It depends on how you are measuring fitness. As an individual or as a species? A species that had a relative paucity of genetic diversity may not survive as much environmental stress. Diversity helps species survive new threats.
An example is the black plague that killed between 30-60% of Europe's population in the 1300s. People who carried one copy of a mutant gene for the Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Receptor are more likely to survive illnesses that cause severe dehydration (like plague, typhoid, etc.) So the genetic diversity of the population (that there were some people who carried mutations in the CFTR) was a critical factor in survival of that population (because it was not just polymorphisms in the CFTR that were responsible - multiply that out by many genes and many stressors.)
Of course it also resulted in about 1/25 people of European descent being a carrier of a CFTR mutation (which if you have two results in a quite deadly illness.) So diversity isn't all great on the individual level.
If this was a machine that did something that other (cheaper) technologies did not already do, it might be worth the price tag. Spirometry (cheap) and a chest X-ray (cheap), and a blood gas (cheap) will tell you more than TFA says this does. Not to mention a good history and physical. (Prices may vary depending on social justice quotient of one's country.)
In a matter of mere seconds, a doctor using the technology can ascertain an enormous amount of information about the lung that would ordinarily take hours and require the use of several devices.
Yeah, well you can get a spirometer that can hook up to a laptop (used) for a couple hundred dollars. A good cardiology stethoscope costs about $160. Of course, doing a reasonable spirometry assessment is 20 minutes, a good history and physical is 30-40 minutes, and a chest X-ray takes an hour if you count the time to drive to the place to get your one second of radiation exposure. I am not seeing the value of buying a new $40,000 toy to replace that when that same amount of money could be spent on an EMR, an office ultrasound (which I would really love but can't afford), or even the annual salary of a medical assistant.
Conditions such as asthma, emphysema, and pneumonia each produce distinct and definable images.
And... um... the day I need a $40,000 machine to tell me someone has asthma, emphysema, or pneumonia is the day I will retire from practice.
Um... he's pro-life, supports continued exclusion of gays from the military, anti-stem cell research, and voted to support large subsidies for oil companies. He's highly socially conservative and is only fiscally conservative when it comes to a few popular issues.
I'm not at all a Libertarian. However, I have a few Libertarian friends, and they don't give a rats ass what I do in the bedroom or that I write prescriptions for the morning after pill. Calling Ron Paul a Libertarian is not only incorrect, but insulting to people who really are.
My point is this: when I was "dead," I never "left my body," I never saw myself and the doctors in the hospital from "above," I never experienced anything. It was like a light-switch was simply flipped. I was just gone. No angels, no bright light, nothing. So. My advice, for what it's worth, is that you should do whatever you need to do. Whatever you need to accomplish. If my experience is any indication, there is no second chance.
I agree with you in your conclusions (there is only one life, so use it well.) However your experience of lack of a near death experience doesn't add to that. I flew last week in a plane and it didn't crash. This doesn't mean that planes don't crash.
They immediately ran a catheter up my groin, into my heart, and attached to an external pace-maker. A day later they implanted a pace-maker.
Actually if they threaded a temporary pacemaker though your groin, it was a transvenous pacemaker. An external pacer is attached via pads on your chest/back that basically send a repetitive shock through your chest wall to buy a few minutes till you can insert the transvenous as an hours-days bridge to a permanent pacemaker. And if you've ever been transcutaneously paced, you'd be quite aware of it - it hurts like an MF. Though generally people don't seem to mind them or pull them off when you let them know what the little shocks are doing.
Oh, 7,500 - so that makes it only $50,000 per resident. Of course we can't spend $5,000 a year on the poor to provide them with basic primary medical care. In fact that same money used to pay for that bridge could have been used to save the lives of the 18,000 American's who died last year for lack of health care.
But you are right. Being able to drive over a bridge in 2 minutes versus taking a grueling 8 minute ferry ride is way worth it.
