Israel's U.S.-supported policies send the message that the only time the Palestinians will make gains is through arms. The policies penalize peaceful efforts by Fatah, and reward violence by Hamas. Fatah, in 1991, recognized Israel's existence, renounced violence, and agreed to negotiations leading to a Palestinian state. Instead, Israel tripled the number of settlers and Fatah is no closer to a state. Hamas, in 2006, won the election, and refused to recognize Israel's existence or renouce violence. Having seen what happened to Fatah, Hamas refused, and was put under siege. Israeli settlers left Gaza, and Israel returned thousands of prisoners in return for an Israeli captive, which showed Hamas that they could acchieve results from violence. The latest cease-fire rewards Hamas for violence again, by getting Israel to ease collective punishment and extajudicial assassinations (which are against international law anyway). But Israel always ignores the underlying causes -- the denial of human rights and dignity.
http://www.juancole.com/2014/0... The Hateful Likud Charter Calls for Destruction of Any Palestinian State Aug. 4, 2014 By Jonathan Weiler
Since virtually every comment on Hamas in American media includes the assertion that the group's Charter rejects Israel's right to exist, it's worth noting the following from the Likud Platform of 1999:
a. "The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel."
b. "Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem"
c. "The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river."
d. "The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.
There have been some updates to the platform more recently, reflecting Israel's withdrawal of settlements from Gaza in 2005. But the Likud Party has *never* in its statements of principles, accepted a Palestinian State. Its electoral partner, Yisrael Beitenu, has likewise categorically rejected the possibility of an independent Palestinian State, insisting that the idea is nothing more than a ploy to facilitate the destruction of Israel.
The Hamas charter, of course, does more than just reject Israel as a sovereign political entity. It's a vile document that echoes some of the worst anti-Semitic tropes of the modern era. But on the central question of one side denying the other's legitimacy - it's hard to ignore the symmetry between Likud - the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - and Hamas.
Policy Forum Sacred Barriers to Conflict Resolution Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, Richard Davis Resolution of quarrels arising from conflicting sacred values, as in the Middle East, may require concessions that acknowledge the opposition's core concerns
We went to the Middle East in February 2007 to directly probe issues of material trade-offs and symbolic concessions with leaders of the major parties to the Israel-Palestine dispute. We asked 14 interviewees in Syria, Palestine, and Israel to verify statements for citation. No off-the-record statements contradicted these.
Responses were consistent with our previous findings (1), with one important difference. Previously, people with sacred values had responded "No" to the proposed trade-off; "No" accompanied by emotional outrage and increased support for violence to the trade-off coupled with a substantial and credible material incentive; and "Yes, perhaps" to trade-offs that also involve symbolic concessions (of no material benefit) from the other side. Leaders responded in the same way, except that the symbolic concession was not enough in itself, but only a necessary condition to opening serious negotiations involving material issues as well. For example, Musa Abu Marzouk (former chairman, and current deputy chairman, of Hamas) said "No" to a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return; a more emphatic "No, we do not sell ourselves for any amount," when given a trade-off with a substantial material incentive (credible offering of substantial U.S. aid for the rebuilding of Palestinian infrastructure); but "Yes, an apology is important, but only as a beginning. It's not enough, because our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that."
Similarly, Binyamin Netanyahu (former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader in parliament) responded to our question, "Would you seriously consider accepting a two-state solution following the 1967 borders if all major Palestinian factions, including Hamas, were to recognize the right of the Jewish people to an independent state in the region?" with the answer: "Yes, but the Palestinians would have to show that they sincerely mean it, change their textbooks and anti-Semitic characterizations and then allow some border adjustments so that Ben Gurion [Airport] would be out of range of shoulder-fired missiles."
One given in the war against terrorism seems to be that suicide attackers are evil, deluded or homicidal misfits who thrive in poverty, ignorance and anarchy.
(Actually they are well-adjusted, successful, and educated. Reviews the evidence based on interviews with terrorists.)
http://www.theatlantic.com/int... Who Started the Israel-Gaza Conflict? By Robert Wright Nov 16 2012, A summary of events in the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, Nov 8 - Nov 15 By Emily Hauser There's a constant back and forth, and on both sides, there's always something or someone to avenge. According to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as of November 13, Palestinian militants had fired 797 rockets into Israel in the course of 2012 , and according to the Israeli human rights organization Btselem, between January 2009 (the conclusion of the last all-out Gaza war) and September of this year, 25 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, and 314 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces, with six more being killed by Israeli civilians. Wednesday November 14 Reports emerged that Israel has targeted Ahmed Jabari, head of Hamas's military wing; Israel confirmed the assassination, citing his "decade-long terrorist activity," and said that killing was the part of an operation in which the military struck 20 different targets across Gaza. HaAretz [Note: Later reports indicate that Jabari was considering a permanent truce agreement at the time of his assassination]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11... Op-Ed Contributor Israel's Shortsighted Assassination By GERSHON BASKIN Published: November 16, 2012 Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn't just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas's deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt. Gershon Baskin is a co-chairman of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Shalit.
That's a pretty one-sided version of events. Israel denies Gazans airspace, access to their coastline, and blocks imports. Palestinian children are stunted growth because the Israeli government blocked even pasta from coming in.
And yes, Palestinians elected Hamas because they wanted to throw out the existing corrupt party, and since Israelis elected a right winger who said he'd force concessions from Palestinians they voted the same right back.
That's correct. Israel is blockading Gaza. A blockade is an act of war, under international law. A country that is being attacked has a right to defend itself.
I would like both sides to strictly follow international law and abide by humanitarian principles and human rights, but neither side is doing that. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are correct to condemn Hamas for targeting civilians, but they are also correct to condemn Israel for doing the same thing.
The main difference between Hamas and Israel is that Israel kills civilians and says, "We killed them by accident." Hamas kills civilians and says, "We did it deliberately."
