The reason for this of course is simple: The profits for the owners of the food factories. Natural, unadulterated foods spoil more quickly on the shelf and in the dairy case. That leads directly to lower profits for the makers and middle men in the food distribution system. Food producers have not the slightest interest in our health, unless it directly affects their profits. ince the FDA gets much of their funding from these sources, they too don't have much real interest in protecting your health.
I think you're being overly negative here. The food distribution system here in the United States isn't perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as you suggest. Things like preservatives and pasteurization don't make store-bought foods more profitable; they make it possible. Without these things, food would spoil far too quickly and regional famine would occur. Modern urban life would become impossible as there simply isn't enough nearby arable land to support the millions of city-dwellers.
As far as the FDA corruption goes, I think you might make such arguments in the case of pharmaceuticals but, in my opinion as someone who has studied the matter in a college course, they do a pretty bang-up job with our food, for the most part. You know, for a country with 300 million people and an historically unprecedented amount of choice in food products, it's rather amazing that food-borne illnesses and outbreaks are so relatively rare. In fact, by most standards the United States has the most secure, safest food supply in the world.
Kinda like CO2 vs global temperature?
Bottom line is, in today's science: "Correlation is not causation, when we think it isn't."
The difference, if you're interested, (though your factious tone suggests that you are not) is that atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures have a known causal relationship via the undisputed greenhouse effect. This relationship must exist in some form or another, because if it didn't, life as we know it would not be possible as the earth's average surface temperature would be well below freezing.
The OP's example of milk and being sick is only a correlative relationship because he lacks any true mechanistic explanation for his observation and furthermore fails to demonstrate that the two things are not merely coincidental in nature.
I agree with you, clinical depression is a very serious thing. I should know, I've been diagnosed as bipolar, manic-depressive, and, I quote "SEVERELY clinically depressed"... I'm talking about a never-ending, life long dysphoria with LIFE. You get occasional pick-me-ups in the form of the people you life, a funny cartoon, etc... but in general, life seems to kind of... suck.
So, going back to your original post, do you feel that this is a "natural" state of being? More specifically, do you think that your depression (since you brought it up) was the result of events in your life or your perception of these events?
Clinical depression is not normal. Being sad or upset because bad things have happened to you in life is not the same as being clinically depressed. Whether or not anti-depressants work, it would be dangerous to confuse this fact.
In short, you did not sufficiently indicate where to draw a line.
Explicitly enumerating the specifics of such a policy would undoubtedly be left up to the courts to decide and was not the point of my post. I was merely observing that both privacy and transparency are not mutually exclusive and how maximizing utility of a situation such as this is likely to be achieved by focusing on what benefits the public the most.
For this reason, if you want truth, and are that interested in the truth, then you should advocate the full public disclosure of all corporate, charitable and government documents. Since this covers just about everyone, it follows that there should be no privacy at all and we ought to live in a world where everything is online.
I think this is a false choice. Why should we be forced to choose between a complete lack of transparency within government-chartered and/or publicly-traded organizations and no privacy--for anyone--at all?
There can be a reasonable balance between transparency and privacy. Trade secrets, proprietary processes, and national secrets, I agree, should be undisclosed, but should things like financial records, safety/environmental studies, and so on should be publicly available. If businesses don't like that, then they could easily remain private, un-incorporated entities.
The alternative is to accept that there is a right to privacy, and if so, then institutions such as wikileaks ought to be viewed with a well deserved deep distrust, as the outcome can only be ultimately political.
Well, of course wikileaks can be used as a political tool. But if that leads to the exposure of corruption and fraud--who cares?!? I would expect that, over time, organizations like wikileaks, even if they are biased, would come to compete in exposing dirt from opposing sides. In fact, I see no reason why anyone should be against such a situation, because all true capitalists love competition (right?) and everyone wants to end corruption and fraud (right?). So what's the problem?
I didn't make this up. The failure rate of these cables is about 1 per year. This is documented.
I think the burden of proof is on you regarding this point. I'm curious to see your source for this figure. Just one professional/academic (i.e. not popular press) source for this figure will suffice.
The reason I say this is that I find it hard to believe that of the thousands of undersea cables already laid, that only one of them fails per year. Like I said, in 2006, in the span of two days six of them failed. Furthermore, given that more undersea cables are being added each year, and that the older ones are undoubtedly aging, is it not reasonable to expect this figure to increase over time?
What number would you use? This is a very conservative number, in an attempt to not skew they statistics towards malice, as I will explain below.
How about a number that's based upon some sort of observation and not a mere notion (even if it is a conservative one)? People are typically very bad at assessing risks and probabilities/frequencies of events in practice.
If you were to come up with some conservative guesses for these numbers, you would see that Bayesian prediction would show a strong likelihood that the cable disabling is somehow correlated. We can't blame weather, ship anchors, or an earthquake. Absence of any natural phenomenon and absence of blind luck, we are left with only a person or people.
First of all, if your prediction were that the events were merely likely related, I would not have objected. But you don't. You go on to extend your prediction into the realm of paranoia where you imply that the U.S. (or some other entity with subs and/or undersea sabotage capability) is, with >99% certainty sabotaging undersea communication lines, despite the fact that you have no evidence at all for this, by all accounts, admittedly unlikely scenario.
There are any number of ways that these failures could have been related that are (if not by themselves, certainly together) far more likely than men in black suits. What if there was a change in the maintenance operations of these cables? What if these cables all share a common engineering flaw that is just now becoming apparent? What if seismic events are involved? What if a biological organism is involved?
Also, how can you be so sure that these failures are typically randomly distributed? What implications would that have on your analysis? What if, it turns out, that these cable failures follow seasonal or temporal patterns (e.g. reflecting shipping patterns, undersea currents, or maintenance schedules)? What if the failure of one of the lines due to a natural or common event increases the likelihood of failure of other lines (examples of this could be from increased use or decreased maintenance, etc.)?
2) Again, if you make reasonable guesses either way, you will find that these statistics begin to converge on a high likelihood for malice (that is if you can't explain the correlation any other way).
No, you can't explain it any other way. You use a simple model which basically divides the plethora of possible explanations into "normal yearly failures" and "malice," and then act surprised when you get "malice" as an answer during a time of unusually high failures. What did you expect?
Converting non-boot drives seems like a fringe use, honestly. Most people can just make a new truecrypt volume and then mount like normal. For everyone else, move the files temporarily onto DVD-R/CD-R media, create a truecrypt volume, then move the files into the new truecrypt volume. Problem solved.
All of them. But since you're asking me specifically, let's go through it:
1/365 as the rate of failure. He just made this number up. Without any actual data about the failure rates of undersea cables, the entire exercise is pointless.
0.01 as the rate of failures due to "malicious intent." Again, he just made this up. You cannot do a rational analysis with made-up numbers. It's the very simple problem of garbage in-garbage out. If he wanted to do this analysis he would have to get some objective data about undersea cable failure as a result of tampering. But, even on this point, his number is deceiving. Despite the fact that in his discussion he talks about the failure rate of a single undersea line, his variable indicates that all of the thousands of undersea cables are likely to have been tampered with in a hundred year period. This is ridiculously high number given the number of these cables there are and how generally inaccessible they are.
