One of the big jobs of the FDA is to screen through millions of accident reports to find the few that are actually relevant to safety.
I've reviewed FDA accident reports. Out of 200 reports on medical lasers, I might find 100 about the hinge on a door to the cabinet being broken, or "malfunctions" of that nature. There might be one report about a serious incident, in which a patient was injured because a cotton swab caught fire or something.
One of the big jobs of the FDA is to screen through those accident reports for a "signal" of a dangerous product. Somebody with an implantable cardiac pacemaker-defibrillator has a heart attack and dies. Was it a failure of the pacemaker-defibrillator? Or would he have died whatever the pacemaker did? It's pretty hard to figure that out. Suppose two patients with the same model pacemaker-defibrillator have heart attacks and die. Is that a failure of the device? When do the reports reach statistical significance? The FDA staff has a lot of expertise in doing that, and they do it about as well as anybody (although the staff sometimes gets overridden by the political managers).
DHS does a notoriously bad job of screening through millions of potential threats and figuring out which are the real threats. They're like a smoke alarm that continually gives false alarms until people ignore it. They're a criminal and military agency, not a scientific agency. The FDA has to balance the risks and costs against the benefits. DHS doesn't care about costs. They've turned our airports into a security circus, installing multi-million-dollar high tech machines without even finding out whether they work. They haven't caught enough terrorists so they go about entrapping them.
In the FDA, you at least have the scientific people fighting the political people, and on some level, there's accountability to a scientific process. In the DHS, it's all politics.
The New York Public Library made a big move to the "digital library". It made a lot of things worse. There are works that I used to get on paper that I can't get any more in any format.
I like modern improvements, but it's a warning not to throw out the old system before the new system is working.
One of the problems is with medical journals. Medical journals set their subscription prices to libraries based on the number of patrons. So a university with 10,000 students pays more than a college with 1,000 students. The paper editions are fairly expensive, but the online editions are really expensive.
That means the library can't buy standard medical journals in digital editions. A librarian told me that they can't afford the New England Journal of Medicine, particularly the online edition, because the journal calculates the entire population of New York as their patrons. And now there's lots of important information for each article that is online-only. Last time I looked in the catalog, I could only find two subscriptions to the NEJM in the entire NYPL system.
I went to the NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library to look something up in Science Citation Index, a useful reference book that I used to use at the NYPL when it was on paper. They didn't have it. It's too expensive.
The thing that really pisses me off is that they spent millions of dollars on luxurious buildings, with marble and Herman Miller chairs, but they didn't spend the few thousand dollars it would cost for a basic medical collection. Or the staff to keep the buildings open the same hours as book stores.
Since that Reason article doesn't give the actual citations of the articles it attacks, I can't check them to see what they're attacking, and I can't check to see what kind of letters or commentary the journals published in response to those articles. I know that the New England Journal of Medicine is www.nejm.org. What's the specific article they're referring to? They don't say. They're apparently citing the NEJM from newspaper accounts. It's a collection of unverifiable quotations from their enemies. It's ironic that somebody who complains about the quality of other peoples' research should fail to follow basic scholarship himself.
I remember reading articles in JAMA about guns, and they had long exchanges in the letters section (from pro-gun doctors) debating the pro- and anti-gun side, so I know they're not censored.
They build their argument around a paper delivered by David Bordua David Cowan presented at a 1994 American Society of Criminology meeting. They claim there's a big conspiracy to hide the pro-gun facts. But as far as I can tell with a half-hour Google search, Bordua and Cowan never published that paper -- after 18 years. So it's unconvincing when somebody complains about the scholarship of the NEJM and JAMA, but doesn't publish his own research. There's a huge literature on criminology and related fields for him to publish in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kleck#References
The reason that so many doctors have a bias against guns is that they get a lot of people who are severely injured or killed in their ERs. That's standard public health. Instead of trying to treat people after it's too late, you attack the causes of the injury. Doctors have always been political activists. That's their job.