Based on many Amnesty International reports, I think the Israelis are lying.
I liked this part near the bottom of the rules (12 f.) "The Sponsor reserves the right to amend the terms and conditions of the official rules at any time, including the rights or obligations of the Contestants and the Sponsor.
So kids, Hurry and send in your multi-million dollar product in good working order and we'll give you a pittance and introduce you to the civil legal system!
Your legal analysis is correct.
I once heard a freelance writer give a talk on writing contracts, and she described the worst contract (for the writer) she had ever seen. It was the Redbook "Writing contest."
Redbook readers were invited to submit short story manuscripts, the winners would get a pittance (and the honor of being the winner), and Redbook would own all the rights.
I realized that Redbook was basically asking people to submit stories on spec, in the hope that they would be chosen out of thousands of entries. If they were chosen, Redbook would own the work, and give them a small fee to print it.
That's what contests are. They ask you to work for nothing, compete with thousands of people, and if they like yours better than all the others, they'll own the work and give you a modest payment.
Spending 6 months or a year (or even a month) for $25,000 -- if they feel like it -- isn't a great deal.
If the FTC wants to secure IOT devices, let them hire a staff to work on it. Or let them award competitive grants.
Their business is not an asset light setup. Their business is to cut out the middle man by any means possible and illegal if it is do required. Also to undercut prices by any means possible, illegal if it is required. First let's ignore the laws concerning the taxi business...
And let's hire some $300 an hour lawyers to come up with reasons why the law is wrong.
And let's hire some lobbyists and pay off some legislators to rewrite the laws our way.
We want to make a PR stunt to show that regulation is killing innovation in the industry and that we're the hip and cool future while our legal team thinks we'll be able to backpedal in time to avoid major economic penalties.
Or, our legal team actually thinks we don't need such a permit and the CA DMV is incorrect in their conclusion.
Or, I'm not paying you $300 an hour to tell me what I can't do. I'm paying you $300 an hour to tell me how to do it.
Lawsuits are expensive, the judgment doesn't pay your lawyer's fees if you win, and if a pedestrian or passenger with horrible damages sues a driver who doesn't have a lot of money, all he can collect is the limit of the insurance policy, which may be only a fraction of the damages. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/0...
New York City had this problem with taxi drivers, so they raised the insurance coverage, and they also changed the partition between the passenger compartment and the driver's compartment, which gave drivers some protection against robbery but also caused some severe facial injuries in minor accidents.
The other problem with your libertarian ideas is that your fellow-travellers, the Republican pro-business conservatives, are working on tort "reform" which makes it more difficult for people who are injured to collect damages commensurate with the injuries.
Workers Compensation is like that. Would you want to lose an arm, and be compensated for a 25% disability under the no-fault disability system with $175 a week? Most people would rather be working in a factory with government regulations that prevents them from losing the arm in the first place.
The other stunt that your corporate masters are pulling is to put "arbitration clauses" into the fine print of contracts that you can sign. https://www.uber.com/legal/ter...
Any lawyer who handles personal injury cases can tell you that it's a lot easier and cheaper to prevent accidents in the first place than to go to court and try to compensate the victim afterwards. The drivers don't care. If they wind up with a million dollar judgment, they'll just go bankrupt or move back to the third-world country they came from.
If he had a heart valve failure, then he wouldn't be able to walk up 5 flights of stairs.
My broader point is that the internet is a great additional resource for medical education (it won't replace textbooks and journals, much less lectures and labs).
But at the end, you need a doctor (sometimes more than one) to decide what the problem is.
There is a movement now to save money by eliminating doctors and delegating much of their job to nurse practitioners and even computers. They're trying to turn patients into "medical consumers" who are supposed to do their own shopping.
That's ridiculous. It's giving us second-class health care.
These triage nurses don't even save money. They have a tendency to tell people to go to the ER.
That's according to a recent study you can find on the internet.
We're denigrating the way David Kenny was making vague claims rather than giving us the critical, specific facts that we need to tell whether Watson is a new toy or actually useful. We're denigrating Kenny for talking like a salesman, not like a scientist.
Statistically, we're seeing that about one third of the time, Watson is proposing an additional diagnosis.
That's great. Statistically, how often does that additional diagnosis turn out to be correct, how often does that additional diagnosis change the way the patient is treated, and how often is the outcome any better?
A British radiologist working in the US described the difference between the 2 systems.
When he was training in the UK, he told his supervisor that he wanted to x-ray a patient. His supervisor said, You already have the diagnosis, and the treatment plan. How will this x-ray change anything? The radiologist realized it wouldn't change anything, so it was useless, and he didn't do it.
In the US, doctors routinely ask him to x-ray patients because they've always done it that way. They get a lot of useless, expensive x-rays. That's the attitude we're denigrating.
It's only a problem (with Watson) if humans wrongfully assume it to be infallible or if Watson gets it wrong so often it's useless. This does not seem to be the case.
That's the question: Does Watson get it wrong so often it's useless? And do people wrongly assume it's infalliable?
The only way to tell is to do a large randomized, controlled trial in which half the doctors are using Watson and half aren't, and see whether the doctors with Watson have better outcomes than the doctors without Watson.
That's the way they study new imaging techniques (which is how they know a lot of imaging is useless).
When they publish a randomized, controlled trial in a major medical journal, then I'll be interested.
Until then, Watson is just making the doctor's job more expensive, complicated and difficult.
Have you ever looked up a disturbing symptom on the Internet? Have you done it not just once, but several times?
If you do a thorough search, you'll find that most symptoms have a differential diagnosis that includes cancer. In other words, the problem with Google searches is massive false positives.
There's a medical student's joke: If your doctor asks you what's wrong with this patient, say, "It's either cancer, an autoimmune disease, or an infection." The joke is that most symptoms could be either cancer, autoimmune disease, or infection.
