There have been informal surveys that ask if you prefer Obamacare or the Patient protection and affordable care act and they pick either one based on emotions rather than facts.
I liked the survey where they asked people, "Which do you think is more expensive, Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act?"
Best answer: "The Affordable Care Act. It's affordable. Duh."
*Those* people (the young and working poor) are going right on Medicaid, or getting heavy subsidies.
To get Medicaid, you must make less than 133% of the poverty level, which is about $13,000/year. So they're not going on Medicaid unless they're really broke. If they have a chronic disease, they're going to be paying about $8,000 a year. Otherwise the young are subsidizing the system.
So, umm... still freeloading on the system./me bangs head on desk...
When they had got exacerbations of conditions like asthma, couldn't breathe, went to the emergency room like the libertarians do, got oxygen, ran up a $4,000 bill, couldn't pay it, and went bankrupt, that would arguably be freeloading on the system.
Now under Obamacare/Romneycare/Heritagecare, the right-wing Democrats are forcing them to get insurance to pay for their ER trips. The Democrats (foolishly copying the Republicans) call that taking personal responsibility. You call that freeloading.
There never have been any exceptions. Getting something from the government comes out of your pocket, one way or another.
Yeah, getting a college education from the government comes out of your pocket -- after you're making 5 times as much as you were before without the degree.
After WWII the government sent a generation of veterans to college. They graduated, became engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, started businesses, started whole new industries. They paid the cost of their college education back into the economy. Some people said every dollar paid back 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, in increased taxes alone.
And they didn't have any college loans to pay back.
Kemp is being unfair. I understand what this section is about, and he doesn't. A patient decision aid could just be a well-written article or web page. The UK NHS has patient information pages that would satisfy these requirements. There's no requirement for artificial intelligence.
"(1) PATIENT DECISION AID—The term patient decision aid' means an educational tool that helps patients, caregivers, or authorized representatives understand and communicate their beliefs and preferences related to their treatment options, and to decide with their health care provider what treatments are best for them based on their treatment options, scientific evidence, circumstances, beliefs, and preferences." "(2) REQUIREMENTS FOR PATIENT DECISION AIDS—Patient decision aids developed and produced pursuant to a grant or contract under paragraph (1)— "(A) shall be designed to engage patients, caregivers, and authorized representatives in informed decision making with health care providers; "(B) shall present up-to-date clinical evidence about the risks and benefits of treatment options in a form and manner that is age-appropriate and can be adapted for patients, caregivers, and authorized representatives from a variety of cultural and educational backgrounds to reflect the varying needs of consumers and diverse levels of health literacy; "(C) shall, where appropriate, explain why there is a lack of evidence to support one treatment option over another; and "(D) shall address health care decisions across the age span, including those affecting vulnerable populations including children."
Economists have a few internal checks to correct for as many inaccuracies as they can.
It doesn't have to be too accurate. It doesn't make much difference whether the per capita cash income is $25,000 a year or $30,000. It's still too low for an economy as successful as ours, with a cost of living as high as ours.
The American capitalist system is the most successful economy in the world, isn't it?
Every time I hear somebody say, "You don't know how good you have it here," I think of the 1960s underground comics artist Gilbert Shelton and his character Wonder Warthog, who used to go around saying that. "In other countries, the government tells people what they can eat, drink and smoke." I can't find the right cartoon, but here's a different one to give you the idea. http://bdtrash.forumdediscussions.com/t1410-wonder-wart-hog-super-heros-dejante-de-gilbert-shelton
"You don't know how good you have it here" is a cold war meme that was used to compare us to Soviet Russia.
The interesting thing was that they took the worst features of American capitalist society, and argued that in Russia it was even worse. They were projecting our own flaws on Russia.
Paul Robeson and Linus Pauling weren't allowed to have a passport because the passport office didn't like their politics? Well, in Russia, people are put in jail just for wanting to leave.
