1971-2012, and narrowed the gap with whites. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo...
The reason the "problem" is concentrated in minority districts is that black people started out as slaves, and after they were freed, they were suppressed by the white power structure whenever they showed hard work and skill -- especially when they showed hard work and skill. Read Ida Wells, who was the subject of last week's Google Doodle:
In 1889 Thomas Moss, a friend of Wells, opened the People's Grocery in the "Curve," a black neighborhood just outside the Memphis city limits. It did well and competed with a white-owned grocery store across the street. While Wells was out of town in Natchez, Mississippi, a white mob invaded her friends' store. During the altercation, three white men were shot and injured. Moss, and two other black men, named McDowell and Stewart, were arrested and jailed pending trial. A large white lynch mob stormed the jail and killed the three men.
Yes, the law asks for that. In practice, once every single group asks for a "reasonable" accommodation, sometimes pushing the limit of the definition (but even if it wasnt), it fucking adds up. A lot.
Actually, it doesn't cost a lot.
Myth: Providing accommodations for people with disabilities is expensive.
Fact: The majority of workers with disabilities do not need accommodations to perform their jobs, and for those who do, the cost is usually minimal. According to the Job Accommodation Network (JAN), a service from the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy, 57% of accommodations cost absolutely nothing to make, while the rest typically cost only $500. Moreover, tax incentives are available to help employers cover the costs of accommodations, as well as modifications required to make their businesses accessible to persons with disabilities. http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/f...
Right. And then people like you begin to cry when the government raises taxes to pay for stuff like this.
I just wrote the IRS a check for $4,500. In a strange way, I was glad to pay it. I compared what I was paying to the government with what I was getting from the government, and it was a great deal.
I'd rather pay more in taxes to have the government provide the services I need.
I sent my niece $4,000 to help her pay for college. When Bernie Sanders went to Brooklyn College, it was free (in return for our taxes).
I pay over $400 a month for health insurance. In Canada it would be free (in return for our taxes).
In a well-run country http://www.sanders.senate.gov/... , taxes, in exchange for government services, are the best deal you can get.
In the U.S., unfortunately, the Republicans and centerist Democrats come into office, and say, "Hey, here's all this money in the government treasury. Let's loot it and pass it out to our corporate campaign contributors." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07...http://www.propublica.org/arti...
Then they say, "Government can't do anything. Let's cut taxes."
And all the 4 door sedans that are used as taxis have a wheel chair lift and 20 sq ft of space to secure the rider.
Most Taxis are not Handicapped friendly. They are just Grandma Cars that stink.
This is nothing more than cronyism.
I live in New York City. I have neighbors who are in their 80s and 90s, and I occasionally help them to get to medical appointments. We take a cab. One guy uses a 4-wheel walker. We hail a cab on the street, the cab pulls up to the curb, we put the walker in the trunk, and get into the cab. No problem. People who use wheelchairs do the same thing.
There are some mini-cabs, which aren't allowed in New York City, which are difficult for handicapped users. I was at the physical therapy department of a hospital, and they had an automobile frame set up to help people with broken legs, arthritis and stuff learn how to get into a car. If the car doesn't have enough leg room, they might not be able to sit in it.
Celiac disease has a strong inherited component, and also an environmental (food) component. If somebody had been living in a place where they eat mostly potatoes or rice, and came here and started eating wheat, you'd see more celiac disease. Or if the old country started importing wheat, you'd see more celiac disease.
Interestingly, rheumatoid arthritis was common in America, but rare in Europe until about 1700. It seems that there's something that causes rheumatoid arthritis in America, that traveled to Europe around 1700. One leading candidate is sugar, which changes the bacterial composition of the mouth.
Oh, and a word regarding traditional hybridization: Not the same thing at all -- because it's not like farmers, historically, were somehow incorporating insect DNA into their crops, which, I believe, is what was done with GMO tomatoes.
You were doing OK till then. Actually, the genes for plants and animals are full of DNA for viruses and bacterial that were incorporated into the host DNA.
There was an article in the New Yorker a few years ago that explained how segments of viral DNA were incorporated into the human genome. Once they sequenced the human genome, they could search for viral sequences, and they found a lot. There are lots of DNA viruses that incorporate themselves into human DNA. That's why it's so hard to get rid of herpesviruses and HIV. Usually they target somatic cells, but during human evolution they regularly find their way to the germ line.
You do realize, right, that every GMO is required to undergo years of testing?
Actually, they don't undergo that much testing. If you had a new food that killed 1 in 1,000 rats, you'd have to do a controlled trial with thousands of rats to identify it at the sacred 95% of confidence.
If it killed 1 in 1,000 humans, you'd have to do a controlled trial with thousands of humans, for many years. And there's a good chance you wouldn't notice it. They don't have trials like that. The large-scale toxicity test for GM corn was to feed it to the entire 300 million US population. If there were a rare toxic response, affecting say 1 in 10,000 people, you probably wouldn't notice it. How would you find that?
I was eating GM corn flakes for breakfast without even knowing it. Thanks for the informed consent.
Hormone replacement for older women caused thousands of additional breast cancers, but it took a long time to notice it. X-rays probably cause cancer, but it's very hard to prove.
Unlike anything labeled as Organic or Natural or Dietary Supplement which do not require any testing at all.
The dietary supplements are even less safe. They don't even have to test them on rats. You can buy anything from China that isn't a scheduled drug, call it a dietary supplement, imply some health claims, and sell it at gas stations and grocery stores (like synthetic cannabis). A government agency won't get involved until they start getting reports from emergency rooms. And as a tax-cutting measure, the states have cut back on the health departments that used to follow those things. Fortunately, there are fewer than ~50 deaths a year from dietary supplements. (Unless there are more deaths that we haven't connected to a dietary supplement).
Hybrids have a multi-thousand year safety track record, I think we can call the long term data in on that issue. GMOs do not.