The problem with medical diagnosis is that most major diseases have overlapping symptoms. Does this patient have heart failure or lung failure? Does this patient have rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, or ankylosing spondylitis? Or is it Wegener's granulomatosis, which is a medical emergency and can cause blindness?
I just read an article about lyme disease. One of the big problems with lyme disease is that it starts with an infection. Then the infection is cleared, and you're left with an autoimmune disease. If it's an infection, the way to treat it is with antibiotics. If it's an autoimmune disease, the way to treat it is with drugs like steroids, which turn the immune system down. But if you treat an infection with steroids, the immune system will be less able to fight an infection.
In New York State (and most states), it's outside the nurses' scope of practice to diagnose disorders. If a nurse diagnoses diseases, she could lose her license. There's a reason for that. Medical students get thousands of hours training seeing patients with different diseases and learning how to diagnose them. Nursing students get hundreds of hours, and their training is not directed at diagnosis. Nurses are pretty smart. They know a lot of biology, chemistry and medicine. But most important, they (usually) know what they don't know.
My health insurer has a nurse telephone hotline. I've tried it a few times, mostly out of curiosity. One day I had some vague symptoms including dizziness and what could be shortness of breath. (Probably from sitting at my desk all day.) I figured more advice is better. I described my symptoms and she said, you should go to the doctor immediately. Go to your own doctor or the emergency room.
I said, what's the problem? What should I tell them when I get to the ER?
She said, you have symptoms of heart failure.
I said, that's impossible. I walk up 5 flights of stairs every week. How did you come to this conclusion?
She said she was using a "decision aid."
I said, what decision aid? I have to tell them when I get to the ER. She was evasive. Finally she admitted that she looked it up on the Internet. I said, where on the Internet? She was even more evasive. I said, is there a blue bar on the top of the page? What does it say in the blue bar?
She said, "Medscape."
I said, I write for Medscape. I wouldn't want people to diagnose a disease based on my stories.
I got one thing out of it. I was able to call my doctor's office and tell them that a nurse had told me to see a doctor immediately. They gave me an appointment immediately.
I told my doctor, I can climb 5 flights of stairs.
He laughed and said, if you can climb 5 flights of stairs, you don't have heart failure.
Conclusion 1: These decision guides and algorithms have been around long before the Internet. I read about them in Scientific American from the early 1970s. The futurists, and computer salesmen, in their irresponsible moments, claimed that they would replace doctors.
They failed. Computer diagnosis has now achieved its rightful place in medicine as the place for doctors to go when they could use more information. But you can only do that if you have the medical training to understand what you're getting, how the algorithm works, and what it's doing. You need doctors, and sometimes specialists, to see whether the results make sense.
If you have a man who can climb 5 flights of stairs, a
There's a 60-year-old woman in Tokyo. She was at the University of Tokyo. She had been diagnosed with leukemia six years ago. She was living, but not healthy. So the University of Tokyo ran her genomic sequence through Watson and it was able to ascertain that they were off by one thing. Actually, she had two strains of leukemia. The did treat her and she is healthy.
This is one anecdote by David Kenny, General Manager of IBM Watson, who has no medical expertise. He's a computer salesman and this is his pitch. Have you ever heard of a computer salesman making a promise that turned out to be an exaggeration?
This is the kind of story I used to see about miracle cures from vitamins or fad diets or Burzynski's Clinic: a vague description ending in a miraculous cure that is impossible to verify.
Kenny doesn't even describe the case. She had "leukemia." What kind of leukemia? There are at least 4 major types of leukemia, and many subtypes.
Some of them have effective treatments, some of them don't.
Some of them have a median survival of 6 months, some of them have a median survival of 20 years. Since she's been alive for 6 years she doesn't have the most deadly type.
It looks as if they found a mutation which suggested that one drug would be more effective than another, which is routine these days. You don't need a supercomputer to do that. You do need a randomized, controlled trial to see if using Watson actually leads to better survival than doctors can get without Watson.
She's healthy? What does "healthy" mean? What does "not healthy" mean? Those aren't medical terms.
If they're serious about this, publish in a medical journal.
You're basically right. I picked colon cancer because that is the one major cancer in which screening really can result in a cure.
The way I learned it, the cancers appear in the inner layer of the colon, and they progress to the outer layers and finally the surrounding tissue. Doctors can screen for them with colonoscopy, and the initial cancer can be removed, sometimes directly during the colonoscopy, and sometimes in a separate operation which might remove more of the colon. Once it spreads outside the colon, though, it can't be cured by surgery any more, and there are no drugs that can cure colon cancer.
I think I've seen long-term studies which showed that people who have the cancer surgically removed in the early stages ultimately live a normal life span, whereas people with the same early stage cancer who don't have it removed go on to develop later stage cancer and die of it within 5-10 years. I admit I can't quickly pull up a citation right now.
Christie Aschwanden had a good story about this in FiveThirtyEight, although it's one of those stories that makes you work for the reward at the end.
Papillary tumors are like turtles -- they move very slowly and never pose an escape risk. They don't need screening, because they will never cause trouble. Then there are rabbits, which are eager to hop away to other parts of the body, but can be confined if they're found and fenced. These are the cancers that can be helped by early detection and treatment. Birds, on the other hand, are so flighty and quick that they can't be confined. Screening makes no difference for bird cancers, because they're so aggressive that they can't be detected before they've begun their deadly course.
No cancer screening has ever eliminated the majority of cancer deaths. Instead, the best screening can do is reign in the rabbits. Birds remain unstoppable, and they're the ones responsible for most cancer deaths
Unfortunately the 21st Century Cures Act will encourage the FDA to approve treatments based not on randomized, controlled trials, but on weaker evidence, such as observational studies, case studies, anecdotes, and testimony by patient groups financed by the drug companies.