Doctors were complaining during the 1950s and 1960s about the unsafe design of cars, that created needless deaths and injuries -- for example, radio knobs that punctured children's faces in an accident. After a few multi-million dollar product liability lawsuits, the car companies finally changed their designs.
Doctors also have a bias against syphilis. Do you want to ignore the medical literature against syphilis because it's biased against microbes?
In searching for the published article, if any, by David Bordua David Cowan, I found this:
Assuming the speciousness and atavistic, insidious malignancy of all opposition to gun control, health advocacy periodicals need not waste space or time on evaluating such views.
The Reason article, this Tennessee law journal article, and the other stuff, is just a long tirade of allegations that the entire medical establishment of bias. It's not acceptable scholarship. It's not even rational logic.
The evidence was showing that guns were far more likely to kill an innocent person than to protect his life. The NRA couldn't answer them with facts and arguments, so they had to cut off the research. That's censorship.
There's something wrong with the Loganville police if it takes them so long to respond to the emergency.
There are too many unanswered questions about this story. I don't trust the TV news to get it all right.
Unfortunately, the NRA lobbied Congress to deny funds for research into gun crimes, so we could find out exactly what happens in situations like this. So we don't know.
That woman was on the phone with her husband during the break-in. It's not clear from the story whether either of them called 911, which would have been a good idea. The fire department can get to my house in 2-3 minutes. Can the police do the same when they get a call of a home break-in? Is a burglar going to stick around if you tell him the police are coming?
The woman is also lucky that he burglar didn't have a gun. If she started shooting at him, he would have started shooting back. If you're facing an armed burglar, you have about as good a chance of killing him as he does of killing you.
If you're worried about burglars, get a dog. It's safer.
Viewpoint: Silencing the Science on Gun Research FREE Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, MPH; Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH JAMA. 2012;():1-2. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.208207....
The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.
To ensure that the CDC and its grantees got the message, the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”4
Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency's funding to find out. Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up. Even today, 17 years after this legislative action, the CDC's website lacks specific links to information about preventing firearm-related violence.
When other agencies funded high-quality research, similar action was taken. In 2009, Branas et al5 published the results of a case-control study that examined whether carrying a gun increases or decreases the risk of firearm assault. In contrast to earlier research, this particular study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Two years later, Congress extended the restrictive language it had previously applied to the CDC to all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the National Institutes of Health.6
These are not the only efforts to keep important health information from the public and patients. For example, in 1997, Cummings et al7 used state-level data from Washington to study the association between purchase of a handgun and the subsequent risk of homicide or suicide. Similar studies could not be conducted today because Washington State's firearm registration files are no longer accessible.8
Viewpoint: Silencing the Science on Gun Research FREE Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, MPH; Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH JAMA. 2012;():1-2. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.208207....
The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.
To ensure that the CDC and its grantees got the message, the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”4
Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency's funding to find out. Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up. Even today, 17 years after this legislative action, the CDC's website lacks specific links to information about preventing firearm-related violence.
When other agencies funded high-quality research, similar action was taken. In 2009, Branas et al5 published the results of a case-control study that examined whether carrying a gun increases or decreases the risk of firearm assault. In contrast to earlier research, this particular study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Two years later, Congress extended the restrictive language it had previously applied to the CDC to all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the National Institutes of Health.6
These are not the only efforts to keep important health information from the public and patients. For example, in 1997, Cummings et al7 used state-level data from Washington to study the association between purchase of a handgun and the subsequent risk of homicide or suicide. Similar studies could not be conducted today because Washington State's firearm registration files are no longer accessible.8
“CLIP: A device for holding a group of cartridges. Semantic wars have been fought over the word, with some insisting it is not a synonym for “detachable magazine.” For 80 years, however, it has been so used by manufacturers and the military. There is no argument that it can also mean a separate device for holding and transferring a group of cartridges to a fixed or detachable magazine or as a device inserted with cartridges into the mechanism of a firearm becoming, in effect, part of that mechanism.”
In your idiotic support of the current system you seem to miss out a lot of things. Maybe your ignorance or your unwillingness to confront them leads you to spout this nonsense.