A lot of natural foods contain toxins, allergens, carcinogens -- in small quantities, sure, but we can use genetic engineering to reduce that without losing the flavors, nutrients, and antioxidants. With selective breeding, who knows what you'll get. Using genetic engineering can also reduce the amount or nastiness of pesticides used.
There was the killer potato.
Using conventional breeding techniques, agricultural scientists developed an insect-resistant potato. The potato had insecticidal toxic substances in its skin.
The potato was so toxic to humans that it could kill you.
(I saw this in Science magazine years ago, if you want to look it up.)
There are lots of toxic plants and animals. Toxicity gives them an evolutionary advantage.
There are lots of auto-immune diseases that are probably caused by natural foods that we use every day, or by new foods that some people would import from abroad.
For example, there was no rheumatoid arthritis in Europe before 1700. One well-supported theory is that when people had access to sugar from the new world, it changed the microbial mix in their mouths, favoring bacteria that cause periodontal disease. The immune system responds to the periodontal bacteria, and because of molecular mimicry, it attacks certain tissues in the joints as well. (As I recall, the periodontal bacteria had a short protein sequence that was identical to a protein sequence found in one of the tissues of the joints.)
Peanut allergy is increasing. Something is making them more allergenic. The western way of roasting seems to make certain peanut proteins more allergenic. The Chinese boil peanuts, which aren't as allergenic.
That's a good argument. One of the problems is that it's very difficult to prove safety.
Suppose you wanted to find out if a drug was safe.
If you have a product that kills 1 person in 1,000, you would have to do a randomized controlled trial with thousands of people (or thousands of mice), to identify (or exclude) that problem.
And you'd have to do that study for years, or decades. In fact, you'd have to do a study that lasted a lifetime to see whether it kills someone during their lifetime.
In practice, most drug and nutrition trials last 6 months, and it's rare to find a trial that lasts as long as 4 years -- even though many drugs are taken for a lifetime.
So suppose you wanted to introduce a new food. Suppose you went to the Andes and found that the natives used an unusual tasty grain, which you wanted to market in the US.
How many people would you have to test it on, and how long would the test have to last? Should you test this new grain on people for a lifetime first, before you could sell it?
There are some foods that people in isolated regions eat, which have turned out to be toxic if you eat them for a long time.
This was documented by investigators from the Goldstone Commission, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Ha'aretz, the New York Times, Washington Post, Independent, and others. The Israelis never investigated. I'll tell you what Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor said: They're all lying. Goldstone, AI, HRW, Ha'aretz, NYT, WP, they're all lying. They're all Jews who have gone over to the anti-Semites
Did Goldstone, AI, HRW, Ha'aretz, NYT, and WP see it themselves? They're all quoting the same Palestinian sources, which offered no evidence. No hospital records for the child who was allegedly hospitalised and left disabled, not the child herself, and no bodies or graves for the children allegedly killed.
In other words, Palestinians say that Israelis committed war crimes, and everyone believes them without even asking to see the evidence which must exist if it's true.
Yes, the Goldstone commission, B'Tselem and Amnesty International sent investigators to the location to examine the scene and interview eyewitnesses. So did the newspapers. The BBC sent a crew to the scene and to the hospital (in Egypt, I think) and filmed Samar in a hospital bed. An eyewitness told an investigator that one of the soldiers had been sitting on top of the tank eating potato chips. The investigator found an Israeli potato chip bag on the scene.
The Israelis, for their part, refused to cooperate with the investigators. They didn't talk to the Palestinian eyewitnesses, so they have no way of knowing what actually happened.
This is not just one incident, but part of a pattern. You can search the Goldstone report for "white flag" and find many reliable accounts of Palestinians who were killed while following orders and waving white flags.
There were many incidents, over the occupation, in which there were eyewitnesses, photos, videos, and even testimony by the soldiers involved. There were cases that several members of the international press saw first-hand, like the Gaza beach killings of boys. The Israeli government simply denies it all out of hand.
I've dealt with Israeli officials, and what impressed me was that they lied. They misquoted Palestinian articles in magazines and newspaper interviews about things that you could look up in the library. Some people in public relations believe that you should tell the truth (whenever possible), because once you get caught in a lie, you lose your credibility. The Israeli government doesn't believe that. For example:
http://forward.com/opinion/310... Michael Oren vs. The New York Times Larry Cohler-Esses June 20, 2015 (Book review of Michael B. Oren’s ‘Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide’) In a section entitled, ironically enough, “Hatchet Jobs,” Oren bitterly attacks The New York Times opinion page as the “most malicious,” and goes after its editor, Andrew Rosenthal, with an account of a conversation that sounds absolutely outrageous. Oren’s ire was focused on Rosenthal’s decision to publish a piece by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in which, he writes, “Abbas suggested that the Arabs had accepted the U.N.’s Partition Plan in 1947 while Israel rejected it.” There are three big problems with Oren’s account. The first, and most important, is that nowhere in his piece of May 17, 2011 does Abbas assert that “the Arabs had accepted the U.N.’s Partition Plan in 1947 while Israel rejected it.”
It sounds like you are a diehard supporter of the Likud, and no facts will ever convince you that Israel has committed brutal crimes or that peace with the Arabs is possible. I'm not writing for you, I'm writing for the benefit of other readers who are open to reason.
There are two solutions. One is for Israel to continue on its present unsust
The communists of the USSR did a pretty good job of decapitating the existing Afghan government in an invasion, depopulating the Afghan countryside, driving large numbers of refugees into neighboring countries, putting out booby-traps hidden in toys for children, and using Afghanistan to test its new "yellow rain" mycotoxin (poisonous substances produced by fungi) weapons on the population, and generally engaged in mass slaughter themselves.
But I guess you're just here to admire the bridges the communists built. Such fine bridges, eh?
Unlike you, I like to talk about things I know something about, so let me take the ones I have particular knowledge about.
First, the "yellow rain" story, which was promoted on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, was discredited by every article published in a peer reviewed journal. The "yellow rain" samples, when analyzed by real scientists, turned out to be normal bee feces. Nature, Science and Scientific American were the most prominent magazines that wrote about it. I was following this in some detail at the time. I met Matthew Meselson at a conference, and I met the WSJ reporter who wrote the editorials. Wikipedia has an article which cites lots of sources.