Sometimes you read a medical case history and the doctor says, "There are no randomized, controlled trials to demonstrate effectiveness, so it is treated empirically." Because of the 21st Century Cures Act, you'll now see this more and more. We won't know what the effective treatments are.
In this case, they were surgically removing large tumors that were infiltrated with T cells.
The T cells normally attack cancer cells, but they couldn't do it because the cancer cells had established a defense mechanism.
They were trying to overcome the death mechanism and train the T cells to attack the cancer.
For that they needed big tumors with a lot of T cells.
At first, they did a biopsy of her tumors to see whether she had enough T cells to make the treatment work. She didn't have enough T cells. If they had tried it, even if their theory was correct, the treatment would have failed.
Then her x-rays showed that her tumor had grown, so her doctor sent them in to the researchers. They did another biopsy, and she had a lot of T cells infiltrating the tumor -- enough to make the treatment work. That's why they accepted her in the trial.
I'm writing this from memory. I read the paper and a few articles about it, but I'm not going to read it again.
I'm pretty sure techniques very similar to this have been available in France for more than a decade. So maybe the story should be that the slow U.S. regulatory process for medical procedures is a decade behind as opposed to framing it as brand new cutting-edge technology.
Not true. I follow French medical science -- everybody in medicine does. Much of their work is excellent, but they don't hide it. They talk about it at international conferences and publish their results in major journals. Like everything else in medicine, when the French come up with a good idea, the rest of the world picks it up.
For that matter, when a French scientist comes up with a good idea, graduate students all over the world want to study in his lab, just like French grad students want to study in other labs worldwide. So a lot of the cutting-edge work is by international teams. You can see that by searching Youtube for Dance Your PhD http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
Cancer immunology is a big field. Everybody's trying to make it work. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Bone marrow transplants (actually blood cell transplants) are standard now for some leukemias, and fairly effective. This specific treatment has never been done before, not in France, or anywhere.
It's also not true that the European regulatory agencies approve drugs faster than the US FDA:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... The 21st Century Cures Act â" Will It Take Us Back in Time? Jerry Avorn and Aaron S. Kesselheim N Engl J Med 2015; 372:2473-2475 June 25, 2015 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1506964
An underlying premise of the bill is the need to accelerate approval for new products, but this process is already quite efficient. A third of new drugs are currently approved on the basis of a single pivotal trial; the median size for all pivotal trials is just 760 patients. More than two thirds of new drugs are approved on the basis of studies lasting 6 months or less â" a potential problem for medications designed to be taken for a lifetime. Once the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) starts its review, it approves new medications about as quickly as any regulatory agency in the world, evaluating nearly all new drug applications within 6 to 10 months, an impressive turnaround for such complex assessments.
Especially in the security field, people have always taken government jobs for a while in order to leave for a better-paying private career.
There's a whole network of ex-police, FBI, and security officials working for corporations and private security services. VP in charge of security is a well-paying job.
Back in the 1990s, I met a guy from the New York State police department who had established the state's first computer crime division. After his talk, he told me that he was planning to work for the police for a while and then look for a better-paying career in the private sector.
At the time, he was not concerned with hacking of a local teenager's bulletin board. He was going after big-dollar computer crimes. If it didn't meet a financial threshold, they wouldn't pursue it. It seemed like he was most interested in developing relationships with people who would hire him at a good salary after he left government.
It makes economic sense, but not a lot of dedication to public service.
Your entire rant glosses over the very real fact that death certificates are total bullshit. NO ONE ever puts the real cause of death down because no one wants to get sued or get entangled in the ensuing mess. So the standard practice is to put down heart disease or cancer regardless of actual cause.
This measure would be a considerable deviation from current practice.
Truth in death reporting would actually be nice. It will probably set off a shit storm of litigation though.
There are many reasons why people don't put down the "real" cause of death on a death certificate.
One reason is that they don't know the cause of death. You can't confidently determine the cause of death without an autopsy, and sometimes not even then.
They have an immediate cause of death, and an underlying cause of death, and usually several conditions that the patient suffered from, most of which could have contributed to the death.
For example, the immediate cause of death could be heart failure, with an underlying cause of cancer. A 90-year-old man would commonly be suffering from heart disease, cancer, atherosclerosis, and diabetes, in the presence of several bacteria that turn up in the lab. What caused the death? How much time and money do you want to spend to figure it out? Can you figure it out? What difference would it make?
One of the journals, I think JAMA Internal Medicine (I don't have time to find the citation), had an article by a doctor who described how the coronor's office called him up about an elderly patient who had visited this doctor once and recently died. The coronor was trying to figure out how to fill out the death certificate. If they had a good reason, they wouldn't need an autopsy, which the family was trying to avoid. Finally the doctor said, His heart stopped beating, right? Put down heart failure. That's what they did.
I remember reading the death statistics from prostate cancer in the US, which has reasonably accurate reporting. After PSA testing started, the death rate from prostate cancer suddenly increased for a couple of years. It wasn't because they found more prostate cancer. It was probably because doctors and medical examiners were more aware of prostate cancer and more likely to think of it as a cause of death, rather than heart disease.
Here perhaps this will help you. This is what other countries have managed to agree upon as a notification regime.
(Sigh.) Here's an internet phenomenon. Somebody does a Google search, finds something he doesn't understand, and pastes it into a comment.
This isn't a list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, it's a list of reportable emerging tropical diseases. You don't seem to understand the difference between bacteria and viruses.
This list doesn't even include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), or Clostridium difficile, which is what we're talking about. http://www.reuters.com/investi...
Let me guess: You never took a bacteriology course in your life, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Historically, Zionism was a nationalist movement formed by German Jews on the model of 19th century German nationalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11...