Communists are sent to jail here for printing books and newspapers the government doesn't like? Well, in Russia, people are shot for saying things the government doesn't like.
Now, they don't have the Soviet Union to kick around any more.
People who can't afford health care are going bankrupt? Well, in Canada and England you have to wait six months to see a doctor.
In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999–2000,[55][56] Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997.[57] However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data, or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,[58] the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics alleged that the survey had never taken place,[59] but Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy, quoting on his website colleagues who lost data in the hard drive crash.[60][self-published source?]
I dunno. There may just be a half a dozen people who are interested in your wife's penguin or whatever, but to them it's really interesting. They might have to make a decision about penguin habitat or whatever.
And then there's the scientific paper lottery. A few papers turn out to be really important, everybody cites them, and they change the world -- but you can't know in advance which one is going to be important. There were people doing studies of the hearing of fish, and suddenly, when porpoises start going deaf, everybody looks them up.
I admit it can be frustrating. I admit people have been known to say, "What am I doing this for?"
People make mistakes. According to the New Scientist, a DP manager was creating a fund-raising letter for a charity's wealthy customers (the 1%?) and he set up a template letter with the salutation, "Dear Rich Bastard." It went out by mistake.
Make sure you have a few safeguards in place to prevent things like that.
HIPPA makes it illegal for a health care provider to share the information. This company claims it got the data from other sources, which is legal if not ethical.
Plus HIPPA is so poorly written nobody really knows what it means anyway. The driver for it was to simplify Medicaid billing across the 50 states, all that privacy/security stuff was a toss in from Ted Kennedy
That's right. HIPPA doesn't actually protect your privacy -- it protects doctors and hospitals who want to violate your privacy.
Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person.[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipaa#Privacy_Rule
It protects you like a condom made by the lowest bidder.
The Roberts Supreme Court hasn't been very good to privacy. Under Sorrell v. IMS Health, it ruled that a doctor can't stop a pharmacy from selling his prescribing information to an information broker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_v._IMS_Health_Inc.
Sometime around the age of 12 one of my children commented "I wish we were rich."
I stopped the car and turned around, "We are rich." I said
"Both your mother and I both earn enough money to have a house and a car. You are always clothed and fed, you never go to bed hungry and cold. You get to travel, play sports and get a good education.
That must have been a long time ago, or you must have a lot of money. In order to get a good education today, you have to be rich. Not only does a college education cost at least $20,000 a year, but in the U.S. you usually have to live in an expensive neighborhood to go to a good K-12 education.
Nobody forces you to work, ever.
She never has to work? Even to make her living expenses? What does she have, a trust fund? She is rich.
.Yes, it helps to remind ourselves that we're not living in a slum with no electricity and water, but "someone else is worse" is a really horrible argument against social inequality.
How come we can use "someone else is worse" to make the rich pay more taxes?
gov: Mr. Hunt, we're taxing your secret offshore account. Here's your tax bill: $1 billion.
Hunt (Tears pouring down his cheeks): Boo hoo! I can't afford that!
gov: Don't complain. Billionaires in Africa are starving.
Hunt: I won't create any more jobs! I'll move to Barbados!
gov: Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
You're telling me that out of the population of the US, Canada and Western Europe, that only 70M of those people make more then $34,000?
If they were all Americans, that means 3 out of every 4 Americans make less than $34,000, a number I feel is high, especially when you add in the populations of Western Europe.
There is no need for information which identifies specific individuals when determining the effectiveness of a drug or medical procedure in a large group of people.
Not always.
On the most basic level, you want to distinguish male from female. There are some drugs and diseases that have a different course in men than women, so you want to go back and see whether that's the case in a particular study.
There are some genes that are more common in black caribbean populations, that affect the metabolism of opioids. So a normal dose of codeine for a cough might be fatal for a black caribbean person. So you want to know in the study how many people were black (and preferably of caribbean origin).
You want to know who's a smoker and who's a non-smoker.