Second, the "booby-trapped toys" story was also discredited. Some well-funded organization published full-page ads in major newspapers, including the New York Times, with an illustration of a doll that was booby-trapped with explosives. It turned out that the illustration was not a booby-trapped doll from Afghanistan, but a mock-up that the American advertising agency had created to "illustrate" the point. Nobody had a real booby-trapped toy from Afghanistan to prove that the Soviets were doing this.
The germ of truth in the story was that, apparently, the Soviets were dropping land mines that had a "butterfly" appearance, and Afghans, including children, would sometimes pick them up and get injured. However, at the same time, the U.S. was also using land mines, and just like the Soviet land mines, people, especially children, would pick them up or walk on them and be injured. That's the purpose of land mines, after all. After the Vietnam war, there were U.S. land mines left over in large areas of Vietnam and other southeast asian countries, which would injure farmers who were trying to cultivate their fields. There was a 1997 treaty to ban land mines, but the U.S. refused to sign it. The U.S. was also supplying land mines to other countries. We're still using land mines in Korea. GWB refused to sign the treaty, but Obama said that he wants to phase out landmines.
I once met a Marine surgeon who volunteered for duty in Iraq, and spent most of his time amputating the legs of Marines who had their feet blown off by Iraqi land mines. We might have all been better off if the U.S. signed the land mine treaty earlier, when Saddam Hussein was still our friend.
The fact remains that after Najibullah invited the Soviets to Afghanistan, they built schools that taught the entire populace, including girls, to read and write. Half of their teachers were women. Many of their doctors were women. They appointed women to positions of authority and responsibility. They built housing, transportation, and a modern infrastructure, at least in Kabul. They were a colonial occupying power, like the British, French, or other colonial powers, and they gave them the benefits (and oppression) of any colonial power. They were a lot more humane than the Belgians.
If the Soviets had remained in Afghanistan, there would be no Taliban. There might not have been a 9/11. We wouldn't have had 2,000 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan (and 10 times as many permanent injuries). The Soviets knew how to keep the Muslim populations under control -- teach them calculus instead of the Koran. Too bad. We could have had an age of peace.
You're rational is the same we followed when arming Afghan jihads against the USSR. That didn't come back to bite us.
The USSR seemed to have done a pretty good job of keeping Afghanistan under control, building housing, schools, educating women, etc. They were less brutal than GWB, and more competent. (Although anybody is more competent than GWB.)
Sure thing, the out is simple. Dismantle the nuclear weapons program, stop supporting terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist.
Do those, all sanctions go away.
Israel could have peace tomorrow if they stopped treating Palestinians the way certain other people treated the Jews in the past.
http://world.time.com/2014/02/... Iranian Foreign Minister Lays Out Condition for Iranian Recognition of Israel Official's language marks a shift from previous rhetoric By Karl Vick / Tel Aviv Feb. 04, 2014
One day after senior Israeli government officials raised eyebrows at an international conference by remaining in the room when Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took the stage to speak, Zarif told a German television interviewer that Tehran could restore diplomatic relations with Israel in the event of a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. “Once the Palestinian problem is solved the conditions for an Iranian recognition of Israel will be possible,” Zarif said in the interview Monday.
The Arab League also offered them a peace plan on similar terms.
When you do something wrong, you're supposed to admit it, then say you're sorry, then promise you'll never do it again, then ask for forgiveness.
You're supposed to teach your children this stuff, shame that nations led by adults have such a hard time with it.
There is no shame in saying you're sorry when you're wrong. Iran might well find a lot of support in Europe if they came clean, the US wouldn't be in any position to push on Iran if they did. Nor would we have any need to.
If you are a Zionist then you are the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world. When did Israel ever admit that they were wrong, much less apologize, or ask for forgiveness, for acting like Nazis?
773. At about 12.50 p.m., Khalid Abd Rabbo, his wife Kawthar, their three daughters, Souad (aged 9), Samar (aged 5) and Amal (aged 3), and his mother, Hajja Souad Abd Rabbo, stepped out of the house, all of them carrying white flags. Less than 10 metres from the door was a tank, turned towards their house. Two soldiers were sitting on top of it having a snack (one was eating chips, the other chocolate, according to one of the witnesses). The family stood still, waiting for orders from the soldiers as to what they should do, but none was given. Without warning, a third soldier emerged from inside the tank and started shooting at the three girls and then also at their grandmother. Several bullets hit Souad in the chest, Amal in the stomach and Samar in the back. Hajja Souad was hit in the lower back and in the left arm.
[The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life. The Israeli government never investigated this event or prosecuted the soldier responsible.]
This was documented by investigators from the Goldstone Commission, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Ha'aretz, the New York Times, Washington Post, Independent, and others. The Israelis never investigated.
I'll tell you what Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor said: They're all lying. Goldstone, AI, HRW, Ha'aretz, NYT, WP, they're all lying. They're all Jews who have gone over to the anti-Semites.
I hope the Israeli government and their well-paid PR firms are reading this and will see that their propaganda isn't working any more.
Israel is also a nuclear-armed terrorist state. Since they own the U.S. government, we'll have to depend on the Europeans to put pressure on them, and the boycott, sanctions and divestment movement seems t
Good corporate management types can spew that stuff on demand. Pacify the angry mobs, and don't promise anything. Hell, that's most of their job.
I don't know if Ellen Pao makes it as a good corporate management type.
Suing your former employer when you don't make the cut is a bold move but pretty risky and it turned out to be a mistake.
If she had left on good terms they could have used their contacts to help her out, which is what usually happens to associates that don't make partner, especially if the firm has any class and has more money than God.
Of course once you reach a certain management level in America, people assume you can handle anything even if you're a complete incompetent, and you can just go from job to job with a trail of disasters behind you. Look at George W. Bush.