Op-Ed Contributor
America's Failed Palestinian Policy
By YOUSEF MUNAYYER
November 23, 2012
Israel's U.S.-supported policies send the message that the only time the Palestinians will make gains is through arms. The policies penalize peaceful efforts by Fatah, and reward violence by Hamas. Fatah, in 1991, recognized Israel's existence, renounced violence, and agreed to negotiations leading to a Palestinian state. Instead, Israel tripled the number of settlers and Fatah is no closer to a state. Hamas, in 2006, won the election, and refused to recognize Israel's existence or renouce violence. Having seen what happened to Fatah, Hamas refused, and was put under siege. Israeli settlers left Gaza, and Israel returned thousands of prisoners in return for an Israeli captive, which showed Hamas that they could acchieve results from violence. The latest cease-fire rewards Hamas for violence again, by getting Israel to ease collective punishment and extajudicial assassinations (which are against international law anyway). But Israel always ignores the underlying causes -- the denial of human rights and dignity.
http://www.juancole.com/2014/0...
The Hateful Likud Charter Calls for Destruction of Any Palestinian
State
Aug. 4, 2014
By Jonathan Weiler
Since virtually every comment on Hamas in American media includes the assertion that the group's Charter rejects Israel's right to exist, it's worth noting the following from the Likud Platform of 1999:
a. "The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel."
b. "Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem"
c. "The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river."
d. "The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.
There have been some updates to the platform more recently, reflecting Israel's withdrawal of settlements from Gaza in 2005. But the Likud Party has *never* in its statements of principles, accepted a Palestinian State. Its electoral partner, Yisrael Beitenu, has likewise categorically rejected the possibility of an independent Palestinian State, insisting that the idea is nothing more than a ploy to facilitate the destruction of Israel.
The Hamas charter, of course, does more than just reject Israel as a sovereign political entity. It's a vile document that echoes some of the worst anti-Semitic tropes of the modern era. But on the central question of one side denying the other's legitimacy - it's hard to ignore the symmetry between Likud - the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - and Hamas.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
Science 24 August 2007:
Vol. 317 no. 5841 pp. 1039-1040
DOI: 10.1126/science.1144241
Policy Forum
Sacred Barriers to Conflict Resolution
Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, Richard Davis
Resolution of quarrels arising from conflicting sacred values, as in the Middle East, may require concessions that acknowledge the opposition's core concerns
We went to the Middle East in February 2007 to directly probe issues of material trade-offs and symbolic concessions with leaders of the major parties to the Israel-Palestine dispute. We asked 14 interviewees in Syria, Palestine, and Israel to verify statements for citation. No off-the-record statements contradicted these.
Responses were consistent with our previous findings (1), with one important difference. Previously, people with sacred values had responded "No" to the proposed trade-off; "No" accompanied by emotional outrage and increased support for violence to the trade-off coupled with a substantial and credible material incentive; and "Yes, perhaps" to trade-offs that also involve symbolic concessions (of no material benefit) from the other side. Leaders responded in the same way, except that the symbolic concession was not enough in itself, but only a necessary condition to opening serious negotiations involving material issues as well. For example, Musa Abu Marzouk (former chairman, and current deputy chairman, of Hamas) said "No" to a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return; a more emphatic "No, we do not sell ourselves for any amount," when given a trade-off with a substantial material incentive (credible offering of substantial U.S. aid for the rebuilding of Palestinian infrastructure); but "Yes, an apology is important, but only as a beginning. It's not enough, because our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that."
Similarly, Binyamin Netanyahu (former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader in parliament) responded to our question, "Would you seriously consider accepting a two-state solution following the 1967 borders if all major Palestinian factions, including Hamas, were to recognize the right of the Jewish people to an independent state in the region?" with the answer: "Yes, but the Palestinians would have to show that they sincerely mean it, change their textbooks and anti-Semitic characterizations and then allow some border adjustments so that Ben Gurion [Airport] would be out of range of shoulder-fired missiles."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05...
Who Wants to Be a Martyr?
By Scott Atran
May 5, 2003
One given in the war against terrorism seems to be that suicide attackers are evil, deluded or homicidal misfits who thrive in poverty, ignorance and anarchy.
(Actually they are well-adjusted, successful, and educated. Reviews the evidence based on interviews with terrorists.)
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...
Who Started the Israel-Gaza Conflict?
By Robert Wright
Nov 16 2012,
A summary of events in the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, Nov 8 - Nov 15
By Emily Hauser
There's a constant back and forth, and on both sides, there's always something or someone to avenge.
According to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as of November 13, Palestinian militants had fired 797 rockets into Israel in the course of 2012 , and according to the Israeli human rights organization Btselem, between January 2009 (the conclusion of the last all-out Gaza war) and September of this year, 25 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, and 314 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces, with six more being killed by Israeli civilians.
Wednesday November 14
Reports emerged that Israel has targeted Ahmed Jabari, head of Hamas's military wing; Israel confirmed the assassination, citing his "decade-long terrorist activity," and said that killing was the part of an operation in which the military struck 20 different targets across Gaza. HaAretz [Note: Later reports indicate that Jabari was considering a permanent truce agreement at the time of his assassination]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11...
Op-Ed Contributor
Israel's Shortsighted Assassination
By GERSHON BASKIN
Published: November 16, 2012
Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn't just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas's deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.
Gershon Baskin is a co-chairman of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Shalit.
That's a pretty one-sided version of events. Israel denies Gazans airspace, access to their coastline, and blocks imports. Palestinian children are stunted growth because the Israeli government blocked even pasta from coming in.
And yes, Palestinians elected Hamas because they wanted to throw out the existing corrupt party, and since Israelis elected a right winger who said he'd force concessions from Palestinians they voted the same right back.
That's correct. Israel is blockading Gaza. A blockade is an act of war, under international law. A country that is being attacked has a right to defend itself.