1. MIT's investigation is not about just and unjust actions - it is more about the fact that they did not actively stop the justice department from going after Schwartz. JSTOR aggressively responded to the prosecutorial threat and declined to pursue charges, whereas MIT did not. If MIT too had strongly declined, then, the prosecutor would have very little grounds to prosecute Aaron.
This is the second time I can think of where the MIT administration acted like assholes.
MIT releases statement, says student’s actions were ‘reckless’
MIT is cooperating with the state police in the investigation, according to a statement released by the MIT News Office this afternoon. “As reported to us by authorities, Ms. Simpson’s actions were reckless and understandably created alarm at the airport,” the statement continues.
Let's assume Swartz was completely in the right on all of his actions. What, precisely, would you have MIT and the US Government do differently to prevent this suicide? What actions of theirs do you find culpable for forcing Aaron Swartz into no other choice than to take his own life?
They shouldn't have prosecuted him.
It's called prosecutorial discretion.
Just the way they didn't prosecute the financial companies responsible for the housing collapse, even though the companies committed wholesale fraud by falsely swearing they had properly handled legal papers.
Wide overgeneralization. Having worked in the trade press, I know how fair and balanced they are.
Many of them pander to their advertisers. Many of them don't. Many of them go through a period of independence, then get bought up by a publisher who panders to advertisers again.
Business Week used to pride itself on its independence from advertisers. They had a cover story in which they trounced Westinghouse. Westinghouse pulled all their ads. It happened a lot.
I used to read Automotive News. They published bad news about the auto industry that the New York Times wouldn't print, because the auto industry was one of the NYT's biggest advertisers. When people in the auto industry were talking among themselves, they wouldn't put up with any bullshit.
Most journalists will tell you that freedom of the press means to them the freedom to print whatever they know to be the truth. If the government censors them, or their publisher censors them, they don't have freedom of the press.
One of the best examples was tobacco. The tobacco industry was one of the biggest advertisers in newspapers and magazines. They were also the major cause of preventable death in the U.S.. Newspapers and magazines printed articles about every kind of cancer -- except lung cancer. Reporters knew that cigarettes were killing people, they knew the tobacco companies were lying when they denied it, they knew that their readers didn't realize how dangerous cigarettes were, and yet they couldn't print it. (There were a handful of exceptions, most of which didn't take ads, such as the Readers Digest.)
They didn't have the freedom of the press to print the important truth about cigarettes.
The issue is not funding your detractors, but publishing news about your competitor. It's self-censorship, an independent issue from government control.
If CBS is censoring CNET, I know that CNET isn't reliable -- and neither is CBS.
If I'm a reader, I want a magazine to give me the truth as accurately and completely as they can, not self-censor for the publisher's business reasons. If they won't do that, fuck them. I have plenty of other news sources.
Among journalists, this has been a well-known issue for at least the last hundred years.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, got its reputation in the 1950s when it was going to print a story about to GM's unannounced new lineup of cars. GM threatened to pull out all its advertising if the WSJ printed the story. They told GM to get lost and printed the story. This was an astounding move, because most (not all) newspapers used to cave in to their advertisers. The WSJ got a reputation for accuracy and independence that it kept until Murdoch bought them up.
Newspaper reporters like A.J. Liebling used to complain that their stories about advertisers would get killed. Stories about anything that offended the publisher's personal prejudices, like unions or left-wing politics, would also get killed, in most (not all) newspapers.
A reporter named George Seldes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Seldes got some money to put out a newsletter called In Fact. Most of his stories came from other reporters who sent him the stuff they couldn't print in their own newspapers, like news about strikes, the FBI, dangerous products (the dangers of tobacco were almost never discussed in major newspapers), FDA seizures, segregation, lynchings and politics on the left. His newsletter was successful for many years, and finally the FBI started intimidating his subscribers, his circulation dropped, and he had to shut it down.
In Fact became the model for a lot of other newsletters, including I.F. Stone's Weekly. He had a big impact on American journalism.
Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4). The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.