This is particularly an issue when you have one study that says a treatment worked, another study that says it didn't work, and you want to go back and figure out why they're coming to different conclusions.
In addition to that, kids have to use their family connections to get the unpaid internship. A law firm, advertising agency or something will hire a kid because his father is one of their clients.
It used to be that kids would use their family connections to get a paid internship.
There are even agencies that will place kids in an unpaid internship for a fee in the thousands of dollars.
This study was done on people with "no nutritional deficiencies". Yet vitamins are intended as supplements for people with nutritional deficiencies. As such, this study doesn't really show what it appears to be showing.
Vitamin deficiency diseases are generally third-world diseases. The population of the U.S. has very little vitamin deficiency. It's not as if doctors see scurvey or rickets when they go out into the community.
When Americans do have vitamin deficiency, it's usually because of a disease, hereditary or acquired. For example, alcoholics get vitamin B deficiency.
The New England Journal of Medicine had a case of rickets a few years ago, and the patient was a mentally retarded child who ate a diet entirely of Pop-Tarts.
Here's another one http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMicm1205540 -- from the Ukraine. "In addition to a diet poor in vitamin D and calcium, the patient had a history of biliary dyskinesia, which may have contributed to poor absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, including vitamin D."
One major cause of vitamin deficiency is people on fad diets. The macrobiotic diet was one of the worst for that. Sometimes people couldn't follow the macrobiotic diet themselves, but they had an infant that they kept on a "strict" macrobiotic diet (by feeding them not much more than brown rice), and in a few cases the child died.
There are some stupid articles, like this one http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306 that simply measured vitamin D blood levels, without consideration of whether they actually had clinical disease that made any difference to the patient's health. (It's like finding an elevated PSA or a lung spot that will never develop into cancer.) If you don't know how to read a journal article, you might misinterpret this to mean that there was a lot of vitamin D deficiency. But I can't find any studies that show clinical vitamin deficiency in Americans without specific diseases, since America was industrialized during WWII.
Randomized, controlled trials of vitamin D supplementation have addressed its effects on skeletal outcomes, but most of these trials involved supplementation with both vitamin D and calcium, making it impossible to separate out the effects attributable specifically to vitamin D.
I just spent half an hour trying to find an article in a peer-reviewed journal that describes vitamin deficiency in a population in the U.S. where the deficiency isn't the result of a serious disease, and I can't find one.
The only time Americans need vitamin supplements is when they're diagnosed with a specific disease that causes a specific deficiency. In that case, they should get treated with vitamins under the supervision of an MD. You have to find out the cause of the deficiency and treat it. Otherwise you could die. This isn't the kind of thing you can self-treat with Google searches.
And here was I thinking that people on slashdot would know that (to date) the only thing that 'cures' you of cancer (and, I might add, a variety of other spectacularly nasty diseases) is death.
Not true. There are curable cancers. There was a small number of them, and the number is growing. The calculation of the cure rate depends on how you define cancer, early-stage cancer, and pre-cancer. But among the major cancers, early stage colon cancer is curable.
The usual definition of "cure" for cancer is that it will not return in your lifetime. If you're 75 years old, and the cancer won't come back for 20 years, and you die of something else, most people define that as cure. If you're male, you probably have prostate cancer, and that probably won't kill you either in your lifetime.
What is it about the Internet that makes people say, "You're an IDIOT!" when they hear something they don't agree with? Even when the person you're calling an idiot knows more about the subject than you do?
You are generally correct, but there are exceptions.
I don't have the cases handy, but the FBI and local officials have been sued and lost big damages in court for violating peoples' freedom. There were left-wing radicals who made good use of a couple of hundred thousand dollars that fell into their laps. Sometimes a good judge winds up in a position of influence.
Having said that, if you were a black person in the South during the Jim Crow days, then yes, you didn't have many rights that you could enforce. If a mob killed somebody and the jury acquitted them, there wasn't much you could do about it. For that matter, black people aren't doing too well in Florida these days either.