Pretty much. Think of how bad it has to be for her to actually be admitting fault? We're talking about a chick that fired people that had to go off to chemo.
If she's apologizing it means that she's afraid. And at this point given her long series of unacceptable moves... that's just blood in the water.
She's a corporate management type. Her apology might have been written by a crisis management PR firm.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they're not the VA... That's just government funding through the universities that uses the VA as test subjects.
The VA is involved to the extent that they provide people with those injuries along with the funding from the federal government to do the work. But the actual brains are supplied by the universities and the private medical firms.
That's not true. I've read the studies. I've talked to the doctors.
What do you know? Have you read the studies?
Riiiight. Which is why every single Republican Senator and Congressman voted against it.
If you read that Washington Post article I linked above, you will see that the complaint of the progressives is that Obama gave the Republicans everything they said they wanted, but they still opposed it. The progressives thought that Obama was making a stupid, unnecessary compromise that wouldn't even work, and they turned out to be right. Even when Obama gave away the store, the Republicans still opposed him in every way they could.
I don't know where you get your idea of "far-left wing." I went to City College of New York at a time when I could sit at one lunchroom table with the Communists, another table with the Trotskyites, and another table with the Socialist Workers Party. Those were the people who were supporting Fidel Castro, fighting against the Vietnam war, and sitting in with Martin Luther King (and getting arrested in the process). So maybe you could call them far-left.
The left wing of the Democratic Party in Congress is probably represented by the Progressive Caucus, which includes Bernie Sanders and John Conyers. I don't know why you call them "far" left, unless it just makes you feel good to throw out inflammatory adjectives.
The Progressive Caucus supports a single-payer, Canadian-style system, where the government replaces the insurance companies, and negotiates with drug companies. That's not Obamacare. The Progressive Caucus members weren't even allowed into Obama's White House Health Care Summit in 2009, until they complained. Obama first promised them a single payer option, and then took it back when Karen Ignani, head of the insurance industry lobbying organization, threatened to pull another "Harry and Louise." Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, was always hostile to the Democratic left and in one famous incident called them "fucking retarded." (Which you can look up on Google.)
Obamacare was modeled on a Heritage Foundation plan. I can blame it on the conservatives, Democrat and Republican:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Busin...
The irony of Republican disapproval of Obamacare
The Democrat's version of health insurance would have been cheaper, simpler and more popular. But we enacted the Republican version. So why are they so upset? Because it an achievement for the Obama administration.
By Robert Reich October 28, 2013
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the...
The Heritage Foundation disowns its baby
1. I don't believe that it is impossible to find equal or superior care for those sorts of injuries outside the VA.
I'd like to know where. All the major research is published by people from the VA (and they collaborate with the best people around the world). I read the studies and I really am impressed by the work of the VA.
Can J Surg. 2015 Jun;58(3):S104-7.
Cervical spine injury in dismounted improvised explosive device trauma.
Taddeo J1, Devine M2, McAlister VC3.
Author information
1The Maine Veterans' Affairs Medical Center, Augusta, Maine.
2The Canadian Armed Forces Health Services, Ottawa, Ont.
3The Canadian Armed Forces Health Services, Ottawa, Ont. and the Department of Surgery, Western University, London, Ont.
PLoS One. 2015 May 11;10(5):e0126110. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0126110. eCollection 2015.
Cognitive Improvement after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Measured with Functional Neuroimaging during the Acute Period.
Wylie GR1, Freeman K2, Thomas A2, Shpaner M2, OKeefe M2, Watts R2, Naylor MR2.
Author information
1Rocco Ortenzio Neuroimaging Center, Kessler Foundation, West Orange, NJ, United States of America; Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Rutgers University Medical School, Newark, NJ, United States of America; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans' Affairs, East Orange, NJ, United States of America.
2Department of Psychiatry, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
JAMA Neurol. 2014 Dec;71(12):1490-7. doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2014.2668.
Dementia risk after traumatic brain injury vs nonbrain trauma: the role of age and severity.
Gardner RC1, Burke JF2, Nettiksimmons J3, Kaup A4, Barnes DE5, Yaffe K6.
Author information
1Memory and Aging Center, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco2Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California.
2Department of Neurology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor4Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Affairs Center for Clinical Management and Research, Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
3Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California5Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco.
4Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California6Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco.
5Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California5Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco6Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisc.
6Memory and Aging Center, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco2Department of Veterans Affairs, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, California5Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of.
Ann Biomed Eng. 2015 May;43(5):1071-88. doi: 10.1007/s10439-014-1171-9. Epub 2014 Oct 25.
Head rotational acceleration characteristics influence behavioral and diffusion tensor imaging outcomes following concussion.
Stemper BD1, Shah AS, Pintar FA, McCrea M, Kurpad SN, Glavaski-Joksimovic A, Olsen C, Budde MD.
Author information
1Department of Neurosurgery, Medical College of Wisconsin, Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Milwaukee, WI, USA, bstemper@mcw.edu.
2. All you're saying here is that the military budget got cut and there we
First, the hospitals do not bid rates generally. They only tell the insurance companies what their price lists are and that is the only place those prices are really negotiated.
Virtually all insurance companies negotiate with all hospitals. http://www.npr.org/sections/he... (You can also look up Steven Brill's articles about the Chargemaster.) That's the way the free market works. If I buy ketchup from Heinz, they'll charge me $5 a bottle. If McDonald's buys ketchup from Heinz, they'll negotiate.
If I needed a certain type of treatment... not right now... but in a week or two... I'd have time to shop around. And the medical system could offer rates just like anything else is offered with rates. The fact that they're not is one of the reasons the market has a hard time controlling costs. Lets say a hospital 400 miles away is willing to do an operation that would cost me 50k where I am for only 25k? Now assuming quality is comparable, I then do a cost benefit analysis...
I've talked to doctors and economists about this. I've read their articles (and written a few myself).
Here's the flaw in your reasoning: "Now assuming quality is comparable"...
You can't possibly tell whether quality is comparable (unless you know as much about medicine as a doctor, and maybe not even then).