This "statistic" used to bother me, I have lived my entire life in homes with firearms. A little research found "stastics" indicating that the majority of gun crime is commited by repeat violent felons. The lesson here is do not have violent felons in your home, and you greatly reduce that the odds that you will be shot. Oh, and do not be suicidal, or take drugs that have side effects like "increased risk of suicide".
Why doesn't it bother you that males with a gun in their home are 10 times as likely to commit suicide as homes without guns? That's good evidence that guns are more likely to kill a male in your household, from suicide, than to protect you.
Suppose I have cancer and my doctor tells me that if I take Adriamycin there's a 90% probability I would live a year longer but a 10% probability it would give me heart failure and kill me right away. I look at the odds and take it, but I'm one of the unlucky ones and die.
Gun murder or suicide is a preventable death.
If I die from Adriamycin, it wasn't preventable; it's because I made the best decision I could and I was unlucky. It's the inevitable result of having drugs that aren't perfect.
When I checked the income distribution a few years ago, to a good approximation, the upper 20% of the population got 50% of the income, the next 20% got 50% of the remaining income, the next 20% got 50% of the remaining income, etc. (In other words, it was a straight line on a logarithmic graph.)
Since that time, the upper 20% get even more of the income. (I hate it when people mess up a beautiful graph.)
Slashdot readers understand the significance of an exponential decay.
So the top 60% of the American population earn basically the entire income (87.5% then, more today), to a good approximation.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the big jobs of the FDA is to screen through millions of accident reports to find the few that are actually relevant to safety.
I've reviewed FDA accident reports. Out of 200 reports on medical lasers, I might find 100 about the hinge on a door to the cabinet being broken, or "malfunctions" of that nature. There might be one report about a serious incident, in which a patient was injured because a cotton swab caught fire or something.
One of the big jobs of the FDA is to screen through those accident reports for a "signal" of a dangerous product. Somebody with an implantable cardiac pacemaker-defibrillator has a heart attack and dies. Was it a failure of the pacemaker-defibrillator? Or would he have died whatever the pacemaker did? It's pretty hard to figure that out. Suppose two patients with the same model pacemaker-defibrillator have heart attacks and die. Is that a failure of the device? When do the reports reach statistical significance? The FDA staff has a lot of expertise in doing that, and they do it about as well as anybody (although the staff sometimes gets overridden by the political managers).
DHS does a notoriously bad job of screening through millions of potential threats and figuring out which are the real threats. They're like a smoke alarm that continually gives false alarms until people ignore it. They're a criminal and military agency, not a scientific agency. The FDA has to balance the risks and costs against the benefits. DHS doesn't care about costs. They've turned our airports into a security circus, installing multi-million-dollar high tech machines without even finding out whether they work. They haven't caught enough terrorists so they go about entrapping them.
In the FDA, you at least have the scientific people fighting the political people, and on some level, there's accountability to a scientific process. In the DHS, it's all politics.
The New York Public Library made a big move to the "digital library". It made a lot of things worse. There are works that I used to get on paper that I can't get any more in any format.
I like modern improvements, but it's a warning not to throw out the old system before the new system is working.
One of the problems is with medical journals. Medical journals set their subscription prices to libraries based on the number of patrons. So a university with 10,000 students pays more than a college with 1,000 students. The paper editions are fairly expensive, but the online editions are really expensive.
That means the library can't buy standard medical journals in digital editions. A librarian told me that they can't afford the New England Journal of Medicine, particularly the online edition, because the journal calculates the entire population of New York as their patrons. And now there's lots of important information for each article that is online-only. Last time I looked in the catalog, I could only find two subscriptions to the NEJM in the entire NYPL system.
I went to the NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library to look something up in Science Citation Index, a useful reference book that I used to use at the NYPL when it was on paper. They didn't have it. It's too expensive.
The thing that really pisses me off is that they spent millions of dollars on luxurious buildings, with marble and Herman Miller chairs, but they didn't spend the few thousand dollars it would cost for a basic medical collection. Or the staff to keep the buildings open the same hours as book stores.
Give me an example of a question that you could easily find in a library that you couldn't easily find on the Internet.