But let's talk about the rationale for his analysis for a second. First of all, he assumes that cable failures are independent events and are randomly distributed. But is there a good reason to do this? What if they aren't. What if failures in one cables increase the likelihood of failures in other cables a la the New York City Blackout of 2006. Furthermore, what about seismic events? In 2006, six Asian undersea cables were disabled in a two-day period. He could have similarly made some bullshit analysis then--coming up with an even more "certain" result, making it seem as if a conspiracy was afoot--despite the fact that the failures were, in fact, the result of natural phenomenon, the Hengchun earthquake.
How would you compute the probability? Please explain.
Quite simply, in the absence of objective data, I wouldn't. Computing a probability based upon made-up numbers usually just gives you the answer that you assumed to be true all along. You might as well follow your intuition, at that point, and not kid yourself with fake probabilities and statistics.
You should turn off your spam filter, because it uses Bayesian analysis to work.
I don't disagree with Bayes' theorem (or Occam's Razor), jackass. I disagree with using it incorrectly in an intellectually lazy way to try and "prove" a half-baked notion. My spam filter uses hundreds of thousands of objective datapoints to accurately identify spam. It's programmers didn't just program four datapoints of what they thought spam would look like and then call it a day. How effective do you think it would be if they had? Then why are you giving so much credence to this guy's "work."
Today we are going to use Bayes's theorem to determine the likelihood that all of this disabling of cables is malicious.
Bullshit. What you're doing is making up numbers and then using Baye's theorum to validate your previous suspicions. As much as you try to play it off as such, you are not being rational or scientific.
While you're at it, you might as well just throw Occam's Razor in there, for misreferencing-completeness, and try claim that a simpler explanation is conspiracy rather than four independent failures.
Now how do you know that? Has the NSA, CIA, or DOD ever wrote an article or given an interview on the trials and tribulations of tapping undersea lines? Or are you just confidently bullshiting on how you think it might work based upon your simplistic understanding of the matter?
Well, let me tell you how I think it works, based upon mine. I think that the providers localize the spot of the outage by communicating to the series of regenerators both sides of the cut. Then they further estimate where the outage is by sending bursts of light down each side of the broken fiberoptic line and measuring how long it takes to get it back (the cut ends effectively acting like mirrors), using an instrument called an optical time-domain reflectometer.
So, cutting a line to splice somewhere else would be absolutely pointless, because it would be detectable and would even be more dangerous for any kind of clandestine operation because it would attract undue attention. There are thousands of undersea cables and we're all talking about these four. If this was some kind of CIA or NSA mission it was the biggest clusterfuck ever.
Technology is technology. You can't have cellphones and computers without also having guns, bombs, etc. The modern combat rifle has been around for about 60 years now. Even modern jets were products of the breakthroughs made in the the late '40s. If people are wanting to kill eachother and are willing to spend the money to buy modern weaponry, no amount of naive, wishful thinking is going to stop it from being available to them.
One of the middle level farm workers asked me, in English, why the U.S. maintained such high subsidies on cotton and rice; why wouldn't the U.S., master of free trade, import Ethiopian cotton and rice?...They wanted to know why we refused to buy their products, even though their products were produced more cheaply than ours. How do you answer that? Coming from someone who makes less in a month than I might spend in a night.
The answer is rather simple. Being a sovereign nation, the United States isn't obligated to buy anything from anyone, even if it is cheaper.
Technically, we don't even need one but the reason we choose to pay more for these products is because having a reserve domestic farming capacity is a great boon for our national security. You could think of it as a nice buffer against many possibly dysfunctional globalization scenarios. For example, if Kenya (currently on the verge of a civl war) were the U.S.'s number one food supplier, there would be grave concerns about how we were all going to eat soon. By keeping necessities like food production domestic (or at least maintaining the ability to do so), we don't expose ourselves to this class of risk.
I agree, it's very unfortunate for third world countries whose natural resources are on this select few subsidized products, but it is for very rational reasons. We don't enact such policies to hurt Ethiopian farmers any more than, hypothetically, you would "hurt" Exxon by choosing to buy gas at BP because you like the bathrooms better or think the girl behind the counter is cute or whatever.
Now, that being said, I do think the U.S. does go a bit overboard and subsidizes a bit too much. But this is largely a product of our dysfunctional lobbying-sensitive political system we have. So, if the first answer doesn't go over so well, you could always just respond with "Damn politicians!" and probably please your Ethiopean friends without being too far from the truth.
We're talking about two different things! The gp said that Mitt was inhumanly unethical for not supporting pot for a very narrow class of people. That has nothing to do with recreational use or the huge arrest numbers.
Oh, but it does. The reason why conservative politicians refuse to support medical marijuana is that doing so would undermine their tactic of demonizing substances that have been arbitrarily deemed illegal. The mere ambiguity that using marijuana therapeutically might introduce goes counter to their emotive rhetoric, which you obviously seem to have bought lock-stock-and-barrel.
Being that the war on drugs is such a large issue, let's focus on medical marijuana for a second. Before I start, let me say that I do not use marijuana and am looking at this from a clinical point of view being that I am a healthcare professional.
I firmly believe that there is no scientific reason why marijuana should not be available as a medicine. Let's examine the common counterarguments to using marijuana medically.
One could argue about the effectiveness of marijuana as a treatment. However, there are many accepted medical treatments for which the data is inconclusive and the mechanism unknown or only theoretical. Why aren't they subject to the same scrutiny? I think it would be interesting if politicians were consistent in this regard and chose to oppose things like statins, lower-back surgery, tonsilectomies, and anti-depressants with the same vigor and arguments they use against marijuana. Oh, how the reaction from voters would be furious and swift!
Regardless, it should be obvious that such ambiguity about effectiveness is best managed in the hands of experts (i.e. doctors) familiar with the context and complexities of the case. And, thankfully, this is normally what is done except in the unique case of marijuana. Why is this so? And is there any good reason for it?
Another argument might be made on safety. After all, marijuana is dangerous, right? Even IF this is true, there is no reason why it shouldn't be available as a medical treatment. Many prescription drugs are FAR, FAR more dangerous than marijuana is claimed to be. Take Atropine, for instance, a common drug which is used for resuscitation, treatment for acute organophosphate poisoning, and even dilating pupils. And yet, in the past, it used to be known as "deadly nightshade" and was primarily used as a poison. If you're going to outlaw medical marijuana because marijuana is dangerous, you had better outlaw atropine too. Another example would be Digoxin, which is widely used to treat various heart conditions. Digoxin is derived from the foxglove plant (a.k.a. "Dead Man's Bells" or "Witches' Gloves") and is a poison of antiquity and great notoriety. Again, if you're going to outlaw medical marijuana because its dangerous, you had better outlaw digoxin too. The bottom-line is this: If one is going to make this argument that marijuana should not be available by prescription because it is dangerous, they should at least be consistent and declare the whole practice of modern medicine, by extension, too dangerous as well.
Some say that marijuana should not be available by prescription because it is addictive. This is ridiculous. Alcohol and tobacco are available essentially over the counter and yet they are demonstrably far more addictive than marijuana. Furthermore, many drugs available by prescription are also much more addictive and yet are still available. Again, a little consistency would be nice. I've never seen a politician or pundant who uses this argument about marijuana also suggest the abolishment of Opioids (morphine, codine, oxycodon, etc.) for pain management too. If they did, I can assure you that the masses would be up in arms.
But enough of that. I think I've made my point. If you can formulate a logical argument against marijuana being availa
Bone marrow transplant isn't what happened to this girl.