I don't want to be too pessimistic, because I know people who are activists of all kinds, and once in the while after a long struggle they do have a success. But the overall system is pretty corrupt. If you ever get an opportunity to get dual citizenship in a European country, grab it.
if you know anything of history you'll realize it's the Democrats who are the party of hate and bigotry.
Quick history lesson.
Up to the 1960s, the southern Democrats (the Dixiecrats), were the party that supported the Confederacy, Jim Crow, discrimination, etc. The northern Democrats were completely opposed, and they had big fights in the nominating conventions. The Republicans were also opposed.
When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which started us on the way to ending discrimination, he said that it would probably cost the Democratic Party the South.
He was right. Nixon adopted the "Southern Strategy" for the Republican party, which was to appeal to the racist southern whites. It was successful. They won elections, and racist Democrats went over to the Republican Party.
So the Democrats were the party of Southern racism. They are (imperfectly) not today. When they reformed, the Republicans eagerly took their place as the party of Southern racism, which is where they are today.
I could, hypothetically, say the words "Christianity is a myth" and be arrested under 18 USC 245. All you need is to have a different religion from me, and claim I made you feel "intimidated" or I "interfered" with you.
Never happens. There's more to the law than the U.S. Code. You have to read the U.S. Code Annotated.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been informal surveys that ask if you prefer Obamacare or the Patient protection and affordable care act and they pick either one based on emotions rather than facts.
I liked the survey where they asked people, "Which do you think is more expensive, Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act?"
Best answer: "The Affordable Care Act. It's affordable. Duh."
*Those* people (the young and working poor) are going right on Medicaid, or getting heavy subsidies.
To get Medicaid, you must make less than 133% of the poverty level, which is about $13,000/year. So they're not going on Medicaid unless they're really broke. If they have a chronic disease, they're going to be paying about $8,000 a year. Otherwise the young are subsidizing the system.
So, umm... still freeloading on the system. /me bangs head on desk...
When they had got exacerbations of conditions like asthma, couldn't breathe, went to the emergency room like the libertarians do, got oxygen, ran up a $4,000 bill, couldn't pay it, and went bankrupt, that would arguably be freeloading on the system.
Now under Obamacare/Romneycare/Heritagecare, the right-wing Democrats are forcing them to get insurance to pay for their ER trips. The Democrats (foolishly copying the Republicans) call that taking personal responsibility. You call that freeloading.
I know what the conservative solution is: Let them die. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1312793
Speaking for the American public, I can say: we don't want your solution.
There never have been any exceptions. Getting something from the government comes out of your pocket, one way or another.
Yeah, getting a college education from the government comes out of your pocket -- after you're making 5 times as much as you were before without the degree.
After WWII the government sent a generation of veterans to college. They graduated, became engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, started businesses, started whole new industries. They paid the cost of their college education back into the economy. Some people said every dollar paid back 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, in increased taxes alone.
And they didn't have any college loans to pay back.
Typical right-wing anti-government ideology.
Kemp is being unfair. I understand what this section is about, and he doesn't. A patient decision aid could just be a well-written article or web page. The UK NHS has patient information pages that would satisfy these requirements. There's no requirement for artificial intelligence.
"(1) PATIENT DECISION AID—The term patient decision aid' means an educational tool that helps patients, caregivers, or authorized representatives understand and communicate their beliefs and preferences related to their treatment options, and to decide with their health care provider what treatments are best for them based on their treatment options, scientific evidence, circumstances, beliefs, and preferences."