I would like both sides to strictly follow international law and abide by humanitarian principles and human rights, but neither side is doing that. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are correct to condemn Hamas for targeting civilians, but they are also correct to condemn Israel for doing the same thing.
The main difference between Hamas and Israel is that Israel kills civilians and says, "We killed them by accident." Hamas kills civilians and says, "We did it deliberately."
Based on many Amnesty International reports, I think the Israelis are lying.
I liked this part near the bottom of the rules (12 f.)
"The Sponsor reserves the right to amend the terms and conditions of the official rules at any time, including the rights or obligations of the Contestants and the Sponsor.
So kids, Hurry and send in your multi-million dollar product in good working order and we'll give you a pittance and introduce you to the civil legal system!
Your legal analysis is correct.
I once heard a freelance writer give a talk on writing contracts, and she described the worst contract (for the writer) she had ever seen. It was the Redbook "Writing contest."
Redbook readers were invited to submit short story manuscripts, the winners would get a pittance (and the honor of being the winner), and Redbook would own all the rights.
I realized that Redbook was basically asking people to submit stories on spec, in the hope that they would be chosen out of thousands of entries. If they were chosen, Redbook would own the work, and give them a small fee to print it.
That's what contests are. They ask you to work for nothing, compete with thousands of people, and if they like yours better than all the others, they'll own the work and give you a modest payment.
Spending 6 months or a year (or even a month) for $25,000 -- if they feel like it -- isn't a great deal.
If the FTC wants to secure IOT devices, let them hire a staff to work on it. Or let them award competitive grants.
Their business is not an asset light setup. Their business is to cut out the middle man by any means possible and illegal if it is do required. Also to undercut prices by any means possible, illegal if it is required.
First let's ignore the laws concerning the taxi business...
And let's hire some $300 an hour lawyers to come up with reasons why the law is wrong.
And let's hire some lobbyists and pay off some legislators to rewrite the laws our way.
We want to make a PR stunt to show that regulation is killing innovation in the industry and that we're the hip and cool future while our legal team thinks we'll be able to backpedal in time to avoid major economic penalties.
Or, our legal team actually thinks we don't need such a permit and the CA DMV is incorrect in their conclusion.
Or, I'm not paying you $300 an hour to tell me what I can't do. I'm paying you $300 an hour to tell me how to do it.
relatively safe before they get on the road
No it doesn't. Besides, liability laws do that.
Have you ever sued anybody?
Lawsuits are expensive, the judgment doesn't pay your lawyer's fees if you win, and if a pedestrian or passenger with horrible damages sues a driver who doesn't have a lot of money, all he can collect is the limit of the insurance policy, which may be only a fraction of the damages. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/0...
New York City had this problem with taxi drivers, so they raised the insurance coverage, and they also changed the partition between the passenger compartment and the driver's compartment, which gave drivers some protection against robbery but also caused some severe facial injuries in minor accidents.
The other problem with your libertarian ideas is that your fellow-travellers, the Republican pro-business conservatives, are working on tort "reform" which makes it more difficult for people who are injured to collect damages commensurate with the injuries.
Workers Compensation is like that. Would you want to lose an arm, and be compensated for a 25% disability under the no-fault disability system with $175 a week? Most people would rather be working in a factory with government regulations that prevents them from losing the arm in the first place.
The other stunt that your corporate masters are pulling is to put "arbitration clauses" into the fine print of contracts that you can sign. https://www.uber.com/legal/ter...
Any lawyer who handles personal injury cases can tell you that it's a lot easier and cheaper to prevent accidents in the first place than to go to court and try to compensate the victim afterwards. The drivers don't care. If they wind up with a million dollar judgment, they'll just go bankrupt or move back to the third-world country they came from.
If he had a heart valve failure, then he wouldn't be able to walk up 5 flights of stairs.
My broader point is that the internet is a great additional resource for medical education (it won't replace textbooks and journals, much less lectures and labs).
But at the end, you need a doctor (sometimes more than one) to decide what the problem is.
There is a movement now to save money by eliminating doctors and delegating much of their job to nurse practitioners and even computers. They're trying to turn patients into "medical consumers" who are supposed to do their own shopping.
That's ridiculous. It's giving us second-class health care.
These triage nurses don't even save money. They have a tendency to tell people to go to the ER.
That's according to a recent study you can find on the internet.
That's right.
I expect that an experienced oncologist could have done the same with the information in his brain, without the drudgery.
All he has to say is, "Let's order that leukemia DNA test panel."
You got it. Out of mod points, sorry.
We're denigrating the way David Kenny was making vague claims rather than giving us the critical, specific facts that we need to tell whether Watson is a new toy or actually useful. We're denigrating Kenny for talking like a salesman, not like a scientist.
Statistically, we're seeing that about one third of the time, Watson is proposing an additional diagnosis.
That's great. Statistically, how often does that additional diagnosis turn out to be correct, how often does that additional diagnosis change the way the patient is treated, and how often is the outcome any better?
A British radiologist working in the US described the difference between the 2 systems.
When he was training in the UK, he told his supervisor that he wanted to x-ray a patient. His supervisor said, You already have the diagnosis, and the treatment plan. How will this x-ray change anything? The radiologist realized it wouldn't change anything, so it was useless, and he didn't do it.
In the US, doctors routinely ask him to x-ray patients because they've always done it that way. They get a lot of useless, expensive x-rays. That's the attitude we're denigrating.
It's only a problem (with Watson) if humans wrongfully assume it to be infallible or if Watson gets it wrong so often it's useless. This does not seem to be the case.
That's the question: Does Watson get it wrong so often it's useless? And do people wrongly assume it's infalliable?
The only way to tell is to do a large randomized, controlled trial in which half the doctors are using Watson and half aren't, and see whether the doctors with Watson have better outcomes than the doctors without Watson.
That's the way they study new imaging techniques (which is how they know a lot of imaging is useless).