Yes, I realize that. But once you look past the sensationalist headline of "entire immune system" and understand where those cells come from you'll realize that what happened to her is fundamentally no different than what happens to someone who undergoes a bone marrow transplant. The notable things about this case are: (1)the donor's liver cell(s) migrated and differentiated to replace the hematopoietic stem cells and (2) the replacement of the hematopoietic stem cells was not the directed or intended result of any human intervention.
Her entire immune system replaced itself w/o help or pain. This is what the GP was refering to. So why the/sarcasm?
First of all, what happened to this girl was a fluke. The article said as much. Her amazing case was the result of a series of unlikely (and clinically undesirable/risky) events and circumstances. Specifically, she was: taking immuno-suppressants, received an organ transplant from a special organ in the body known to regrow itself, was probably infected with cytomegalovirus, and even then benefited from an unusual migration of donor cells into the bone marrow that just happened to differentiate correctly and (even more amazingly) out-compete the host hematopoietic stem cells. She's lucky to be alive and most certainly didn't have a pleasant experience getting through it.
I'm sorry if my post came off as snarky, but I cannot disagree more with the GP. In fact, I'm almost positive that he doesn't have the slightest clue what he's talking about. Tay Sachs and CJD (which he butchered the spelling for, by the way) has nothing to do with the article at all. I honestly think it's an embarrassment that on a scientifically-centered forum that his comment is rated +5.
Even his speculation is, in my opinion, is entirely baseless and ill-conceived. It's unlikely that any sort of preventative treatment will ever come out of this case. We already have established methods for "replacing" an "immune system," which, by virtue of its drastic nature would almost certainly be much more reliable. And even if you thought you could replicate the circumstances of this case, there's absolutely no way you could get a human trial ethics board to sign off on giving immuno-suppressants and intentionally infecting people with CMV to develop a preventative measure against an STD, of all things. And even IF you could develop such a treatment you could never give it to the entire population because there would be the obviously disastrous problem of creating an immunological monoculture.
Imagine if they could take a sample of your DNA, correct inherited defects, and then re-implant you with stem cells carrying the corrected sequence.
We effectively already do this. They're called bone marrow transplants, and it's been used to treat a number of blood-based or auto-immune diseases for years.
The risk of this procedure aside, one problem is that bone marrow transplants aren't perfect. Take leukemia or sickle cell anemia for instance. Unless every single hemopoietic stem cell is eradicated (unlikely), there is a risk that the original cell populations will reproduce and the disease will eventually come back.
It would mean hope for victims of all kinds of diseases like Tay-Sachs or Kreuzfeld-Jacob.
Umm... no.
Tay-Sachs disease is a lysosomal storage disease which becomes most problematic in the nerve cells of the brain. For obvious reasons, unlike a bone marrow transplant, you can't remove/replace all of the nerve cells of the brain without killing the patient.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is, to put it simply, mediated by a prion (a malfolded protein that induces normally folded proteins to also misfold) which can be either genetic in origin or acquired. Even in the case of genetic CJD, the protein would is expressed in every cell of the body, so a bone marrow transplant would not address the problem. Furthermore, even in the best case scenario where you could replace the entire defective genome without killing the patient, because the defective prion is self-replicating in nature, unless you ALSO replaced every protein in their body too (which, if you could do that, you effectively just be making a whole new body for the person--a cure for all diseases) you'd be in the unique situation of having treated the genetic form of CJD, only to be effectively left with the acquired (and still deadly) form.
At the very least, the promise of being able to transfer immunological memory on the marrow level potentially means that all we have to do is find the one person whose immune system wipes out HIV, say, and we can all receive that same immunity.
Yeah sure. If you're willing to inflict one of the most invasive, riskiest, and painful procedures in medicine upon the entire world's population just for immunity to one disease, I guess you could [/sarcasm].
If her immune system has been replaced by her donors, won't her other organs/tissues (her own) be rejected by her new (her donor's) immune system?
A better article on this case described her original blood group to be Type O negative(-) with her new blood group being Type O positive(+).
In this special instance, there would be no reaction. Simply stated, anti-bodies can only be generated for antigens. Thus, you cannot have a humeral immune response based upon a lack of an antigen. This, incidentally, is the same reason why a type AB positive(+) person can receive blood transfusions from any blood group.
They gave her a liver from someone with a different blood type?!? I know other markers as well as blood type are taken into account (and in hepatic Tx urgency is another factor), but I thought a blood type match was the minimum requirement.
This is a good point. I can only guess that because the recipient's blood type was rare (approximately 9% of the population in Australia, according to wikipedia) and that the donors blood type was close (and perhaps their major histocompatibility was good too), other factors like urgency might have taken precedence over the ideal hope of a "perfect match."
Short sighted ? Because of copy protection, you can't keep on playing the old game but must buy a new one if you want to keep playing. Putting it in for that purpose requires foresight and long-term planning and is the very antithesis of shortsightedness.
Frustrating/haranguing your paying customers (or even simply those people interested in your product) is NOT a prudent long-term strategy.
Take the OP, for example, do you think he would be as enthusiastic about buying from the C&C franchise after his experience?
DNA is as bad, the current theoretical best case is the equivalent of taking a the DNA variant of a dozen traits like hair color, height, skin color, etc. If you have a dozen such variables and calculate the number of possible permutiations you'll get a huge number. But these are not random numbers, they are selected for and match to a much larger than random extent within population groups. Get a large enough database and you will find matches. Take a sample from a hispanic and you'll get a dozen other hispanics. Take a sample from a caucasian and you'll get a horde of white people.
Not quite. STRs used most DNA fingerprints independently sort from one another because they are located on different chromosomes. In other words, having one particular polymorphism at one STR location specifically does not make one more/less likely to have any other particular polymorphism at another location. This is a crucial assumption in the DNA fingerprinting process and, indeed, the one that gives DNA fingerprinting its statistical selectivity.
Furthermore, I dislike your analogy in that it suggests false positives for DNA fingerprinting are in any way, related to race. They are not, because DNA fingerprinting is not in any way based upon phenotype. A better slashdot-accessible analogy would be the following: can two people who encode their first and last names via MD5 hash have a collision? Sure, it's rare, but certainly possible. But is it likely that these two people's names would be linguistically or culturally similar in any way? Probably not.
Intelligence is heritable. Seeing as how intelligence and thought are a product of the physical structures of our brains which are encoded for by our genes, it is undeniable that intelligence is heritable. Level of intelligence, however, is probably what you mean, and on that, there is good evidence to indicate that it too has a genetic basis. The best studies to this effect involve the strong correlation between the IQs of twins separated at birth.
You also assert that reproduction rates are inversely proportional to intelligence.
What? Where did I say that? Reproduction rates are probably, for sociological reasons, inversely proportional to SES and education, but where did I say anything about that in my post? I suggest you brush up on your reading comprehension skills because, I did not and am not making the ridiculous claim that you are suggesting I did.
However, you conclude "a decrease in the overall number of genes conferring intelligence". The correct conclusion is "a decrease in the ratio of genes conferring intelligence to the total number of genes". Which is to say that it is completely possible to end up with more intelligent people further down the line than we have today, while having an even larger number of unintelligent people.
Usually when one references trends in genepool of a species it is implicit that proportions are being discussed, because to speak in terms of absolute numbers would be nonsensical for the reasons you state.
The reproductive trend is irrelevant until we hit a limiting factor (food, space, oxygen, etc). If we hit a limiting factor, your conclusion assumes that both groups will be affected in identical proportions. However, it seems much more reasonable to assume that survivability will be biased toward the intelligent due to their ability to plan and store, to say nothing of them being previously successful and thus controlling resources.