"(2) REQUIREMENTS FOR PATIENT DECISION AIDS—Patient decision aids developed and produced pursuant to a grant or contract under paragraph (1)—
"(A) shall be designed to engage patients, caregivers, and authorized representatives in informed decision making with health care providers;
"(B) shall present up-to-date clinical evidence about the risks and benefits of treatment options in a form and manner that is age-appropriate and can be adapted for patients, caregivers, and authorized representatives from a variety of cultural and educational backgrounds to reflect the varying needs of consumers and diverse levels of health literacy;
"(C) shall, where appropriate, explain why there is a lack of evidence to support one treatment option over another; and
"(D) shall address health care decisions across the age span, including those affecting vulnerable populations including children."
Economists have a few internal checks to correct for as many inaccuracies as they can.
It doesn't have to be too accurate. It doesn't make much difference whether the per capita cash income is $25,000 a year or $30,000. It's still too low for an economy as successful as ours, with a cost of living as high as ours.
The American capitalist system is the most successful economy in the world, isn't it?
Every time I hear somebody say, "You don't know how good you have it here," I think of the 1960s underground comics artist Gilbert Shelton and his character Wonder Warthog, who used to go around saying that. "In other countries, the government tells people what they can eat, drink and smoke." I can't find the right cartoon, but here's a different one to give you the idea. http://bdtrash.forumdediscussions.com/t1410-wonder-wart-hog-super-heros-dejante-de-gilbert-shelton
"You don't know how good you have it here" is a cold war meme that was used to compare us to Soviet Russia.
The interesting thing was that they took the worst features of American capitalist society, and argued that in Russia it was even worse. They were projecting our own flaws on Russia.
Paul Robeson and Linus Pauling weren't allowed to have a passport because the passport office didn't like their politics? Well, in Russia, people are put in jail just for wanting to leave.
Communists are sent to jail here for printing books and newspapers the government doesn't like? Well, in Russia, people are shot for saying things the government doesn't like.
Now, they don't have the Soviet Union to kick around any more.
People who can't afford health care are going bankrupt? Well, in Canada and England you have to wait six months to see a doctor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott#Disputed_survey
Disputed survey
In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999–2000,[55][56] Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997.[57] However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data, or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,[58] the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics alleged that the survey had never taken place,[59] but Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy, quoting on his website colleagues who lost data in the hard drive crash.[60][self-published source?]
I dunno. There may just be a half a dozen people who are interested in your wife's penguin or whatever, but to them it's really interesting. They might have to make a decision about penguin habitat or whatever.
And then there's the scientific paper lottery. A few papers turn out to be really important, everybody cites them, and they change the world -- but you can't know in advance which one is going to be important. There were people doing studies of the hearing of fish, and suddenly, when porpoises start going deaf, everybody looks them up.
I admit it can be frustrating. I admit people have been known to say, "What am I doing this for?"
People make mistakes. According to the New Scientist, a DP manager was creating a fund-raising letter for a charity's wealthy customers (the 1%?) and he set up a template letter with the salutation, "Dear Rich Bastard." It went out by mistake.
Make sure you have a few safeguards in place to prevent things like that.
HIPPA makes it illegal for a health care provider to share the information. This company claims it got the data from other sources, which is legal if not ethical.
Plus HIPPA is so poorly written nobody really knows what it means anyway. The driver for it was to simplify Medicaid billing across the 50 states, all that privacy/security stuff was a toss in from Ted Kennedy
That's right. HIPPA doesn't actually protect your privacy -- it protects doctors and hospitals who want to violate your privacy.
It protects you like a condom made by the lowest bidder.
The Roberts Supreme Court hasn't been very good to privacy. Under Sorrell v. IMS Health, it ruled that a doctor can't stop a pharmacy from selling his prescribing information to an information broker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_v._IMS_Health_Inc.
Sometime around the age of 12 one of my children commented "I wish we were rich."
I stopped the car and turned around, "We are rich." I said
"Both your mother and I both earn enough money to have a house and a car. You are always clothed and fed, you never go to bed hungry and cold. You get to travel, play sports and get a good education.
That must have been a long time ago, or you must have a lot of money. In order to get a good education today, you have to be rich. Not only does a college education cost at least $20,000 a year, but in the U.S. you usually have to live in an expensive neighborhood to go to a good K-12 education.