For a coronary bypass operation, some surgeons will have a death rate of (say) 1%, and some surgeons will have a death rate of 2%. How do you find out their death rate? Do you think you can call their office and ask their secretary? Try that some day.
Let's assume you can find out their death rate. In socialist U.K., they're required to post their death rates on the hospital web site, so patients can make their own choices. In the U.S., you can sometimes get Medicare data.
Are you going to pick the doctor with the lowest death rate, the way you'd pick a hard drive with the lowest failure rate? That doesn't work.
A British surgeon told me, "It's very easy for me to get good numbers. Just operate on easy cases."
Younger patients have lower death rates. Older patients have higher death rates. Smokers, people with lung disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and other diseases, have higher death rates.
Some doctors specialize in tough cases. So if one surgeon has a 2% death rate, and another has a 1% death rate, the 2% surgeon may be the one who does the tough cases, and the 1% surgeon may be a worse surgeon.
Some people say, "Well, we'll correct for all those risk factors." The problem with that is, there's no way to correct for all those factors. Do you think a surgeon can print out a list for you of all of his patients, with their age, lung function, kidney function, blood sugar, and everything else you need, so that you can compare it to all the other surgeons? Ask his secretary and tell me what she says. Doctors don't even agree on what factors are important, or how much weight to give them. How important is age, smoking, diabetes? Nobody knows.
Surgeons get the best results in patients who are absolutely healthy. That is, they get the best results in patients who don't actually need surgery in the first place. They get the best results with unnecessary surgery. That happens a lot, for example in carotid artery surgery, in prostate cancer surgery, in hysterectomies. The suckers don't know the difference. The surgeon says, "The operation was a success!" The patient says, "This is the doctor who saved my life," and recommends the doctor to his friends.
The best thing that could happen to you is to go to a doctor who examines you and gives you tests and says, "You know, you're healthy. You don't need this surgery." Of course, in the free market, surgeons like that will make less money. So the invisible hand will replace them with surgeons who operate on people who don't nee
Here is the best model I can find for what you'd get in the US.
The VA hospital system. This is a medical system set up for US soldiers in the US. It is entirely operated by the US federal government and it is widely regarded to be some mixture of corrupt and incompetent. There have been quite a few scandals with it recently.
Mostly stuff about putting people on wait lists forever. A lot of soldiers die waiting for treatment in the system.
When I hear "lets socialize the US healthcare system"... I think of the VA hospitals.
I've studied the VA system, and they're getting a bad rap.
First, you have to judge them by their main purpose: When a soldier comes back from Iraq with a brain injury, their job is to keep him alive and get him functioning as well as possible. They do the best job in the world. There is no place in the world that can treat head wounds as well as the U.S. military. Nobody. Same with the guys who have a foot blown off by a land mine.
If some 60-year-old vet comes in with trouble urinating because of an enlarged prostate, they're going to take care of him, yes. But he may have to wait for somebody with a more urgent problem. Like a coronary bypass or stroke.
Second, Congress wanted to cut taxes. But they wanted first-class service from government agencies. They wanted everything but they didn't want to pay for it. So they ordered the VA to cut their waiting times. But they didn't give them the money to hire more doctors to do it. So what do managers do when you tell them they have to do the impossible or they'll be fired? As any MBA will tell you, they cheat. They fudged their appointment records, just as any private business manager in the same situation would do. (Hello Enron?)
Third, the VA system does some of the best medical research in the world. When they do a treatment hundreds of thousands of times a year, they do a study to find out which treatment works better, which hospital gets better results, and which doctors get better results. (No, they don't fire the doctors with worse results, they retrain them.) They do that for heart disease, stroke, cancer, eye disease, amputations, everything. I went to a lot of medical conferences, and they're always talking about "the VA study" in their field, which is usually the best study available.
For example, I just read a study about how the VA was trying to figure out how to give pain-killing drugs to vets in severe pain. If you don't give them enough drugs, they're in pain. If you give them too much, and if you give them opioids, they can die from an overdose. The VA doctors figured out how to optimize it.
So yes, if I had a heart attack outside a VA medical center, I'd feel comfortable that I was getting the best care in the world. I'd trust them to make a tough diagnosis, and to treat a serious, life-threatening disease. If you were crippled, I'd trust them to get you walking again, if anybody could do it.
Don't whine to me because you can't get an appointment this month. Tell Congress to give them enough money to hire more doctors.
Actually, plenty of people do want to cut that budget, but can't for ideological reasons.
The US spends just over 17% of GDP on health care, which is a figure only exceeded by Tuvalu. Most developed countries (e.g. most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan) the figure is around 9-10% of GDP. Even France spends less than 12%.
So, yes, you could cut that figure by a third simply by building a real public health system.
For every dollar in premiums you pay your insurance company, they spend 15-20 cents in administrative costs and profits. (You can see that if you read an insurance company annual report on their web site. The "loss ratio," usually 80-85%, is the money they pass on to the doctor or hospital.)
Then your doctor gets 80 cents. He has to spend another 20 cents in administrative costs to deal with the insurance company. (Compared to less than 5 cents on Medicare.)
So if you just cut out the insurance companies, you'd save 35% right there. Other big expenses here are the cost of drugs, hospital services, and doctor services.
I don't know if Obamacare has helped or will help in any significant way. Given that the AMA supported it, probably not.
There was a good story in the Washington Post, based on a Netroots Nation meeting, which gave a reasonably good brief explanation of how Obamacare got here and why it will fail.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Liberal activists see Bernie Sanders as champion for causes failed by Obama
By David Weigel
July 20, 2015
Basically, Obama and the advisers he picked decided that the only way to pass a health care bill was to give the Republicans and the corporations everything they wanted. They struck a deal with the insurance companies, the drug companies, the hospitals, the doctors' organizations, etc. to give them everything they wanted. So you have to buy your Obamacare through a private insurer, instead of having the choice of a public option.