What in the hell are you talking about? Until you can explain how this babble relate to my post, I'm not going to comment on it.
Lamarckian evolution was proved false long ago; just because a group of people isn't educated and therefore doesn't make use of their intelligence does not mean that their children will be stupid. They're just more likely to go uneducated and continue the cycle. What I'm saying is, it's nothing a little education couldn't cure, and even if nothing is done about it, intelligent people will never die out, they'll just rise up from 'unintelligent' sources.
Nobody is suggesting LaMarckian evolution. I think the point is that, in modern society, intelligence as a phenotypic trait is, on average, being actively selected against. And furthermore, though it is not simple Mendelian inheritance to be sure, there is good evidence (via twin studies, etc.) that there is a strong genetic component to this trait we term "intelligence." Thus, it is very intuitive to put the two trends together and predict that the average genepool of such societies will, over time (and successive generations), exhibit a decrease in the overall number of genes conferring intelligence (i.e. evolution). This is not an unscientific idea--just an unpopular, politically incorrect, and (to be fair) elitist one.
That being said, the one thing people never take into account is the effect of migration and geneflow on human evolution. There's more going on in the world than just Football and Jerry Springer. In many countries, intelligence and academic success are coveted and (e.g. through arranged marriages and/or, sadly, lack of medical care or food for the uneducated/poor) very much do lead to an increase in reproductive success. So, before you decide to take matters into your own hands and save the world by becoming a baby-daddy,
take comfort in the fact that the evolutionary trends of 300 million Americans would likely be buffered by the counter-trends of, for instance, billions Indians and Chinese.
Now he [a mentally handicapped person] has no job and just sits in his room at a home all day. Before he was helping pay his way at the home, now the state is paying his entire way, and he is, to put it bluntly, a burden on society. The argument could be made that we were exploiting this man...
Nonsense! Our destitute country has carried such burdens long enough! I suggest that we immediately find a way to harness this vast, untapped resource that is our nation's retarded. Clearly, a giant city-sized, electricity-producing hamster wheel is in order. Oh it would be glorious! Imagine how grateful the cretins would be for finally having a purpose in the cogs of industry and progress--indeed, a very purpose for living. But more important than that, imagine.... the profit.
[/sarcasm]
It does hurt society to have a minimum wage. By setting a floor on the amount a business can hire at, the number of employees, and thus the number unemployeed, is off from what the market could handle.
The U.S. currently has a 95.5% employment rate, which for all intents and purposes represents maximal employment. Do you really think that a lack of a minimum wage would add significantly to that number?
It's sad that so many Americans have become so myopically obsessed with self-interest and short-term thinking that such things need to be outright explained, but you need to realize, Mr. Small-business, that social policies like welfare, disability, and the minimum wage benefit you--yes you! Even the most cursory examination of history shows that, while the masses will put up with a lot (e.g. feudalism, monarchy, oppression, even slavery), if they can't eat or care for their families, they will revolt. And revolutions, by the by, are bad for business.
Furthermore, though its quite evident that you seem confident of your position within the world, it (should) go without saying that you could just as easily end up in their (the mentally or physically disabled) position too. I would wager that you might see things a little differently if that were (God forbid) ever the case.
Medicine as it is is normally taught and used as treatment has never been science. Doctors are not taught real rigorous scientific method, and many don't really understand what science is really about. Just because one may think they know about how something works doesn't mean that it is scientifically proven. It just makes me angry that some doctors spout that they are people of science when they are never really trained in the scientific method or really understand what that means.
Speaking as someone who is currently in medical school, allow me to put forth the falsifiable claim that you don't know what you're talking about.
The vast majority of medical school applicants come with degrees in scientific fields (usually Biology or Chemistry). To be considered for admission they must to do well on the MCAT, a difficult test which stresses scientific knowledge and reasoning abilities. Once in, they are drilled for the first two years with what's called "basic" sciences, where they are expected to gain an in-depth understanding of a wide breadth of information all directly based upon accepted scientific literature. Mastery of this information is tested via the USMLE Step 1--again, another very difficult test.
So, please, enlighten us as to where you're getting this idea that modern medicine is taught unscientifically, because as far as I can tell your notion is not based in reality.
The funny thing is, a common argument that I hear on a frequent basis is that because medical school is taught by PhDs and not MDs, it is focused too much on scientific details and not based on clinical reality. There is no point in training a family doctor to be able to draw out the TCA cycle or recite G-protein signaling transduction pathways as such information has no impact on treatment or diagnosis.
Logically, you're not capable of voting if you're dead - your statement is patriotic but makes no sense.
I realize that some of you have been led to believe that self-interest is all that matters in this world (in which case no amount of human dignity would be worth dying for), but the truth is a representative, accountable government is something worth dying for. The only semi-reliable way to achieve this end has been through the institution of democratic governments. Your vote, while perhaps meaningless to you and maybe even meaningless to the outcome of an election, is a powerful symbol of your heritage as a free, represented citizen.
that the American Revolution was economic more than philosophical - these are *seriously* inconvenient historical facts.
Yeah, yeah. You're not the only one that knows about Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States--get over yourself.
Regardless, the fact remains that there were legitimate grievances against the British Empire. And, besides, doesn't taxation carry both an economic and philosophical component? Furthermore, aren't all exploitative arrangements like colonialism, by definition, immoral? To say that 25,000 American civilians-turned-revolutionaries gave up their lives because they envisioned only an economic benefit would be ridiculous. Furthermore, if Beard's thesis is correct, (i.e. that the founders were just a bunch of fatcats trying to structure the government in a way that only benefited themselves), why would they even bother seriously considering abolishing the institution of slavery? How could such a purely philosophical ideal serve to benefit any of them economically?
Obviously this whole topic is to be hyperbolic, the point is we're supposed to ignore that $1 million dollars will make a much larger differences to our lives than whether or not we vote
How much would that one million dollars (or any amount of money, for that matter) be worth if a tyrannical regime decides to take it from you? It's funny how you want to lecture us on history and then assume as if our unusually peaceful domestic situation as a society will hold forever and ever simply because that's all you, yourself, have ever known.
I can understand antipathy towards modern day politics. What I can't understand are the great number of people who have become convinced that governance is somebody else's problem.
[Islamic Fundamentalists] are tiny fraction of all muslims. They are largely whack-jobs. Most fundamentalists are, and there are nutter "christian" ones too, who have the ear of Americans, and even the ear of the President. I put christian in quotes because they represent christians the way Osama represents muslims.
I agree with you in that extremists are most certainly the minority. The problem, however, is that unlike mainstream Christianity, mainstream Islam and so-called moderate muslims often tacitly condone the actions of the extremists and almost never outright condemn them. Islamic terrorism wouldn't be such an epidemic problem if this support didn't exist.
If Iraq were prosperous and its people comfortable, the number of them that the fundamentalists could motivate to blow themselves up in foreign countries would be utterly minimal. The poorer and more desperate you are the more important religion becomes to you, and the more vulnerable you are to religious exploitation... Their will ALWAYS be nutters on both sides who want the other side dead, but they only have power and influence over the people if the people are poor and desperate, and the other side provokes them... Muslims are exactly the same. The only reason they are so much more violent is that they AREN'T as comfortable or wealthy to start with so they are more vulnerable to religious fundamentalism, and America presents itself as a ready target - its meddling in their governments, and lording its prosperity over them.