Ted Stevens cheats on his wife with a prostitute (thus betraying her trust as well as placing her at risk of serious STIs.) And then he lies about it. This makes one wonder what reverence he holds for the sanctity of marriage?
However, you might ask what is the root cause of Stevens' infidelity, stupidity, and dishonesty? Why would a man who so highly values family, marriage, and apple pie betray the sacred trust given him by his wife?
I think Ted himself gave us a pretty good answer: gay marriage.
My partner and I have been in a monogamous relationship for the past 11 years. We finally got married in Ontario in 2004 when I was at a medical conference in Quebec. You see, it was all well and good that we practice all the gardening, cooking, and sodomy that we wanted until we decided to call it a marriage.... because ultimately that resulted in the downfall of Senator Stevens. Before 2004 - Stevens was a respected Senator from the great state of Alaska. He was the chairman of the Senate Commerce and then ultimately the Appropriations Committee. He was happily married to a beautiful woman http://www.adn.com/photo/2007/05/29/2854015-sty.jp g/ (who kinda looks like a dude... but hey, look whose talking?)
Then after we get married, he ends up being continually hounded by the news media for his porktastic appropriations, his bribery scandals, his complete lack of any understanding of a medium of which he is charged to monitor and regulate, his work to allow drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, and numerous other slimy crap he's heretofore been able to keep under wraps.
You too are partially correct. 'Search and destroy' missions are effective at eradicating one particular bad actor - MRSA. However it does not prevent Staph infections in general since we are all swimming in a sea of Staph and Strep. So you can still get cellulitis and Staph pneumonia - however, you can treat it with rocephin instead of vancomycin (or doxycyclin, bactrim, clindamycin, macrodantin, and other antibiotics to which MRSA is still sensitive.) However 'search and destroy' does not eradicate all resistant bacteria. For example VRE (vancomycin resistant enterococcus) is more prevalent in Europe largely because there is a high rate of community carriage because glycopeptide avoparcin is used to promote livestock in Europe (but not in the US where community VRE is essentially unheard of) and promotes high levels of VRE.
As a physician VRE scares the snot out of me more than MRSA. I treat patients with community acquired MRSA infections all the time - with oral antibiotics as outpatients. VRE is often a ticket to the ICU if not the ECU (Eternal Care Unit.)
Moreover, while 'search and destroy' does definitely save some patients from serious illness or even death, it also likely causes serious illness or even death in those pariahs who are isolated. There is pretty good evidence that patients who are on contact or respiratory isolation get poorer quality care when hospitalized. You get less face time with the staff, are less likely to get needed procedures and tests, and are more likely to be discharged earlier from the hospital when corrected for level of severity of illness. In addition those 'profiled' for possible infection are often the sickest in the hospital anyway (dialysis patients, AIDS patients, transplant recipients, cancer patients.) So the cure in this case may be worse than the disease.
That's not to say that both the US and Europe could do better than we are. I think a modified version of 'search and destroy' would benefit the US. However its not as simple as simply adopting one particular technique to decrease the prevalence of one particular bug. We need a comprehensive plan of attack against antibiotic resistance that is the Infectious Disease version of the Kyoto Protocol. It needs to involve comprehensive surveillance, R&D into best practices for infection control (lets start with a head to head of 'search and destroy' that doesn't just measure success by lower rates of MRSA infection, but in overall morbidity and mortality), monetary support for the implementation of such practices, immediate cessation of all antibiotics in agriculture, and R&D into the development of new classes of antibiotics (and cool stuff like TFA talked about.)
Good idea. Let's nationalize the farms before everyone dies of starvation.
Except that there is a difference: 99.9%+ of the US population can afford or obtain through charity at least rudimentary foods necessary for survival due to the inexpensive nature of food in out society. The poorest of the poor in the US may not be eating the best food in the world, but I haven't seen serious protein calorie malnutrition (except due to illness like cancer) in many years.