Here's a question that a librarian answered for me that Google never could:
What's a reliable, accurate source of medical information?
Since that Reason article doesn't give the actual citations of the articles it attacks, I can't check them to see what they're attacking, and I can't check to see what kind of letters or commentary the journals published in response to those articles. I know that the New England Journal of Medicine is www.nejm.org. What's the specific article they're referring to? They don't say. They're apparently citing the NEJM from newspaper accounts. It's a collection of unverifiable quotations from their enemies. It's ironic that somebody who complains about the quality of other peoples' research should fail to follow basic scholarship himself.
I remember reading articles in JAMA about guns, and they had long exchanges in the letters section (from pro-gun doctors) debating the pro- and anti-gun side, so I know they're not censored.
They build their argument around a paper delivered by David Bordua David Cowan presented at a 1994 American Society of Criminology meeting. They claim there's a big conspiracy to hide the pro-gun facts. But as far as I can tell with a half-hour Google search, Bordua and Cowan never published that paper -- after 18 years. So it's unconvincing when somebody complains about the scholarship of the NEJM and JAMA, but doesn't publish his own research. There's a huge literature on criminology and related fields for him to publish in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kleck#References
The reason that so many doctors have a bias against guns is that they get a lot of people who are severely injured or killed in their ERs. That's standard public health. Instead of trying to treat people after it's too late, you attack the causes of the injury. Doctors have always been political activists. That's their job.
Doctors were complaining during the 1950s and 1960s about the unsafe design of cars, that created needless deaths and injuries -- for example, radio knobs that punctured children's faces in an accident. After a few multi-million dollar product liability lawsuits, the car companies finally changed their designs.
Doctors also have a bias against syphilis. Do you want to ignore the medical literature against syphilis because it's biased against microbes?
In searching for the published article, if any, by David Bordua David Cowan, I found this:
http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/4413.pdf
I stopped reading when I got this far:
Assuming the speciousness and atavistic, insidious malignancy of all opposition to gun control, health advocacy periodicals need not waste space or time on evaluating such views.
The Reason article, this Tennessee law journal article, and the other stuff, is just a long tirade of allegations that the entire medical establishment of bias. It's not acceptable scholarship. It's not even rational logic.
The evidence was showing that guns were far more likely to kill an innocent person than to protect his life. The NRA couldn't answer them with facts and arguments, so they had to cut off the research. That's censorship.
Unfortunately nobody knows how realistic scenarios like that are, because the NRA lobbied Congress to cut money for firearms research.
And there's Kary Mullis. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1993/mullis-autobio.html
I don't know whether Mullis is an argument for or against drugs.
There's something wrong with the Loganville police if it takes them so long to respond to the emergency.
There are too many unanswered questions about this story. I don't trust the TV news to get it all right.
Unfortunately, the NRA lobbied Congress to deny funds for research into gun crimes, so we could find out exactly what happens in situations like this. So we don't know.
That woman was on the phone with her husband during the break-in. It's not clear from the story whether either of them called 911, which would have been a good idea. The fire department can get to my house in 2-3 minutes. Can the police do the same when they get a call of a home break-in? Is a burglar going to stick around if you tell him the police are coming?
The woman is also lucky that he burglar didn't have a gun. If she started shooting at him, he would have started shooting back. If you're facing an armed burglar, you have about as good a chance of killing him as he does of killing you.
If you're worried about burglars, get a dog. It's safer.
Well, we can't analyze statistics intelligently and act on them, because the NRA lobbied Congress to prevent us from doing so.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1487470
Viewpoint: Silencing the Science on Gun Research FREE ...
Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, MPH; Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH
JAMA. 2012;():1-2. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.208207.
The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.
To ensure that the CDC and its grantees got the message, the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”4
Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency's funding to find out. Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up. Even today, 17 years after this legislative action, the CDC's website lacks specific links to information about preventing firearm-related violence.