This commonplace notion that terrorists are uneducated, poor, and personally affected (family killed, house blown up, etc.) by Western aggression is demonstrably false. Most of the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks were educated Saudis. The recent failed attack on Glasgow airport in the U.K. was committed by muslim medical students and doctors. In fact, there was a book written by Robert Pape called "Dying to Win" where the author made a database of the biographical data of every suicide terrorist from the 1980's to the writing of the book. The results were startling and absolutely blow this shibboleth out of the water.
Christiantity has loads of precedent for comitting atrocities. You put Christians in the same conditions Iraqi's are in, and militant extremist groups will sprout up like weeds quoting passages of Old Testament and calling for the death of their enemies, and their judgement by God. And their recruiting efforts will appeal greatly to the disenfranchised.
I agree wholeheartedly. I don't think Christians are inherently different on a psychological level or immune to the effects of propaganda or saber-rattling. The utter extermination of the Native Americans, institution of slavery, Spanish Inquisition and Holocaust are certainly proof of that. We are all--irrespective of our faith--human and, thus, prone to manipulation towards evil ends.
That being said, such facts should not be used in a misguided attempt to morally legitimize Islamic terrorism. When people do this, they set the bar for humanity dreadfully low to the point where discussion of morality thereafter becomes a pointless endeavor.
And again, they only want to kill us because we are killing them.
It's interesting how you say this and then proceed to go on and explain how... well... it's not the ONLY reason after all.
You need to actually use your head for once and think about the argument you're making here. Your argument is extremely self-centered - it assumes everything a fundamentalist muslim believes is because of us.
Actually, it's ironic that you say this, because your opinion seem to espouse a more self-centered, myopic take on the situation. As you describe it, there wouldn't be a problem if we "just left them alone." It's almost as if you'd have us believe that Islamic extremism wouldn't exist if U.S. would just play nice; as if their ingrained beliefs are directly dependent upon our actions.
Clearly, U.S. foreign policy has done a lot to exacerbate the situation. But we'd be fools to think that the best way to address the situation is to go down their laundry list of stated grievances (U.S. troops in holy lands, Existence of Israel, Sharia Law for Muslim immigrants, etc.) and give them everything they say they want. What many well-meaning intellectuals here in the West need to understand is that there are internal sociological reasons for Islamic extremism that are completely independent of our actions. As ignorant as the phrase "They hate us for our freedoms." ostensibly sounds, there is some truth to it. Sayyid Qutb, one of the philosophical progenitors for the Arab Nationalist movement (and Al Qaeda) spent some time in the United States and when he came back to tell his followers of his travels, he didn't talk about our government. He didn't talk about our inept foreign policy. What he spoke of in his books/writings was our wicked, wasteful, and corrosive culture.
Why would they hate our music if they didn't have to hear it? What does being against freedom for women have to do with hating the west? (I'm not saying it's right for them to feel that way, but it's their belief - it's got nothing to do with us.)
It's complicated. The true enemy of extremist Islam is globalism. In short, it's very difficult to oppress societies when the people begin to ask questions. Every Western movie, song, book, or news source that finds its way into a strict Islamic country presents another challenge to the authority of the political/religious leaders. One way to deal with this problem is to close off the society to the outside world and completely restrict communications. This is how the totalitarian regime of North Korea (and to a lesser extent, China) discourages the mere idea of dissent from taking root. That is, however, not an option for muslim societies (or at least not how they've decided to respond). My guess as to why this is because their people are in general more mobile and worldly and that trade with the West is so profitable because of their large reserves of of oil and natural gas.
The response to the challenge of globalism has been to try to demonize the West and to promote the idea that muslims and the muslim way of life are being oppressed. The result is that Muslims living in Islamic countries are the victims of the largest, most integrated, pervasive propaganda campaign in human history. Has it not ever struck you how perverse it that an average Iranian peasant struggling to make a living can, at the drop of a hat, rattle off a list of grievances of Isreal against Palestine--a conflict which is over 1000 miles away? That's no accident or product of chance.
I also find it amazing that nobody who parrots the same line you do ever stops to see the fallacy in the logic. If they hate our freedoms so much, why is our stated goal to eradicate terrorism by forcing those same freedoms on them? (Again, through military action if necessary.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're being overly negative here. The food distribution system here in the United States isn't perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as you suggest. Things like preservatives and pasteurization don't make store-bought foods more profitable; they make it possible. Without these things, food would spoil far too quickly and regional famine would occur. Modern urban life would become impossible as there simply isn't enough nearby arable land to support the millions of city-dwellers.
As far as the FDA corruption goes, I think you might make such arguments in the case of pharmaceuticals but, in my opinion as someone who has studied the matter in a college course, they do a pretty bang-up job with our food, for the most part. You know, for a country with 300 million people and an historically unprecedented amount of choice in food products, it's rather amazing that food-borne illnesses and outbreaks are so relatively rare. In fact, by most standards the United States has the most secure, safest food supply in the world.
-Grym
The difference, if you're interested, (though your factious tone suggests that you are not) is that atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures have a known causal relationship via the undisputed greenhouse effect. This relationship must exist in some form or another, because if it didn't, life as we know it would not be possible as the earth's average surface temperature would be well below freezing.
The OP's example of milk and being sick is only a correlative relationship because he lacks any true mechanistic explanation for his observation and furthermore fails to demonstrate that the two things are not merely coincidental in nature.
Science. It works, bitches.
-Grym
So, going back to your original post, do you feel that this is a "natural" state of being? More specifically, do you think that your depression (since you brought it up) was the result of events in your life or your perception of these events?
Clinical depression is not normal. Being sad or upset because bad things have happened to you in life is not the same as being clinically depressed. Whether or not anti-depressants work, it would be dangerous to confuse this fact.
-Grym
Explicitly enumerating the specifics of such a policy would undoubtedly be left up to the courts to decide and was not the point of my post. I was merely observing that both privacy and transparency are not mutually exclusive and how maximizing utility of a situation such as this is likely to be achieved by focusing on what benefits the public the most.
-Grym
I think this is a false choice. Why should we be forced to choose between a complete lack of transparency within government-chartered and/or publicly-traded organizations and no privacy--for anyone--at all?
There can be a reasonable balance between transparency and privacy. Trade secrets, proprietary processes, and national secrets, I agree, should be undisclosed, but should things like financial records, safety/environmental studies, and so on should be publicly available. If businesses don't like that, then they could easily remain private, un-incorporated entities.
Well, of course wikileaks can be used as a political tool. But if that leads to the exposure of corruption and fraud--who cares?!? I would expect that, over time, organizations like wikileaks, even if they are biased, would come to compete in exposing dirt from opposing sides. In fact, I see no reason why anyone should be against such a situation, because all true capitalists love competition (right?) and everyone wants to end corruption and fraud (right?). So what's the problem?
-Grym
I think the burden of proof is on you regarding this point. I'm curious to see your source for this figure. Just one professional/academic (i.e. not popular press) source for this figure will suffice.
The reason I say this is that I find it hard to believe that of the thousands of undersea cables already laid, that only one of them fails per year. Like I said, in 2006, in the span of two days six of them failed. Furthermore, given that more undersea cables are being added each year, and that the older ones are undoubtedly aging, is it not reasonable to expect this figure to increase over time?
How about a number that's based upon some sort of observation and not a mere notion (even if it is a conservative one)? People are typically very bad at assessing risks and probabilities/frequencies of events in practice.