However, in the US, a significant minority of the population does not have access to preventative and basic primary care medicine necessary for survival. So yes, just like I would expect the government to get involved if 8% of American children and almost a quarter of non-elderly adults were starving to death, I would expect the government to get involved if 8% of the American children and almost a quarter of non-elderly adults are unable to get basic health care.
But hey, nice demo of a great slippery slope fallacy!
"Ask any doctor about Medicare reimbursements and she will tell you the same thing. They are much lower than they should be."
OK, well I will field that one, since I am a physician (I work in a primary care clinic and in an ER.) In my clinic, the best payer (hands down) is Medi-Cal. In the ER, Medi-Care pays less than the payments by insurers such as BCBS.... but... (and that is a big but.)
I would easily choose to have every patient that I see in the ER (or in clinic) have their bills paid at the Medi-Care rate because then all of them would would be paid. For example, say I see 100 people and charge $120 a patient. However only 70% of people are insured, so rarely get paid on the other 30%. I make $8,400. However, if I see all 100 and am paid $100/patient, I make $10,000. So Medicare costs are only lower based on the idea that you have to cost shift. If everyone is insured, cost-shifting becomes unnecessary.
In addition, I would not spend so much money to have my stuff coded by a professional biller/coder (who knows the 1000+ insurance policies in CA) I would save even more and would get a large chunk of that $100 to go in my pocket. Lastly I would not spend as much of my time dicking around looking up whether or not a person's insurer covers X, Y, or Z proton pump inhibitor and more time seeing patients - thereby making my productivity and pay higher.
So from this doctor - and many more: Medicare for all? Hell yeah!
It is so interesting hearing conservative whack jobs talk about the bottom line as the ultimate measure of success in an endeavor. Then have them develop selective hearing loss when the bottom line is revealed for a social justice policy like universal health insurance. For example, average life expectancy at birth in the UK is 78.7, in the US its 78. Average spending on health care in the US as a percentage of GDP is 15% in the UK its 9.4%. (And remember for that 15% we don't cover about 15% of the population, while the UK covers 100%.)
So either the British are significantly healthier than us, it is cheaper to provide inexpensive preventative care for all in the long run, or there is a large sucking sound that is coming from the health insurance industry and Pharma taking about 30% off the top of what we spend.
I will tell you the only two thing that is keeping my partner and I from immigrating to Canada is the fact that it would be hard(er) to take his parents with us and I hate cold weather. With global warming and time, Canada looks a whole lot better. And this is a sentiment that I have heard from a lot of my colleagues. Few physicians want to work in a system where 15% of people are uninsured, where people die for lack of simple basic preventative care, where in order to write your patient an rx for an antibiotic, you have to check one of a thousand formularies to determine which they will pay for. For a group of people who, when they started medical school were largely idealistic and wanted to help people, this is a soul-crushing system. However our kids, parents, whatever obligation prevents us from moving. But leave it for a few years, and you may find that the trend of Canadian Physicians emigrating to the US, which slowed and then halted in 2004, may reverse course with US physicians emigrating to Canada.
I would hope for, but the AMA can be a very conservative organization at times.
It also depends on whether or not you are asking for single-payer or universal coverage. If you are asking the later, many physician organizations (including the AMA) support that - essentially the system as it stands, but everyone who is uninsured gets government insurance. This situation is similar to what they have in the UK. Anyone can go to the NHS, but if you have private insurance you can go to private facilities. The reason for this support for UC but not SP is that the former makes it more likely that in the short term physician salaries will stay high. This is shortsighted because in the long term overall I think SP would increase or at least keep the same physician compensation. (This may come in the form of lower pay, but also lower malpractice and operating costs. A large chunk of most malpractice claims is to cover future costs of care. If the future cost of care is $0, then that lowers malpractice awards and ultimately malpractice insurance costs. If you look hour per hour, US physician pay is not far off of most other developed nations. And if you ask many physicians they would take a pay cut to avoid having their souls sucked out of their eyeballs by having to care for patients in the system we have now.)