When they publish a randomized, controlled trial in a major medical journal, then I'll be interested.
Until then, Watson is just making the doctor's job more expensive, complicated and difficult.
Have you ever looked up a disturbing symptom on the Internet? Have you done it not just once, but several times?
If you do a thorough search, you'll find that most symptoms have a differential diagnosis that includes cancer. In other words, the problem with Google searches is massive false positives.
There's a medical student's joke: If your doctor asks you what's wrong with this patient, say, "It's either cancer, an autoimmune disease, or an infection." The joke is that most symptoms could be either cancer, autoimmune disease, or infection.
The problem with medical diagnosis is that most major diseases have overlapping symptoms. Does this patient have heart failure or lung failure? Does this patient have rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, or ankylosing spondylitis? Or is it Wegener's granulomatosis, which is a medical emergency and can cause blindness?
I just read an article about lyme disease. One of the big problems with lyme disease is that it starts with an infection. Then the infection is cleared, and you're left with an autoimmune disease. If it's an infection, the way to treat it is with antibiotics. If it's an autoimmune disease, the way to treat it is with drugs like steroids, which turn the immune system down. But if you treat an infection with steroids, the immune system will be less able to fight an infection.
In New York State (and most states), it's outside the nurses' scope of practice to diagnose disorders. If a nurse diagnoses diseases, she could lose her license. There's a reason for that. Medical students get thousands of hours training seeing patients with different diseases and learning how to diagnose them. Nursing students get hundreds of hours, and their training is not directed at diagnosis. Nurses are pretty smart. They know a lot of biology, chemistry and medicine. But most important, they (usually) know what they don't know.
My health insurer has a nurse telephone hotline. I've tried it a few times, mostly out of curiosity. One day I had some vague symptoms including dizziness and what could be shortness of breath. (Probably from sitting at my desk all day.) I figured more advice is better. I described my symptoms and she said, you should go to the doctor immediately. Go to your own doctor or the emergency room.
I said, what's the problem? What should I tell them when I get to the ER?
She said, you have symptoms of heart failure.
I said, that's impossible. I walk up 5 flights of stairs every week. How did you come to this conclusion?
She said she was using a "decision aid."
I said, what decision aid? I have to tell them when I get to the ER. She was evasive. Finally she admitted that she looked it up on the Internet. I said, where on the Internet? She was even more evasive. I said, is there a blue bar on the top of the page? What does it say in the blue bar?
She said, "Medscape."
I said, I write for Medscape. I wouldn't want people to diagnose a disease based on my stories.
I got one thing out of it. I was able to call my doctor's office and tell them that a nurse had told me to see a doctor immediately. They gave me an appointment immediately.
I told my doctor, I can climb 5 flights of stairs.
He laughed and said, if you can climb 5 flights of stairs, you don't have heart failure.
Conclusion 1: These decision guides and algorithms have been around long before the Internet. I read about them in Scientific American from the early 1970s. The futurists, and computer salesmen, in their irresponsible moments, claimed that they would replace doctors.
They failed. Computer diagnosis has now achieved its rightful place in medicine as the place for doctors to go when they could use more information. But you can only do that if you have the medical training to understand what you're getting, how the algorithm works, and what it's doing. You need doctors, and sometimes specialists, to see whether the results make sense.
If you have a man who can climb 5 flights of stairs, a
There's a 60-year-old woman in Tokyo. She was at the University of Tokyo. She had been diagnosed with leukemia six years ago. She was living, but not healthy. So the University of Tokyo ran her genomic sequence through Watson and it was able to ascertain that they were off by one thing. Actually, she had two strains of leukemia. The did treat her and she is healthy.
This is one anecdote by David Kenny, General Manager of IBM Watson, who has no medical expertise. He's a computer salesman and this is his pitch. Have you ever heard of a computer salesman making a promise that turned out to be an exaggeration?
This is the kind of story I used to see about miracle cures from vitamins or fad diets or Burzynski's Clinic: a vague description ending in a miraculous cure that is impossible to verify.
Kenny doesn't even describe the case. She had "leukemia." What kind of leukemia? There are at least 4 major types of leukemia, and many subtypes.
Some of them have effective treatments, some of them don't.
Some of them have a median survival of 6 months, some of them have a median survival of 20 years. Since she's been alive for 6 years she doesn't have the most deadly type.
It looks as if they found a mutation which suggested that one drug would be more effective than another, which is routine these days. You don't need a supercomputer to do that. You do need a randomized, controlled trial to see if using Watson actually leads to better survival than doctors can get without Watson.
She's healthy? What does "healthy" mean? What does "not healthy" mean? Those aren't medical terms.
If they're serious about this, publish in a medical journal.
You're basically right. I picked colon cancer because that is the one major cancer in which screening really can result in a cure.
The way I learned it, the cancers appear in the inner layer of the colon, and they progress to the outer layers and finally the surrounding tissue. Doctors can screen for them with colonoscopy, and the initial cancer can be removed, sometimes directly during the colonoscopy, and sometimes in a separate operation which might remove more of the colon. Once it spreads outside the colon, though, it can't be cured by surgery any more, and there are no drugs that can cure colon cancer.
I think I've seen long-term studies which showed that people who have the cancer surgically removed in the early stages ultimately live a normal life span, whereas people with the same early stage cancer who don't have it removed go on to develop later stage cancer and die of it within 5-10 years. I admit I can't quickly pull up a citation right now.
Christie Aschwanden had a good story about this in FiveThirtyEight, although it's one of those stories that makes you work for the reward at the end.
Unfortunately the 21st Century Cures Act will encourage the FDA to approve treatments based not on randomized, controlled trials, but on weaker evidence, such as observational studies, case studies, anecdotes, and testimony by patient groups financed by the drug companies.
Here's an article that rounds up some of the other articles about it. http://www.healthnewsreview.or...