First of all, if your prediction were that the events were merely likely related, I would not have objected. But you don't. You go on to extend your prediction into the realm of paranoia where you imply that the U.S. (or some other entity with subs and/or undersea sabotage capability) is, with >99% certainty sabotaging undersea communication lines, despite the fact that you have no evidence at all for this, by all accounts, admittedly unlikely scenario.
There are any number of ways that these failures could have been related that are (if not by themselves, certainly together) far more likely than men in black suits. What if there was a change in the maintenance operations of these cables? What if these cables all share a common engineering flaw that is just now becoming apparent? What if seismic events are involved? What if a biological organism is involved?
Also, how can you be so sure that these failures are typically randomly distributed? What implications would that have on your analysis? What if, it turns out, that these cable failures follow seasonal or temporal patterns (e.g. reflecting shipping patterns, undersea currents, or maintenance schedules)? What if the failure of one of the lines due to a natural or common event increases the likelihood of failure of other lines (examples of this could be from increased use or decreased maintenance, etc.)?
No, you can't explain it any other way. You use a simple model which basically divides the plethora of possible explanations into "normal yearly failures" and "malice," and then act surprised when you get "malice" as an answer during a time of unusually high failures. What did you expect?
-Grym
Converting non-boot drives seems like a fringe use, honestly. Most people can just make a new truecrypt volume and then mount like normal. For everyone else, move the files temporarily onto DVD-R/CD-R media, create a truecrypt volume, then move the files into the new truecrypt volume. Problem solved.
-Grym
All of them. But since you're asking me specifically, let's go through it:
But let's talk about the rationale for his analysis for a second. First of all, he assumes that cable failures are independent events and are randomly distributed. But is there a good reason to do this? What if they aren't. What if failures in one cables increase the likelihood of failures in other cables a la the New York City Blackout of 2006. Furthermore, what about seismic events? In 2006, six Asian undersea cables were disabled in a two-day period. He could have similarly made some bullshit analysis then--coming up with an even more "certain" result, making it seem as if a conspiracy was afoot--despite the fact that the failures were, in fact, the result of natural phenomenon, the Hengchun earthquake.
Quite simply, in the absence of objective data, I wouldn't. Computing a probability based upon made-up numbers usually just gives you the answer that you assumed to be true all along. You might as well follow your intuition, at that point, and not kid yourself with fake probabilities and statistics.
I don't disagree with Bayes' theorem (or Occam's Razor), jackass. I disagree with using it incorrectly in an intellectually lazy way to try and "prove" a half-baked notion. My spam filter uses hundreds of thousands of objective datapoints to accurately identify spam. It's programmers didn't just program four datapoints of what they thought spam would look like and then call it a day. How effective do you think it would be if they had? Then why are you giving so much credence to this guy's "work."
-Grym
Bullshit. What you're doing is making up numbers and then using Baye's theorum to validate your previous suspicions. As much as you try to play it off as such, you are not being rational or scientific.
While you're at it, you might as well just throw Occam's Razor in there, for misreferencing-completeness, and try claim that a simpler explanation is conspiracy rather than four independent failures.
-Grym
Now how do you know that? Has the NSA, CIA, or DOD ever wrote an article or given an interview on the trials and tribulations of tapping undersea lines? Or are you just confidently bullshiting on how you think it might work based upon your simplistic understanding of the matter?
Well, let me tell you how I think it works, based upon mine. I think that the providers localize the spot of the outage by communicating to the series of regenerators both sides of the cut. Then they further estimate where the outage is by sending bursts of light down each side of the broken fiberoptic line and measuring how long it takes to get it back (the cut ends effectively acting like mirrors), using an instrument called an optical time-domain reflectometer.
So, cutting a line to splice somewhere else would be absolutely pointless, because it would be detectable and would even be more dangerous for any kind of clandestine operation because it would attract undue attention. There are thousands of undersea cables and we're all talking about these four. If this was some kind of CIA or NSA mission it was the biggest clusterfuck ever.
-Grym
Technology is technology. You can't have cellphones and computers without also having guns, bombs, etc. The modern combat rifle has been around for about 60 years now. Even modern jets were products of the breakthroughs made in the the late '40s. If people are wanting to kill eachother and are willing to spend the money to buy modern weaponry, no amount of naive, wishful thinking is going to stop it from being available to them.
-Grym
The answer is rather simple. Being a sovereign nation, the United States isn't obligated to buy anything from anyone, even if it is cheaper.
Technically, we don't even need one but the reason we choose to pay more for these products is because having a reserve domestic farming capacity is a great boon for our national security. You could think of it as a nice buffer against many possibly dysfunctional globalization scenarios. For example, if Kenya (currently on the verge of a civl war) were the U.S.'s number one food supplier, there would be grave concerns about how we were all going to eat soon. By keeping necessities like food production domestic (or at least maintaining the ability to do so), we don't expose ourselves to this class of risk.
I agree, it's very unfortunate for third world countries whose natural resources are on this select few subsidized products, but it is for very rational reasons. We don't enact such policies to hurt Ethiopian farmers any more than, hypothetically, you would "hurt" Exxon by choosing to buy gas at BP because you like the bathrooms better or think the girl behind the counter is cute or whatever.
Now, that being said, I do think the U.S. does go a bit overboard and subsidizes a bit too much. But this is largely a product of our dysfunctional lobbying-sensitive political system we have. So, if the first answer doesn't go over so well, you could always just respond with "Damn politicians!" and probably please your Ethiopean friends without being too far from the truth.
-Grym
Oh, but it does. The reason why conservative politicians refuse to support medical marijuana is that doing so would undermine their tactic of demonizing substances that have been arbitrarily deemed illegal. The mere ambiguity that using marijuana therapeutically might introduce goes counter to their emotive rhetoric, which you obviously seem to have bought lock-stock-and-barrel.
Being that the war on drugs is such a large issue, let's focus on medical marijuana for a second. Before I start, let me say that I do not use marijuana and am looking at this from a clinical point of view being that I am a healthcare professional.
I firmly believe that there is no scientific reason why marijuana should not be available as a medicine. Let's examine the common counterarguments to using marijuana medically.
One could argue about the effectiveness of marijuana as a treatment. However, there are many accepted medical treatments for which the data is inconclusive and the mechanism unknown or only theoretical. Why aren't they subject to the same scrutiny? I think it would be interesting if politicians were consistent in this regard and chose to oppose things like statins, lower-back surgery, tonsilectomies, and anti-depressants with the same vigor and arguments they use against marijuana. Oh, how the reaction from voters would be furious and swift!
Regardless, it should be obvious that such ambiguity about effectiveness is best managed in the hands of experts (i.e. doctors) familiar with the context and complexities of the case. And, thankfully, this is normally what is done except in the unique case of marijuana. Why is this so? And is there any good reason for it?
Another argument might be made on safety. After all, marijuana is dangerous, right? Even IF this is true, there is no reason why it shouldn't be available as a medical treatment. Many prescription drugs are FAR, FAR more dangerous than marijuana is claimed to be. Take Atropine, for instance, a common drug which is used for resuscitation, treatment for acute organophosphate poisoning, and even dilating pupils. And yet, in the past, it used to be known as "deadly nightshade" and was primarily used as a poison. If you're going to outlaw medical marijuana because marijuana is dangerous, you had better outlaw atropine too. Another example would be Digoxin, which is widely used to treat various heart conditions. Digoxin is derived from the foxglove plant (a.k.a. "Dead Man's Bells" or "Witches' Gloves") and is a poison of antiquity and great notoriety. Again, if you're going to outlaw medical marijuana because its dangerous, you had better outlaw digoxin too. The bottom-line is this: If one is going to make this argument that marijuana should not be available by prescription because it is dangerous, they should at least be consistent and declare the whole practice of modern medicine, by extension, too dangerous as well.