However the problem with a system that is not single payer is that they savings needed to finance this venture would not be as great. The big savings you will get with single payer is 1) no 30% off the top for 'profits and administration', 2) negotiated priced for drugs on par with the rest of the developed world, and 3) lower administrative costs (for example, if you see me in the ER, in addition to the cost of me, the nurse, the supplies, etc, you pay about $50 for me to pay someone to take my charts and code them, create a bill for the insurer, send it, follow up on it to ensure its paid, etc. The reason I have to use a billing company is that there are over 1000 health plans just in CA. I could easily self code, taking about a minute if there were one unified charge/billing system.)
So I believe that support of a non-SP but universal coverage system is actually fiscally irresponsible. That said, in the current political environment and with Pharma and the Insurance Industry paying millions of dollars to buy congressmen I don't think we could get a single payer system through. However, I do think that if we got universal access, the number of people covered under that program would increase to the point that insurers and Pharma lose some of their power. Ultimately this might be the only way that we get single payer. Its not just a battle, but a complicated war. Moreover, currently 50 people die every day due to uninsurance. A melange system of public and private care that was universal would be superior to the immoral and unsustainable system we have today.
That would be a tax to cover a percentage of the population: those who are over 65 who have worked (or their spouse worked) ~10 years while paying that tax, many of the disabled, and those who have end stage renal disease (ESRD) who need dialysis. That would not be what I spoke of in the quote you used which is health care for all.
Though to be honest paying that tax pisses me off a bit precisely because of one specific wastefulness: Medicare Renal (for those with ESRD.) Diabetes affects about 20 million Americans (mostly type-2). If you have diabetes and no insurance, you are most often unable to treat your diabetes. Untreated diabetes results in many complications, but a common one is kidney damage resulting in ESRD.
So instead of paying $1000/year to treat a type 2 diabetic with a pill costing $1/day, we wait till he has developed severe and inevitable complications of that untreated diabetes. Then once the horse is out of the barn, we decide to treat him at the cost of $30,000-40,000 per year plus often a kidney transplant (about $100,000 of yours and my taxpayer dollars). So in addition to costing much more, this squanders a scarce resource (kidneys for transplant) into a group whose ESRD could have been easily an inexpensively treated. An ounce of prevention is not only worth a pound of cure, its a shitload less expensive as well
Its like refusing to pay to put oil in your car till the engine seizes and then buying a new engine. That is, fucktarded.
Pharma and the insurance industry are evil. Moreover in the case of the health insurance industry they serve no purpose. Previously insurers would assume risk and in doing so merit some financial reward. With the advent of capitation and risk selection, they don't even do that anymore. They are leeches, that in the words of Sicko: Flat Suck.
And I can also assure you that the denials of care that Moore described were not the exceptions, but the rule. I have a patient (whose details are a bit obscured in this story) who has a number of serious medical problems. He has a history of a bleeding ulcer and recently began to have symptoms that were the same as he'd had when he had the ulcer. So I prescribed a Proton Pump Inhibitor (the one that was the preferred drug on that insurer's formulary.) They denied it saying that he had reached the limit of the number of medicines he was allowed to have. In order to have the ulcer medicine he would have to go off of one of his diabetes, blood pressure, or asthma medicines or pay for one of them out of pocket.
And sorry, but the cries of 'socialized medicine' being worse than what we have are for shit. If everyone has the same insurance, then every doctor and hospital would take it. I transfer patients every day from the ER to other hospitals when mine is perfectly able to provide them treatment and the patients want to stay at my facility. But their insurer says they won't pay for them to stay to have their appendix removed at the community hospital in their town, but demands they be transfered to a facility 40 miles away that is 'in network.' Of course they can choose to stay if they want (and we would treat them as required by the EMTALA law.) However their insurer gives them the ultimatum: be sent to another hospital they don't want or be faced with the $30,000 bill for their surgery and recovery in the hospital they do want. So the claims of not being able to 'choose your doctor or hospital' are not what you'd have in a single payer system, but are what you get every day if you are insured under an HMO, PPO, or other device used by the insurance industry to deny you care.