Nobody forces you to work, ever.
She never has to work? Even to make her living expenses? What does she have, a trust fund? She is rich.
.Yes, it helps to remind ourselves that we're not living in a slum with no electricity and water, but "someone else is worse" is a really horrible argument against social inequality.
How come we can use "someone else is worse" to make the rich pay more taxes?
gov: Mr. Hunt, we're taxing your secret offshore account. Here's your tax bill: $1 billion.
Hunt (Tears pouring down his cheeks): Boo hoo! I can't afford that!
gov: Don't complain. Billionaires in Africa are starving.
Hunt: I won't create any more jobs! I'll move to Barbados!
gov: Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
You're telling me that out of the population of the US, Canada and Western Europe, that only 70M of those people make more then $34,000?
If they were all Americans, that means 3 out of every 4 Americans make less than $34,000, a number I feel is high, especially when you add in the populations of Western Europe.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
Per capita money income in past 12 months (2012 dollars) $28,051
Median household income $53,046
Since we have a military as big as the rest of the world put together, yes, this is the only place where it matters.
The guy you're arguing with probably has no problem asserting that you don't know how good you have it here.
There is no need for information which identifies specific individuals when determining the effectiveness of a drug or medical procedure in a large group of people.
Not always.
On the most basic level, you want to distinguish male from female. There are some drugs and diseases that have a different course in men than women, so you want to go back and see whether that's the case in a particular study.
There are some genes that are more common in black caribbean populations, that affect the metabolism of opioids. So a normal dose of codeine for a cough might be fatal for a black caribbean person. So you want to know in the study how many people were black (and preferably of caribbean origin).
You want to know who's a smoker and who's a non-smoker.
This is particularly an issue when you have one study that says a treatment worked, another study that says it didn't work, and you want to go back and figure out why they're coming to different conclusions.
In addition to that, kids have to use their family connections to get the unpaid internship. A law firm, advertising agency or something will hire a kid because his father is one of their clients.
It used to be that kids would use their family connections to get a paid internship.
There are even agencies that will place kids in an unpaid internship for a fee in the thousands of dollars.
This study was done on people with "no nutritional deficiencies". Yet vitamins are intended as supplements for people with nutritional deficiencies. As such, this study doesn't really show what it appears to be showing.
Vitamin deficiency diseases are generally third-world diseases. The population of the U.S. has very little vitamin deficiency. It's not as if doctors see scurvey or rickets when they go out into the community.
When Americans do have vitamin deficiency, it's usually because of a disease, hereditary or acquired. For example, alcoholics get vitamin B deficiency.
The New England Journal of Medicine had a case of rickets a few years ago, and the patient was a mentally retarded child who ate a diet entirely of Pop-Tarts.
Here's another one http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMicm1205540 -- from the Ukraine. "In addition to a diet poor in vitamin D and calcium, the patient had a history of biliary dyskinesia, which may have contributed to poor absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, including vitamin D."
Here's another one http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1113996 Autoimmune gastritis (pernicious anemia) is the most common cause of severe [vitamin B12] deficiency.
One major cause of vitamin deficiency is people on fad diets. The macrobiotic diet was one of the worst for that. Sometimes people couldn't follow the macrobiotic diet themselves, but they had an infant that they kept on a "strict" macrobiotic diet (by feeding them not much more than brown rice), and in a few cases the child died.
There are some stupid articles, like this one http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306 that simply measured vitamin D blood levels, without consideration of whether they actually had clinical disease that made any difference to the patient's health. (It's like finding an elevated PSA or a lung spot that will never develop into cancer.) If you don't know how to read a journal article, you might misinterpret this to mean that there was a lot of vitamin D deficiency. But I can't find any studies that show clinical vitamin deficiency in Americans without specific diseases, since America was industrialized during WWII.