Some say that marijuana should not be available by prescription because it is addictive. This is ridiculous. Alcohol and tobacco are available essentially over the counter and yet they are demonstrably far more addictive than marijuana. Furthermore, many drugs available by prescription are also much more addictive and yet are still available. Again, a little consistency would be nice. I've never seen a politician or pundant who uses this argument about marijuana also suggest the abolishment of Opioids (morphine, codine, oxycodon, etc.) for pain management too. If they did, I can assure you that the masses would be up in arms.
But enough of that. I think I've made my point. If you can formulate a logical argument against marijuana being availa
Yes, I realize that. But once you look past the sensationalist headline of "entire immune system" and understand where those cells come from you'll realize that what happened to her is fundamentally no different than what happens to someone who undergoes a bone marrow transplant. The notable things about this case are: (1)the donor's liver cell(s) migrated and differentiated to replace the hematopoietic stem cells and (2) the replacement of the hematopoietic stem cells was not the directed or intended result of any human intervention.
First of all, what happened to this girl was a fluke. The article said as much. Her amazing case was the result of a series of unlikely (and clinically undesirable/risky) events and circumstances. Specifically, she was: taking immuno-suppressants, received an organ transplant from a special organ in the body known to regrow itself, was probably infected with cytomegalovirus, and even then benefited from an unusual migration of donor cells into the bone marrow that just happened to differentiate correctly and (even more amazingly) out-compete the host hematopoietic stem cells. She's lucky to be alive and most certainly didn't have a pleasant experience getting through it.
I'm sorry if my post came off as snarky, but I cannot disagree more with the GP. In fact, I'm almost positive that he doesn't have the slightest clue what he's talking about. Tay Sachs and CJD (which he butchered the spelling for, by the way) has nothing to do with the article at all. I honestly think it's an embarrassment that on a scientifically-centered forum that his comment is rated +5.
Even his speculation is, in my opinion, is entirely baseless and ill-conceived. It's unlikely that any sort of preventative treatment will ever come out of this case. We already have established methods for "replacing" an "immune system," which, by virtue of its drastic nature would almost certainly be much more reliable. And even if you thought you could replicate the circumstances of this case, there's absolutely no way you could get a human trial ethics board to sign off on giving immuno-suppressants and intentionally infecting people with CMV to develop a preventative measure against an STD, of all things. And even IF you could develop such a treatment you could never give it to the entire population because there would be the obviously disastrous problem of creating an immunological monoculture.
-Grym
We effectively already do this. They're called bone marrow transplants, and it's been used to treat a number of blood-based or auto-immune diseases for years.
The risk of this procedure aside, one problem is that bone marrow transplants aren't perfect. Take leukemia or sickle cell anemia for instance. Unless every single hemopoietic stem cell is eradicated (unlikely), there is a risk that the original cell populations will reproduce and the disease will eventually come back.
Umm... no.
Tay-Sachs disease is a lysosomal storage disease which becomes most problematic in the nerve cells of the brain. For obvious reasons, unlike a bone marrow transplant, you can't remove/replace all of the nerve cells of the brain without killing the patient.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is, to put it simply, mediated by a prion (a malfolded protein that induces normally folded proteins to also misfold) which can be either genetic in origin or acquired. Even in the case of genetic CJD, the protein would is expressed in every cell of the body, so a bone marrow transplant would not address the problem. Furthermore, even in the best case scenario where you could replace the entire defective genome without killing the patient, because the defective prion is self-replicating in nature, unless you ALSO replaced every protein in their body too (which, if you could do that, you effectively just be making a whole new body for the person--a cure for all diseases) you'd be in the unique situation of having treated the genetic form of CJD, only to be effectively left with the acquired (and still deadly) form.
Yeah sure. If you're willing to inflict one of the most invasive, riskiest, and painful procedures in medicine upon the entire world's population just for immunity to one disease, I guess you could [/sarcasm].
-Grym
A better article on this case described her original blood group to be Type O negative(-) with her new blood group being Type O positive(+).
In this special instance, there would be no reaction. Simply stated, anti-bodies can only be generated for antigens. Thus, you cannot have a humeral immune response based upon a lack of an antigen. This, incidentally, is the same reason why a type AB positive(+) person can receive blood transfusions from any blood group.
This is a good point. I can only guess that because the recipient's blood type was rare (approximately 9% of the population in Australia, according to wikipedia) and that the donors blood type was close (and perhaps their major histocompatibility was good too), other factors like urgency might have taken precedence over the ideal hope of a "perfect match."
-Grym
Frustrating/haranguing your paying customers (or even simply those people interested in your product) is NOT a prudent long-term strategy.
Take the OP, for example, do you think he would be as enthusiastic about buying from the C&C franchise after his experience?
-Grym
Not quite. STRs used most DNA fingerprints independently sort from one another because they are located on different chromosomes. In other words, having one particular polymorphism at one STR location specifically does not make one more/less likely to have any other particular polymorphism at another location. This is a crucial assumption in the DNA fingerprinting process and, indeed, the one that gives DNA fingerprinting its statistical selectivity.
Furthermore, I dislike your analogy in that it suggests false positives for DNA fingerprinting are in any way, related to race. They are not, because DNA fingerprinting is not in any way based upon phenotype. A better slashdot-accessible analogy would be the following: can two people who encode their first and last names via MD5 hash have a collision? Sure, it's rare, but certainly possible. But is it likely that these two people's names would be linguistically or culturally similar in any way? Probably not.
-Grym
Intelligence is heritable. Seeing as how intelligence and thought are a product of the physical structures of our brains which are encoded for by our genes, it is undeniable that intelligence is heritable. Level of intelligence, however, is probably what you mean, and on that, there is good evidence to indicate that it too has a genetic basis. The best studies to this effect involve the strong correlation between the IQs of twins separated at birth.
What? Where did I say that? Reproduction rates are probably, for sociological reasons, inversely proportional to SES and education, but where did I say anything about that in my post? I suggest you brush up on your reading comprehension skills because, I did not and am not making the ridiculous claim that you are suggesting I did.
Usually when one references trends in genepool of a species it is implicit that proportions are being discussed, because to speak in terms of absolute numbers would be nonsensical for the reasons you state.
What in the hell are you talking about? Until you can explain how this babble relate to my post, I'm not going to comment on it.
-Grym
Nobody is suggesting LaMarckian evolution. I think the point is that, in modern society, intelligence as a phenotypic trait is, on average, being actively selected against. And furthermore, though it is not simple Mendelian inheritance to be sure, there is good evidence (via twin studies, etc.) that there is a strong genetic component to this trait we term "intelligence." Thus, it is very intuitive to put the two trends together and predict that the average genepool of such societies will, over time (and successive generations), exhibit a decrease in the overall number of genes conferring intelligence (i.e. evolution). This is not an unscientific idea--just an unpopular, politically incorrect, and (to be fair) elitist one.
That being said, the one thing people never take into account is the effect of migration and geneflow on human evolution. There's more going on in the world than just Football and Jerry Springer. In many countries, intelligence and academic success are coveted and (e.g. through arranged marriages and/or, sadly, lack of medical care or food for the uneducated/poor) very much do lead to an increase in reproductive success. So, before you decide to take matters into your own hands and save the world by becoming a baby-daddy, take comfort in the fact that the evolutionary trends of 300 million Americans would likely be buffered by the counter-trends of, for instance, billions Indians and Chinese.