When other agencies funded high-quality research, similar action was taken. In 2009, Branas et al5 published the results of a case-control study that examined whether carrying a gun increases or decreases the risk of firearm assault. In contrast to earlier research, this particular study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Two years later, Congress extended the restrictive language it had previously applied to the CDC to all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the National Institutes of Health.6
These are not the only efforts to keep important health information from the public and patients. For example, in 1997, Cummings et al7 used state-level data from Washington to study the association between purchase of a handgun and the subsequent risk of homicide or suicide. Similar studies could not be conducted today because Washington State's firearm registration files are no longer accessible.8
And you can't get precise figures because the NRA lobbied congress to forbid government funding from paying for research into gun fatalities.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1487470
Viewpoint: Silencing the Science on Gun Research FREE ...
Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, MPH; Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH
JAMA. 2012;():1-2. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.208207.
The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.
To ensure that the CDC and its grantees got the message, the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”4
Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency's funding to find out. Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up. Even today, 17 years after this legislative action, the CDC's website lacks specific links to information about preventing firearm-related violence.
When other agencies funded high-quality research, similar action was taken. In 2009, Branas et al5 published the results of a case-control study that examined whether carrying a gun increases or decreases the risk of firearm assault. In contrast to earlier research, this particular study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Two years later, Congress extended the restrictive language it had previously applied to the CDC to all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the National Institutes of Health.6
These are not the only efforts to keep important health information from the public and patients. For example, in 1997, Cummings et al7 used state-level data from Washington to study the association between purchase of a handgun and the subsequent risk of homicide or suicide. Similar studies could not be conducted today because Washington State's firearm registration files are no longer accessible.8
Link from TFA to the NRA web site:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110718225409/http://www.nraila.org/issues/FirearmsGlossary/
“CLIP: A device for holding a group of cartridges. Semantic wars have been fought over the word, with some insisting it is not a synonym for “detachable magazine.” For 80 years, however, it has been so used by manufacturers and the military. There is no argument that it can also mean a separate device for holding and transferring a group of cartridges to a fixed or detachable magazine or as a device inserted with cartridges into the mechanism of a firearm becoming, in effect, part of that mechanism.”
In your idiotic support of the current system you seem to miss out a lot of things. Maybe your ignorance or your unwillingness to confront them leads you to spout this nonsense.
1. MIT's investigation is not about just and unjust actions - it is more about the fact that they did not actively stop the justice department from going after Schwartz. JSTOR aggressively responded to the prosecutorial threat and declined to pursue charges, whereas MIT did not. If MIT too had strongly declined, then, the prosecutor would have very little grounds to prosecute Aaron.
This is the second time I can think of where the MIT administration acted like assholes.
http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html
MIT releases statement, says student’s actions were ‘reckless’
MIT is cooperating with the state police in the investigation, according to a statement released by the MIT News Office this afternoon. “As reported to us by authorities, Ms. Simpson’s actions were reckless and understandably created alarm at the airport,” the statement continues.
Let's assume Swartz was completely in the right on all of his actions. What, precisely, would you have MIT and the US Government do differently to prevent this suicide? What actions of theirs do you find culpable for forcing Aaron Swartz into no other choice than to take his own life?
They shouldn't have prosecuted him.
It's called prosecutorial discretion.
Just the way they didn't prosecute the financial companies responsible for the housing collapse, even though the companies committed wholesale fraud by falsely swearing they had properly handled legal papers.
Yeah. You don't mind that having a gun in the home makes it 10 times more likely that someone in your household will commit suicide in the home?
It's the uneasy ghost of Walter Cronkite wandering the land.
Wide overgeneralization. Having worked in the trade press, I know how fair and balanced they are.
Many of them pander to their advertisers. Many of them don't. Many of them go through a period of independence, then get bought up by a publisher who panders to advertisers again.
Business Week used to pride itself on its independence from advertisers. They had a cover story in which they trounced Westinghouse. Westinghouse pulled all their ads. It happened a lot.
I used to read Automotive News. They published bad news about the auto industry that the New York Times wouldn't print, because the auto industry was one of the NYT's biggest advertisers. When people in the auto industry were talking among themselves, they wouldn't put up with any bullshit.
You're getting your semantics all wrong.