The problem with Obamacare is that the premiums and copayments are enormous. A single person making $27,000 a year would have to pay one month's income a year for the premiums. Then (depending on the plan) the insurance wouldn't kick in until she spent $2,000 or $3,000. Then she might have to pay 20% or 40% of the costs, until she reached the maximum, which is $8,000. It benefits somebody who has more than $8,000 a year of medical expenses.
In other words, you wind up paying twice as much as they do in Canada. And in this country, the burden falls most heavily on the lower middle class. It's a regressive tax.
And what you'll find is that they started to get bad when a lot of welfare programs were released that disincentivized work, disincentivized a stable household, undermined the quality of inner city public education, and a tediously long list of things that really hurt those people. And it was all government action. And it was all with good intentions.
Are you saying that the the center city neighborhoods throughout the country were filled with happy, hard-working black people until Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program came along in the 1960s and gave them government money?
You don't know too much about segregation in the U.S. Black people couldn't even vote in most parts of the formerly Confederate states until the Voting Rights Act of 1964, and even then they were often killed when they tried to register to vote. Black schools were far worse than white schools. When the courts ordered them to integrate their schools, they shut down the public schools entirely and opened private "segregation academies."
The federal government efforts (and money) to improve minority education had good results. Black (and hispanic) math and reading scores rose from 1971-2012, and narrowed the gap with whites. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo...
The reason the "problem" is concentrated in minority districts is that black people started out as slaves, and after they were freed, they were suppressed by the white power structure whenever they showed hard work and skill -- especially when they showed hard work and skill. Read Ida Wells, who was the subject of last week's Google Doodle:
Yes, the law asks for that. In practice, once every single group asks for a "reasonable" accommodation, sometimes pushing the limit of the definition (but even if it wasnt), it fucking adds up. A lot.
Actually, it doesn't cost a lot.
The disability acts in many countries have created situations of "if the disabled cannot have it, no one can", like ebooks in schools, and this.
Point of fact: Disability laws in the U.S. require a reasonable accommodation.
If a company can put braille numbers on elevator buttons for essentially no additional cost, they have to do it.
If a landlord has a 6-story walkup building, he doesn't have to install an elevator.
Right. And then people like you begin to cry when the government raises taxes to pay for stuff like this.
I just wrote the IRS a check for $4,500. In a strange way, I was glad to pay it. I compared what I was paying to the government with what I was getting from the government, and it was a great deal.
I'd rather pay more in taxes to have the government provide the services I need.
I sent my niece $4,000 to help her pay for college. When Bernie Sanders went to Brooklyn College, it was free (in return for our taxes).
I pay over $400 a month for health insurance. In Canada it would be free (in return for our taxes).
In a well-run country http://www.sanders.senate.gov/... , taxes, in exchange for government services, are the best deal you can get.
In the U.S., unfortunately, the Republicans and centerist Democrats come into office, and say, "Hey, here's all this money in the government treasury. Let's loot it and pass it out to our corporate campaign contributors." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07... http://www.propublica.org/arti...
Then they say, "Government can't do anything. Let's cut taxes."
Right.
And all the 4 door sedans that are used as taxis have a wheel chair lift and 20 sq ft of space to secure the rider.
Most Taxis are not Handicapped friendly. They are just Grandma Cars that stink.
This is nothing more than cronyism.
I live in New York City. I have neighbors who are in their 80s and 90s, and I occasionally help them to get to medical appointments. We take a cab. One guy uses a 4-wheel walker. We hail a cab on the street, the cab pulls up to the curb, we put the walker in the trunk, and get into the cab. No problem. People who use wheelchairs do the same thing.
There are some mini-cabs, which aren't allowed in New York City, which are difficult for handicapped users. I was at the physical therapy department of a hospital, and they had an automobile frame set up to help people with broken legs, arthritis and stuff learn how to get into a car. If the car doesn't have enough leg room, they might not be able to sit in it.
Celiac disease dates back to the 2nd Century and was given its current name in 1856.
Celiac disease has a strong inherited component, and also an environmental (food) component. If somebody had been living in a place where they eat mostly potatoes or rice, and came here and started eating wheat, you'd see more celiac disease. Or if the old country started importing wheat, you'd see more celiac disease.
Interestingly, rheumatoid arthritis was common in America, but rare in Europe until about 1700. It seems that there's something that causes rheumatoid arthritis in America, that traveled to Europe around 1700. One leading candidate is sugar, which changes the bacterial composition of the mouth.
Oh, and a word regarding traditional hybridization: Not the same thing at all -- because it's not like farmers, historically, were somehow incorporating insect DNA into their crops, which, I believe, is what was done with GMO tomatoes.
You were doing OK till then. Actually, the genes for plants and animals are full of DNA for viruses and bacterial that were incorporated into the host DNA.
There was an article in the New Yorker a few years ago that explained how segments of viral DNA were incorporated into the human genome. Once they sequenced the human genome, they could search for viral sequences, and they found a lot. There are lots of DNA viruses that incorporate themselves into human DNA. That's why it's so hard to get rid of herpesviruses and HIV. Usually they target somatic cells, but during human evolution they regularly find their way to the germ line.
You do realize, right, that every GMO is required to undergo years of testing?
Actually, they don't undergo that much testing. If you had a new food that killed 1 in 1,000 rats, you'd have to do a controlled trial with thousands of rats to identify it at the sacred 95% of confidence.
If it killed 1 in 1,000 humans, you'd have to do a controlled trial with thousands of humans, for many years. And there's a good chance you wouldn't notice it. They don't have trials like that. The large-scale toxicity test for GM corn was to feed it to the entire 300 million US population. If there were a rare toxic response, affecting say 1 in 10,000 people, you probably wouldn't notice it. How would you find that?
I was eating GM corn flakes for breakfast without even knowing it. Thanks for the informed consent.
Hormone replacement for older women caused thousands of additional breast cancers, but it took a long time to notice it. X-rays probably cause cancer, but it's very hard to prove.
Unlike anything labeled as Organic or Natural or Dietary Supplement which do not require any testing at all.