Sometimes you read a medical case history and the doctor says, "There are no randomized, controlled trials to demonstrate effectiveness, so it is treated empirically." Because of the 21st Century Cures Act, you'll now see this more and more. We won't know what the effective treatments are.
Particularly in colon cancer.
Colon cancer is curable with surgery in the early stages, but uncurable by anything after it metastasizes.
After metastases, they're trying to extend life for another 5 or 10 years.
In this case, they were surgically removing large tumors that were infiltrated with T cells.
The T cells normally attack cancer cells, but they couldn't do it because the cancer cells had established a defense mechanism.
They were trying to overcome the death mechanism and train the T cells to attack the cancer.
For that they needed big tumors with a lot of T cells.
At first, they did a biopsy of her tumors to see whether she had enough T cells to make the treatment work. She didn't have enough T cells. If they had tried it, even if their theory was correct, the treatment would have failed.
Then her x-rays showed that her tumor had grown, so her doctor sent them in to the researchers. They did another biopsy, and she had a lot of T cells infiltrating the tumor -- enough to make the treatment work. That's why they accepted her in the trial.
I'm writing this from memory. I read the paper and a few articles about it, but I'm not going to read it again.
I'm pretty sure techniques very similar to this have been available in France for more than a decade. So maybe the story should be that the slow U.S. regulatory process for medical procedures is a decade behind as opposed to framing it as brand new cutting-edge technology.
Not true. I follow French medical science -- everybody in medicine does. Much of their work is excellent, but they don't hide it. They talk about it at international conferences and publish their results in major journals. Like everything else in medicine, when the French come up with a good idea, the rest of the world picks it up.
For that matter, when a French scientist comes up with a good idea, graduate students all over the world want to study in his lab, just like French grad students want to study in other labs worldwide. So a lot of the cutting-edge work is by international teams. You can see that by searching Youtube for Dance Your PhD http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
Cancer immunology is a big field. Everybody's trying to make it work. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Bone marrow transplants (actually blood cell transplants) are standard now for some leukemias, and fairly effective. This specific treatment has never been done before, not in France, or anywhere.
It's also not true that the European regulatory agencies approve drugs faster than the US FDA:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
The 21st Century Cures Act â" Will It Take Us Back in Time?
Jerry Avorn and Aaron S. Kesselheim
N Engl J Med 2015; 372:2473-2475
June 25, 2015
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1506964
An underlying premise of the bill is the need to accelerate approval for new products, but this process is already quite efficient. A third of new drugs are currently approved on the basis of a single pivotal trial; the median size for all pivotal trials is just 760 patients. More than two thirds of new drugs are approved on the basis of studies lasting 6 months or less â" a potential problem for medications designed to be taken for a lifetime. Once the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) starts its review, it approves new medications about as quickly as any regulatory agency in the world, evaluating nearly all new drug applications within 6 to 10 months, an impressive turnaround for such complex assessments.
Especially in the security field, people have always taken government jobs for a while in order to leave for a better-paying private career.
There's a whole network of ex-police, FBI, and security officials working for corporations and private security services. VP in charge of security is a well-paying job.
Back in the 1990s, I met a guy from the New York State police department who had established the state's first computer crime division. After his talk, he told me that he was planning to work for the police for a while and then look for a better-paying career in the private sector.
At the time, he was not concerned with hacking of a local teenager's bulletin board. He was going after big-dollar computer crimes. If it didn't meet a financial threshold, they wouldn't pursue it. It seemed like he was most interested in developing relationships with people who would hire him at a good salary after he left government.
It makes economic sense, but not a lot of dedication to public service.
Your entire rant glosses over the very real fact that death certificates are total bullshit. NO ONE ever puts the real cause of death down because no one wants to get sued or get entangled in the ensuing mess. So the standard practice is to put down heart disease or cancer regardless of actual cause.
This measure would be a considerable deviation from current practice.
Truth in death reporting would actually be nice. It will probably set off a shit storm of litigation though.
There are many reasons why people don't put down the "real" cause of death on a death certificate.
One reason is that they don't know the cause of death. You can't confidently determine the cause of death without an autopsy, and sometimes not even then.
They have an immediate cause of death, and an underlying cause of death, and usually several conditions that the patient suffered from, most of which could have contributed to the death.
For example, the immediate cause of death could be heart failure, with an underlying cause of cancer. A 90-year-old man would commonly be suffering from heart disease, cancer, atherosclerosis, and diabetes, in the presence of several bacteria that turn up in the lab. What caused the death? How much time and money do you want to spend to figure it out? Can you figure it out? What difference would it make?
One of the journals, I think JAMA Internal Medicine (I don't have time to find the citation), had an article by a doctor who described how the coronor's office called him up about an elderly patient who had visited this doctor once and recently died. The coronor was trying to figure out how to fill out the death certificate. If they had a good reason, they wouldn't need an autopsy, which the family was trying to avoid. Finally the doctor said, His heart stopped beating, right? Put down heart failure. That's what they did.
I remember reading the death statistics from prostate cancer in the US, which has reasonably accurate reporting. After PSA testing started, the death rate from prostate cancer suddenly increased for a couple of years. It wasn't because they found more prostate cancer. It was probably because doctors and medical examiners were more aware of prostate cancer and more likely to think of it as a cause of death, rather than heart disease.
Here perhaps this will help you. This is what other countries have managed to agree upon as a notification regime.
(Sigh.) Here's an internet phenomenon. Somebody does a Google search, finds something he doesn't understand, and pastes it into a comment.
This isn't a list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, it's a list of reportable emerging tropical diseases. You don't seem to understand the difference between bacteria and viruses.
This list doesn't even include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), or Clostridium difficile, which is what we're talking about. http://www.reuters.com/investi...
Let me guess: You never took a bacteriology course in your life, right?