And that is what its like for those with insurance. For those without it can mean death or permanent disability. I see people in the ER every day who have delayed or avoided care because of uninsurance who experience severe consequences because of it. Perforated appendicitis because of a delay due to worries about costs. A child admitted to the hospital with a kidney infection that could have been easily treated with oral antibiotics days before but wasn't because of lack of access. Renal failure in a person with diabetes left untreated. People with bent forearms because while they were appropriately treated and splinted in the ER, they were unable to see an orthopedist for subsequent definitive treatment because of lack of insurance. That is stuff you expect to see in the developing countries, not the richest country in the world. Of course it is easy to see the villain in that scenario as the evil orthopedist who would not see him for free. (And I will admit ortho is one of the worst offenders for unwillingness to provide uncompensated care.) However why should one group of professionals (health care providers) be expected to shoulder the cost of health care for 15-20% of the US population simply because the country refuses to? I don't mind paying taxes to support health care for all in the US, but I do take issue with the tax being exclusively applied to doctors and nurses and PTs and RTs etc, while an attorney or programmer or businessman who makes as much or more than I do pays nothing.
The saddest part is that we already spend in GNP well more than enough to cover every man, woman, and child in the US with a health care system that the world would envy. We pay about 15% of our GNP for health care, while most developed nations spend around 7-8%. If we took all of the money that goes to 'profits an administration' (about 30%) in the for profit health insurance industry, as well as negotiating for drug prices that were on par with what the rest of the developed world we would have enough to pay for everyone.
And if my cell rings when I am driving to the ER or clinic, my options if cell phones were prohibited while driving is either a) not taking the call from or about a patient, or b) pulling immediately over to the side of the highway and thus causing a significant risk for accident.
There is no perfectly safe way to drive. Preferably you do it at noon, on a sunny day, without other cars on the road, with good breaks, airbags, and seatbelts, after a long 10 hour rest, physically healthy, with no other occupants of the vehicle (including no kids), no radio, no cell, stone cold sober, etc.
However that doesn't happen. Deaf people drive. Parents drive their kids around. People sometimes have to drive at night, or when they are hungry, or when they are sick, or when there is a lot of traffic on the road, or when it is raining. Moreover, I like to listen to music when I am driving. Or to have a conversation with my partner.
Unfortunately there is no great way to regulate stupidity and that is what's involved in most wrecks. I would say that of the wrecks I see in the ER, more than half have some recognizable stupidity that directly caused them. Its not one single distraction, but rather some douchebag that is driving after no sleep, eating a Big Mac, talking on his cell, speeding, while his kid whines in the background. That is way more risky than me driving carefully while talking to a patient on the phone.
My personal thoughts about how you could make the roads more safe:
1) graduated licenses - and getting a full licenses is no guarantee you'll keep it. You should just as easily be able to put restrictions on people's licenses after they are fully licensed as you are to take it away. Cause an accident due to putting your makeup on in the car - get your license limited to driving between 0600-2200 and with no other occupants in the vehicle. Do that for a few months, and people will be more careful.
2) require people who have any first accident to take an 8 hour defensive driving course. Even if you were not 'at fault' you still have to take it when you get in your first accident. (Because if you get rear-ended when you stop abruptly without warning with a guy 10 feet off your bumper when you see the street sign for the road you are seeking, you are not paying as much attention as you should.)
3) Make it so everyone has to pay a real penalty when they get a moving violation ticket. A $300 fine and $1000 extra premiums for me for 2 years is not a real deterrent because I make a lot of money. If however, the penalty was picking up garbage off the side of the road for 4 hours, that would be a helluva deterrent.
4) Place momentum limits on vehicles rather than speed limits. Driving my little civic at 75mph is far less dangerous than an average SUV at 60mph. If you limit momentum, people will buy smaller cars that are better at avoiding accidents.