Most journalists will tell you that freedom of the press means to them the freedom to print whatever they know to be the truth. If the government censors them, or their publisher censors them, they don't have freedom of the press.
One of the best examples was tobacco. The tobacco industry was one of the biggest advertisers in newspapers and magazines. They were also the major cause of preventable death in the U.S.. Newspapers and magazines printed articles about every kind of cancer -- except lung cancer. Reporters knew that cigarettes were killing people, they knew the tobacco companies were lying when they denied it, they knew that their readers didn't realize how dangerous cigarettes were, and yet they couldn't print it. (There were a handful of exceptions, most of which didn't take ads, such as the Readers Digest.)
They didn't have the freedom of the press to print the important truth about cigarettes.
The issue is not funding your detractors, but publishing news about your competitor. It's self-censorship, an independent issue from government control.
If CBS is censoring CNET, I know that CNET isn't reliable -- and neither is CBS.
If I'm a reader, I want a magazine to give me the truth as accurately and completely as they can, not self-censor for the publisher's business reasons. If they won't do that, fuck them. I have plenty of other news sources.
Among journalists, this has been a well-known issue for at least the last hundred years.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, got its reputation in the 1950s when it was going to print a story about to GM's unannounced new lineup of cars. GM threatened to pull out all its advertising if the WSJ printed the story. They told GM to get lost and printed the story. This was an astounding move, because most (not all) newspapers used to cave in to their advertisers. The WSJ got a reputation for accuracy and independence that it kept until Murdoch bought them up.
Newspaper reporters like A.J. Liebling used to complain that their stories about advertisers would get killed. Stories about anything that offended the publisher's personal prejudices, like unions or left-wing politics, would also get killed, in most (not all) newspapers.
A reporter named George Seldes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Seldes got some money to put out a newsletter called In Fact. Most of his stories came from other reporters who sent him the stuff they couldn't print in their own newspapers, like news about strikes, the FBI, dangerous products (the dangers of tobacco were almost never discussed in major newspapers), FDA seizures, segregation, lynchings and politics on the left. His newsletter was successful for many years, and finally the FBI started intimidating his subscribers, his circulation dropped, and he had to shut it down.
In Fact became the model for a lot of other newsletters, including I.F. Stone's Weekly. He had a big impact on American journalism.
Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4).
The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.
This "statistic" used to bother me, I have lived my entire life in homes with firearms. A little research found "stastics" indicating that the majority of gun crime is commited by repeat violent felons.
The lesson here is do not have violent felons in your home, and you greatly reduce that the odds that you will be shot.
Oh, and do not be suicidal, or take drugs that have side effects like "increased risk of suicide".
Why doesn't it bother you that males with a gun in their home are 10 times as likely to commit suicide as homes without guns? That's good evidence that guns are more likely to kill a male in your household, from suicide, than to protect you.
In the US you don't have to be sane at all to buy guns.
0.0348% prescription drug reactions
That's meaningless.
Suppose I have cancer and my doctor tells me that if I take Adriamycin there's a 90% probability I would live a year longer but a 10% probability it would give me heart failure and kill me right away. I look at the odds and take it, but I'm one of the unlucky ones and die.
Gun murder or suicide is a preventable death.
If I die from Adriamycin, it wasn't preventable; it's because I made the best decision I could and I was unlucky. It's the inevitable result of having drugs that aren't perfect.
If somebody was bug-nuts crazy he wouldn't pass the physical and mental exam to get into the armed forces in Switzerland.
I'd like to see that documented from a reliable source written in plain English that says it clearly.
When I checked the income distribution a few years ago, to a good approximation, the upper 20% of the population got 50% of the income, the next 20% got 50% of the remaining income, the next 20% got 50% of the remaining income, etc. (In other words, it was a straight line on a logarithmic graph.)
Since that time, the upper 20% get even more of the income. (I hate it when people mess up a beautiful graph.)
Slashdot readers understand the significance of an exponential decay.
So the top 60% of the American population earn basically the entire income (87.5% then, more today), to a good approximation.