-Grym
Nonsense! Our destitute country has carried such burdens long enough! I suggest that we immediately find a way to harness this vast, untapped resource that is our nation's retarded. Clearly, a giant city-sized, electricity-producing hamster wheel is in order. Oh it would be glorious! Imagine how grateful the cretins would be for finally having a purpose in the cogs of industry and progress--indeed, a very purpose for living. But more important than that, imagine.... the profit.
[/sarcasm]
The U.S. currently has a 95.5% employment rate, which for all intents and purposes represents maximal employment. Do you really think that a lack of a minimum wage would add significantly to that number?
It's sad that so many Americans have become so myopically obsessed with self-interest and short-term thinking that such things need to be outright explained, but you need to realize, Mr. Small-business, that social policies like welfare, disability, and the minimum wage benefit you--yes you! Even the most cursory examination of history shows that, while the masses will put up with a lot (e.g. feudalism, monarchy, oppression, even slavery), if they can't eat or care for their families, they will revolt. And revolutions, by the by, are bad for business.
Furthermore, though its quite evident that you seem confident of your position within the world, it (should) go without saying that you could just as easily end up in their (the mentally or physically disabled) position too. I would wager that you might see things a little differently if that were (God forbid) ever the case.
-Grym
Speaking as someone who is currently in medical school, allow me to put forth the falsifiable claim that you don't know what you're talking about.
The vast majority of medical school applicants come with degrees in scientific fields (usually Biology or Chemistry). To be considered for admission they must to do well on the MCAT, a difficult test which stresses scientific knowledge and reasoning abilities. Once in, they are drilled for the first two years with what's called "basic" sciences, where they are expected to gain an in-depth understanding of a wide breadth of information all directly based upon accepted scientific literature. Mastery of this information is tested via the USMLE Step 1--again, another very difficult test.
So, please, enlighten us as to where you're getting this idea that modern medicine is taught unscientifically, because as far as I can tell your notion is not based in reality.
The funny thing is, a common argument that I hear on a frequent basis is that because medical school is taught by PhDs and not MDs, it is focused too much on scientific details and not based on clinical reality. There is no point in training a family doctor to be able to draw out the TCA cycle or recite G-protein signaling transduction pathways as such information has no impact on treatment or diagnosis.
-Grym
I realize that some of you have been led to believe that self-interest is all that matters in this world (in which case no amount of human dignity would be worth dying for), but the truth is a representative, accountable government is something worth dying for. The only semi-reliable way to achieve this end has been through the institution of democratic governments. Your vote, while perhaps meaningless to you and maybe even meaningless to the outcome of an election, is a powerful symbol of your heritage as a free, represented citizen.
Yeah, yeah. You're not the only one that knows about Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States--get over yourself.
Regardless, the fact remains that there were legitimate grievances against the British Empire. And, besides, doesn't taxation carry both an economic and philosophical component? Furthermore, aren't all exploitative arrangements like colonialism, by definition, immoral? To say that 25,000 American civilians-turned-revolutionaries gave up their lives because they envisioned only an economic benefit would be ridiculous. Furthermore, if Beard's thesis is correct, (i.e. that the founders were just a bunch of fatcats trying to structure the government in a way that only benefited themselves), why would they even bother seriously considering abolishing the institution of slavery? How could such a purely philosophical ideal serve to benefit any of them economically?
How much would that one million dollars (or any amount of money, for that matter) be worth if a tyrannical regime decides to take it from you? It's funny how you want to lecture us on history and then assume as if our unusually peaceful domestic situation as a society will hold forever and ever simply because that's all you, yourself, have ever known.
I can understand antipathy towards modern day politics. What I can't understand are the great number of people who have become convinced that governance is somebody else's problem.
-Grym
I agree with you in that extremists are most certainly the minority. The problem, however, is that unlike mainstream Christianity, mainstream Islam and so-called moderate muslims often tacitly condone the actions of the extremists and almost never outright condemn them. Islamic terrorism wouldn't be such an epidemic problem if this support didn't exist.
This commonplace notion that terrorists are uneducated, poor, and personally affected (family killed, house blown up, etc.) by Western aggression is demonstrably false. Most of the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks were educated Saudis. The recent failed attack on Glasgow airport in the U.K. was committed by muslim medical students and doctors. In fact, there was a book written by Robert Pape called "Dying to Win" where the author made a database of the biographical data of every suicide terrorist from the 1980's to the writing of the book. The results were startling and absolutely blow this shibboleth out of the water.
I agree wholeheartedly. I don't think Christians are inherently different on a psychological level or immune to the effects of propaganda or saber-rattling. The utter extermination of the Native Americans, institution of slavery, Spanish Inquisition and Holocaust are certainly proof of that. We are all--irrespective of our faith--human and, thus, prone to manipulation towards evil ends.
That being said, such facts should not be used in a misguided attempt to morally legitimize Islamic terrorism. When people do this, they set the bar for humanity dreadfully low to the point where discussion of morality thereafter becomes a pointless endeavor.
-Grym
It's interesting how you say this and then proceed to go on and explain how... well... it's not the ONLY reason after all.
Actually, it's ironic that you say this, because your opinion seem to espouse a more self-centered, myopic take on the situation. As you describe it, there wouldn't be a problem if we "just left them alone." It's almost as if you'd have us believe that Islamic extremism wouldn't exist if U.S. would just play nice; as if their ingrained beliefs are directly dependent upon our actions.
Clearly, U.S. foreign policy has done a lot to exacerbate the situation. But we'd be fools to think that the best way to address the situation is to go down their laundry list of stated grievances (U.S. troops in holy lands, Existence of Israel, Sharia Law for Muslim immigrants, etc.) and give them everything they say they want. What many well-meaning intellectuals here in the West need to understand is that there are internal sociological reasons for Islamic extremism that are completely independent of our actions. As ignorant as the phrase "They hate us for our freedoms." ostensibly sounds, there is some truth to it. Sayyid Qutb, one of the philosophical progenitors for the Arab Nationalist movement (and Al Qaeda) spent some time in the United States and when he came back to tell his followers of his travels, he didn't talk about our government. He didn't talk about our inept foreign policy. What he spoke of in his books/writings was our wicked, wasteful, and corrosive culture.
It's complicated. The true enemy of extremist Islam is globalism. In short, it's very difficult to oppress societies when the people begin to ask questions. Every Western movie, song, book, or news source that finds its way into a strict Islamic country presents another challenge to the authority of the political/religious leaders. One way to deal with this problem is to close off the society to the outside world and completely restrict communications. This is how the totalitarian regime of North Korea (and to a lesser extent, China) discourages the mere idea of dissent from taking root. That is, however, not an option for muslim societies (or at least not how they've decided to respond). My guess as to why this is because their people are in general more mobile and worldly and that trade with the West is so profitable because of their large reserves of of oil and natural gas.
The response to the challenge of globalism has been to try to demonize the West and to promote the idea that muslims and the muslim way of life are being oppressed. The result is that Muslims living in Islamic countries are the victims of the largest, most integrated, pervasive propaganda campaign in human history. Has it not ever struck you how perverse it that an average Iranian peasant struggling to make a living can, at the drop of a hat, rattle off a list of grievances of Isreal against Palestine--a conflict which is over 1000 miles away? That's no accident or product of chance.