I save about 20% of my income (largely in mutual funds) and donate about 10-15% to charity each year. I've always done the charity thing even when I was making minimum wage and/or putting myself through school selling my plasma. However it was not until I got into 6 figures that I started regularly putting 20% away in savings annually.
Either way, you don't have to spend at or beyond your means. Whether that means is $100/week or $100/hour.
And no, that 10-15% is not because I'm Christian and its a tithe... I'm a secular humanist. So its largely just doing my part to piss off the religious right by funding organizations that they hate.;)
I agree. Making sales taxes apply to internet purchases makes sales taxes slightly less regressive than they already are. That is, if you spend 50% of your income on purchases subject to sales tax (as the poor are likley to do since things like food is a larger part of your budget) you pay a greater percentage of your income in sales tax than people who are more affluent. The wealthy spend a smaller percentage of their income on things subject to sales tax and are thus taxed at a lower rate.
For example:
Person X: $2000/month take home pay of which $400 is spent on things subject to a 5% sales tax. He pays $20/month in sales tax - or 1%.
Person Y: $8000/month take home pay of which $1000 is spent on things subject to sales tax. He pays $50/month in sales tax - or 0.6%.
So sales tax is inherently regressive. When sales tax doesn't apply to internet purchases, that means that those with internet access (the more affluent) pay less sales tax than the poor. So taxing internet purchases makes those who are more affluent (and more likely to purchase things from the internet) pay even less in taxes.
Is it really inane? A true "pure" scientist, uninfluenced by politically correct notions, will also be willing to accept that it is plausible that an alternate explanation for the levels of violent crime in certain races is genetic or at least partially genetic.
Except that this has already been disproved. If you'd like a good summary of the pertinent data and arguments for that I would suggest Stephen Jay Gould's 'The Mismeasure of Man.' Once something has been shown to be true to such a degree, it becomes perverse to keep questioning it. This is similar to the incessant challenges to evolution that creationists make, and for similar reasons: wanting science to provide proof that your decidedly non-scientific beliefs are true.
Continually challenging the concept that race has nothing to do with intelligence or propensity to commit crime is no different from the creationists harping on scientists about transitional fossils: Fossil 1 becomes Fossil 2, so the creationists demand a transitional fossil between the two. So we find fossil 1.5 and say: 'See, here you go! A transitional form between 1 and 2.' At which point the creationist wingnut then demands a transitional fossil between 1 and 1.5....
There is a point when the "yeah but..." needs to stop - especially since the motives that underlie that sentiment are racist to begin with.
You are describing surrogate endpoints. If you study the correlation of crime and skin color, you are actually using skin color as a proxy for other characteristics like poverty, parental education levels, and the per child expenditures for education in the inner city versus suburbia.
Using surrogates is OK in some instances. If the study that answers a given question is outrageously expensive and one using a reasonably valid surrogate is a lot cheaper, using a surrogate can be valid. In addition, if the surrogate itself is a characteristic worth investigating independently, that adds to their validity. For example, using LDL cholesterol as a proxy for heart disease is reasonable since we know that high LDL cholesterol levels are involved in the development of heart disease. However for the kind of research that you are describing, using race as a surrogate for poverty is inane. It reifies race as a characteristic that validly describes ones propensity for crime, poverty, and drug use. Even worse its just as easy to ask people their income as asking them their race so it is generally not even justified to save you research dollars. So why use a surrogate for an easily measured characteristic that has jack shit to do with what you are talking about? It would be like correlating cancer incidence to individual net worth. Of course cancer incidence increases with net worth, but that's because as you get older you tend to have more money and you also tend to have more cancer.
Cancer versus net worth is as meaningless as race versus violent crime. Except that no one is really interested in studying the correlation between individual net worth and cancer because it does not provide craptastic pseudoscience in support of racist ideology...
"You seem to prefer believing the former and based on the extremely aggressive tenor of your original reply to the somewhat bland comments being made it feels to me like you are heavily emotionally invested in maintaining those beliefs."