The dietary supplements are even less safe. They don't even have to test them on rats. You can buy anything from China that isn't a scheduled drug, call it a dietary supplement, imply some health claims, and sell it at gas stations and grocery stores (like synthetic cannabis). A government agency won't get involved until they start getting reports from emergency rooms. And as a tax-cutting measure, the states have cut back on the health departments that used to follow those things. Fortunately, there are fewer than ~50 deaths a year from dietary supplements. (Unless there are more deaths that we haven't connected to a dietary supplement).
Your DNA is full of viral and bacterial DNA that your ancestors have accumulated over time.
There's gene transfer among species all the time.
Hybrids have a multi-thousand year safety track record, I think we can call the long term data in on that issue. GMOs do not.
A lot of natural foods contain toxins, allergens, carcinogens -- in small quantities, sure, but we can use genetic engineering to reduce that without losing the flavors, nutrients, and antioxidants. With selective breeding, who knows what you'll get. Using genetic engineering can also reduce the amount or nastiness of pesticides used.
There was the killer potato.
Using conventional breeding techniques, agricultural scientists developed an insect-resistant potato. The potato had insecticidal toxic substances in its skin.
The potato was so toxic to humans that it could kill you.
(I saw this in Science magazine years ago, if you want to look it up.)
There are lots of toxic plants and animals. Toxicity gives them an evolutionary advantage.
There are lots of auto-immune diseases that are probably caused by natural foods that we use every day, or by new foods that some people would import from abroad.
For example, there was no rheumatoid arthritis in Europe before 1700. One well-supported theory is that when people had access to sugar from the new world, it changed the microbial mix in their mouths, favoring bacteria that cause periodontal disease. The immune system responds to the periodontal bacteria, and because of molecular mimicry, it attacks certain tissues in the joints as well. (As I recall, the periodontal bacteria had a short protein sequence that was identical to a protein sequence found in one of the tissues of the joints.)
Peanut allergy is increasing. Something is making them more allergenic. The western way of roasting seems to make certain peanut proteins more allergenic. The Chinese boil peanuts, which aren't as allergenic.
That's a good argument. One of the problems is that it's very difficult to prove safety.
Suppose you wanted to find out if a drug was safe.
If you have a product that kills 1 person in 1,000, you would have to do a randomized controlled trial with thousands of people (or thousands of mice), to identify (or exclude) that problem.
And you'd have to do that study for years, or decades. In fact, you'd have to do a study that lasted a lifetime to see whether it kills someone during their lifetime.
In practice, most drug and nutrition trials last 6 months, and it's rare to find a trial that lasts as long as 4 years -- even though many drugs are taken for a lifetime.
So suppose you wanted to introduce a new food. Suppose you went to the Andes and found that the natives used an unusual tasty grain, which you wanted to market in the US.
How many people would you have to test it on, and how long would the test have to last? Should you test this new grain on people for a lifetime first, before you could sell it?
There are some foods that people in isolated regions eat, which have turned out to be toxic if you eat them for a long time.
I do go along with full disclosure, though.
This was documented by investigators from the Goldstone Commission, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Ha'aretz, the New York Times, Washington Post, Independent, and others. The Israelis never investigated. I'll tell you what Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor said: They're all lying. Goldstone, AI, HRW, Ha'aretz, NYT, WP, they're all lying. They're all Jews who have gone over to the anti-Semites
Did Goldstone, AI, HRW, Ha'aretz, NYT, and WP see it themselves? They're all quoting the same Palestinian sources, which offered no evidence. No hospital records for the child who was allegedly hospitalised and left disabled, not the child herself, and no bodies or graves for the children allegedly killed.
In other words, Palestinians say that Israelis committed war crimes, and everyone believes them without even asking to see the evidence which must exist if it's true.
Yes, the Goldstone commission, B'Tselem and Amnesty International sent investigators to the location to examine the scene and interview eyewitnesses. So did the newspapers. The BBC sent a crew to the scene and to the hospital (in Egypt, I think) and filmed Samar in a hospital bed. An eyewitness told an investigator that one of the soldiers had been sitting on top of the tank eating potato chips. The investigator found an Israeli potato chip bag on the scene.
The Israelis, for their part, refused to cooperate with the investigators. They didn't talk to the Palestinian eyewitnesses, so they have no way of knowing what actually happened.
This is not just one incident, but part of a pattern. You can search the Goldstone report for "white flag" and find many reliable accounts of Palestinians who were killed while following orders and waving white flags.
There were many incidents, over the occupation, in which there were eyewitnesses, photos, videos, and even testimony by the soldiers involved. There were cases that several members of the international press saw first-hand, like the Gaza beach killings of boys. The Israeli government simply denies it all out of hand.
I've dealt with Israeli officials, and what impressed me was that they lied. They misquoted Palestinian articles in magazines and newspaper interviews about things that you could look up in the library. Some people in public relations believe that you should tell the truth (whenever possible), because once you get caught in a lie, you lose your credibility. The Israeli government doesn't believe that. For example:
It sounds like you are a diehard supporter of the Likud, and no facts will ever convince you that Israel has committed brutal crimes or that peace with the Arabs is possible. I'm not writing for you, I'm writing for the benefit of other readers who are open to reason.
There are two solutions. One is for Israel to continue on its present unsust
The communists of the USSR did a pretty good job of decapitating the existing Afghan government in an invasion, depopulating the Afghan countryside, driving large numbers of refugees into neighboring countries, putting out booby-traps hidden in toys for children, and using Afghanistan to test its new "yellow rain" mycotoxin (poisonous substances produced by fungi) weapons on the population, and generally engaged in mass slaughter themselves.
But I guess you're just here to admire the bridges the communists built. Such fine bridges, eh?
Unlike you, I like to talk about things I know something about, so let me take the ones I have particular knowledge about.
First, the "yellow rain" story, which was promoted on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, was discredited by every article published in a peer reviewed journal. The "yellow rain" samples, when analyzed by real scientists, turned out to be normal bee feces. Nature, Science and Scientific American were the most prominent magazines that wrote about it. I was following this in some detail at the time. I met Matthew Meselson at a conference, and I met the WSJ reporter who wrote the editorials. Wikipedia has an article which cites lots of sources.