Here's an article by people who do understand the complexity of the problem http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1009570 and here's what they say:
Randomized, controlled trials of vitamin D supplementation have addressed its effects on skeletal outcomes, but most of these trials involved supplementation with both vitamin D and calcium, making it impossible to separate out the effects attributable specifically to vitamin D.
I just spent half an hour trying to find an article in a peer-reviewed journal that describes vitamin deficiency in a population in the U.S. where the deficiency isn't the result of a serious disease, and I can't find one.
The only time Americans need vitamin supplements is when they're diagnosed with a specific disease that causes a specific deficiency. In that case, they should get treated with vitamins under the supervision of an MD. You have to find out the cause of the deficiency and treat it. Otherwise you could die. This isn't the kind of thing you can self-treat with Google searches.
There is ample evidence that cyclophosphamide can cure cancer
You, sir, are AN IDIOT.
Cyclophosphamide doesn't CURE anything, period.
Not true. Cyclophosphamide is used (as part of a treatment protocol) for acute lymphocytic leukemia. Childhood ALL has cure rates of ~ 95%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_lymphocytic_leukemia#Treatment
And here was I thinking that people on slashdot would know that (to date) the only thing that 'cures' you of cancer (and, I might add, a variety of other spectacularly nasty diseases) is death.
Not true. There are curable cancers. There was a small number of them, and the number is growing. The calculation of the cure rate depends on how you define cancer, early-stage cancer, and pre-cancer. But among the major cancers, early stage colon cancer is curable.
The usual definition of "cure" for cancer is that it will not return in your lifetime. If you're 75 years old, and the cancer won't come back for 20 years, and you die of something else, most people define that as cure. If you're male, you probably have prostate cancer, and that probably won't kill you either in your lifetime.
What is it about the Internet that makes people say, "You're an IDIOT!" when they hear something they don't agree with? Even when the person you're calling an idiot knows more about the subject than you do?
And who do we buy those computers from?
That's right -- China!
Monetary compensation and jail time for violators never makes up for tarnished reputations and loss of time.
Sometimes the reputations are enhanced, like the one whose funeral we just commemorated.
You are generally correct, but there are exceptions.
I don't have the cases handy, but the FBI and local officials have been sued and lost big damages in court for violating peoples' freedom. There were left-wing radicals who made good use of a couple of hundred thousand dollars that fell into their laps. Sometimes a good judge winds up in a position of influence.
Having said that, if you were a black person in the South during the Jim Crow days, then yes, you didn't have many rights that you could enforce. If a mob killed somebody and the jury acquitted them, there wasn't much you could do about it. For that matter, black people aren't doing too well in Florida these days either.
I don't want to be too pessimistic, because I know people who are activists of all kinds, and once in the while after a long struggle they do have a success. But the overall system is pretty corrupt. If you ever get an opportunity to get dual citizenship in a European country, grab it.
if you know anything of history you'll realize it's the Democrats who are the party of hate and bigotry.
Quick history lesson.
Up to the 1960s, the southern Democrats (the Dixiecrats), were the party that supported the Confederacy, Jim Crow, discrimination, etc. The northern Democrats were completely opposed, and they had big fights in the nominating conventions. The Republicans were also opposed.
When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which started us on the way to ending discrimination, he said that it would probably cost the Democratic Party the South.
He was right. Nixon adopted the "Southern Strategy" for the Republican party, which was to appeal to the racist southern whites. It was successful. They won elections, and racist Democrats went over to the Republican Party.
So the Democrats were the party of Southern racism. They are (imperfectly) not today. When they reformed, the Republicans eagerly took their place as the party of Southern racism, which is where they are today.
I could, hypothetically, say the words "Christianity is a myth" and be arrested under 18 USC 245. All you need is to have a different religion from me, and claim I made you feel "intimidated" or I "interfered" with you.
Never happens. There's more to the law than the U.S. Code. You have to read the U.S. Code Annotated.