Second, the "booby-trapped toys" story was also discredited. Some well-funded organization published full-page ads in major newspapers, including the New York Times, with an illustration of a doll that was booby-trapped with explosives. It turned out that the illustration was not a booby-trapped doll from Afghanistan, but a mock-up that the American advertising agency had created to "illustrate" the point. Nobody had a real booby-trapped toy from Afghanistan to prove that the Soviets were doing this.
The germ of truth in the story was that, apparently, the Soviets were dropping land mines that had a "butterfly" appearance, and Afghans, including children, would sometimes pick them up and get injured. However, at the same time, the U.S. was also using land mines, and just like the Soviet land mines, people, especially children, would pick them up or walk on them and be injured. That's the purpose of land mines, after all. After the Vietnam war, there were U.S. land mines left over in large areas of Vietnam and other southeast asian countries, which would injure farmers who were trying to cultivate their fields. There was a 1997 treaty to ban land mines, but the U.S. refused to sign it. The U.S. was also supplying land mines to other countries. We're still using land mines in Korea. GWB refused to sign the treaty, but Obama said that he wants to phase out landmines.
I once met a Marine surgeon who volunteered for duty in Iraq, and spent most of his time amputating the legs of Marines who had their feet blown off by Iraqi land mines. We might have all been better off if the U.S. signed the land mine treaty earlier, when Saddam Hussein was still our friend.
The fact remains that after Najibullah invited the Soviets to Afghanistan, they built schools that taught the entire populace, including girls, to read and write. Half of their teachers were women. Many of their doctors were women. They appointed women to positions of authority and responsibility. They built housing, transportation, and a modern infrastructure, at least in Kabul. They were a colonial occupying power, like the British, French, or other colonial powers, and they gave them the benefits (and oppression) of any colonial power. They were a lot more humane than the Belgians.
If the Soviets had remained in Afghanistan, there would be no Taliban. There might not have been a 9/11. We wouldn't have had 2,000 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan (and 10 times as many permanent injuries). The Soviets knew how to keep the Muslim populations under control -- teach them calculus instead of the Koran. Too bad. We could have had an age of peace.
You're rational is the same we followed when arming Afghan jihads against the USSR. That didn't come back to bite us.
The USSR seemed to have done a pretty good job of keeping Afghanistan under control, building housing, schools, educating women, etc. They were less brutal than GWB, and more competent. (Although anybody is more competent than GWB.)
Sure thing, the out is simple. Dismantle the nuclear weapons program, stop supporting terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist.
Do those, all sanctions go away.
Israel could have peace tomorrow if they stopped treating Palestinians the way certain other people treated the Jews in the past.
http://world.time.com/2014/02/...
Iranian Foreign Minister Lays Out Condition for Iranian Recognition of Israel
Official's language marks a shift from previous rhetoric
By Karl Vick / Tel Aviv
Feb. 04, 2014
One day after senior Israeli government officials raised eyebrows at an international conference by remaining in the room when Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took the stage to speak, Zarif told a German television interviewer that Tehran could restore diplomatic relations with Israel in the event of a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. “Once the Palestinian problem is solved the conditions for an Iranian recognition of Israel will be possible,” Zarif said in the interview Monday.
The Arab League also offered them a peace plan on similar terms.
When you do something wrong, you're supposed to admit it, then say you're sorry, then promise you'll never do it again, then ask for forgiveness.
You're supposed to teach your children this stuff, shame that nations led by adults have such a hard time with it.
There is no shame in saying you're sorry when you're wrong. Iran might well find a lot of support in Europe if they came clean, the US wouldn't be in any position to push on Iran if they did. Nor would we have any need to.
If you are a Zionist then you are the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world. When did Israel ever admit that they were wrong, much less apologize, or ask for forgiveness, for acting like Nazis?
This was documented by investigators from the Goldstone Commission, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Ha'aretz, the New York Times, Washington Post, Independent, and others. The Israelis never investigated.
I'll tell you what Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor said: They're all lying. Goldstone, AI, HRW, Ha'aretz, NYT, WP, they're all lying. They're all Jews who have gone over to the anti-Semites.
I hope the Israeli government and their well-paid PR firms are reading this and will see that their propaganda isn't working any more.
Israel is also a nuclear-armed terrorist state. Since they own the U.S. government, we'll have to depend on the Europeans to put pressure on them, and the boycott, sanctions and divestment movement seems t
Good corporate management types can spew that stuff on demand. Pacify the angry mobs, and don't promise anything. Hell, that's most of their job.
I don't know if Ellen Pao makes it as a good corporate management type.
Suing your former employer when you don't make the cut is a bold move but pretty risky and it turned out to be a mistake.
If she had left on good terms they could have used their contacts to help her out, which is what usually happens to associates that don't make partner, especially if the firm has any class and has more money than God.
Of course once you reach a certain management level in America, people assume you can handle anything even if you're a complete incompetent, and you can just go from job to job with a trail of disasters behind you. Look at George W. Bush.
President Pao?
How about I screwed up? Or does the buck not stop at the top at reddit?
We screwed up and some of us will be fired.
Pretty much. Think of how bad it has to be for her to actually be admitting fault? We're talking about a chick that fired people that had to go off to chemo.
If she's apologizing it means that she's afraid. And at this point given her long series of unacceptable moves... that's just blood in the water.
She's a corporate management type. Her apology might have been written by a crisis management PR firm.
Did you do a Google Image search too?
On Yelp, this guy is Deepak Patel http://www.yelp.com/not_recomm...
But at Norwest Venture Partners, he's Sanjay Rao https://angel.co/norwest-ventu...
They also had no complaints at the BBB. http://www.bbb.org/losangeless...
Also, I looked on Google for the lawsuit National Collection Agency, Inc. Vs Link Corporation, Et Al Case Number 1-08-CV-129441
Couldn't find it.