That is funny from someone who obviously has a lot of anger issues regarding this subject. Yes, given a level playing field, men on average will do slightly worse than women in college level activities. So when its a merit based system, you will have a slight majority of women undergraduates. (Its to the point now that many colleges in the US have lowered standards for boys to ensure that the proportions are not too far off 50:50.) There may be more men with IQ's > 160, but we also have more learning disabilities, more developmental problems, and we do worse than women in communication and language skills which are so crucial to success in college. That doesn't mean that any individual man or woman will necessarily be skilled or unskilled in any particular activity. But it does mean that when you look at proportions of a population, you'll see differences.
However that is not the result of the fact that girls have an unfair advantage in college applications, but rather when you finally get rid of the unfair disadvantage that boys have had for a very long time in school, girls will on average do better. A hundred years ago, most colleges simply would not allow women to attend. Forty years ago many major US colleges would not allow women into advanced courses like graduate or medical school. But in the short time that women have been allowed an equal chance, they are doing better. We've been given the advantages for hundreds of years with women not even being allowed to attend the vast majority of colleges until well into this last century. Now women are doing a little better than men are, and we hear guys like you crying "That's not fair!" If your ego is so frail that the idea that girls might actually do better threatens you so much, you might want to think about your own emotional investments coloring how you are able to see reality.
"I refer you to Andrea Dworkin's famous comment..."
You are kidding right? That's like me picking the most vitriolic fucknut from the heterosexual community and suggesting that his or her views represented the entire community. Newsflash: most of the queer and feminist community thinks Dworkin was a bitter, anti-sex, fucked-up little twat. However on that same note, I refer you to one of Fred Phelps' famous comments: "GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS."
Hmm. You'd better try to work though those anger issues more.
"Third, there used to be (maybe still is) a stereotype of gays 'recruiting' amongst straight men. I never believed this stereotype to have any truth in it but at the university where I did my undergrad degree it was quite obviously true in the case of lesbians recruiting among straight women. If the women I talked to were to be believed the hostility toward men in the 'womyn's center' was so intense that bisexual women were considered traitors and straight women were routinely advised and then pressured to become lesbians as a political statement."
Is the behavior of adolescent frat boys useful to make generalizations about adult men in general? Well, then the behavior of 19 year old girls a month after they first come out is probably not a good indicator with which to determine what is 'lesbian behavior'. Though having been in LGBT student groups in both undergrad and med school (admittedly in the 80's and 90's so not now) I rarely saw that behavior. Though I did see closeted gay kids start attending groups followed by their friends assuming this was due to their recruitment and due to a 'change' in their sexual orientation. That's not actually unexpected though. Many kids are heavily in the closet... my high school room-mate and I were both queer and both only found out after we'd both finished grad school and 're-met.' Some gay kids act painfully straight so that they are above scrutiny. So its only natural that it is perceived like a recruited change when they finally come out.
"I've never known a gay man who decided to be gay but I've known lesbians who decided to become lesbian as a political statement."
I haven't known either. I will admit that I met several women who were closeted straight girls, who wanted to be envolved in the lesbian women's movement so pretended they were lesbian (bisexual actually.) However, I think this is less now that straight people are more welcomed as allies in the movement. Though the point is that these women are about as likely to maintain an emotional and sexual relationship with a woman as the leaders of Exodus International are.
"Lesbians, for example, like to use the phrase 'testosterone poisoning' about men as a way of convincing women who have relationships with men to have sex with another woman."
First, lesbians don't want to have sex with straight women any more than I want to have sex with you. I am a man who likes to have sex with gay men. Though even if you are a closet case... um I'm on a drama free diet. However George Takei might be interested... at least if you play basketball. http://www.devilducky.com/media/58118/
Second, as a general rule lesbians have no problem with men who are neither sexist bastards nor think that lesbians 'just need a good man' to convince them to be straight. I can say that with pretty good certainty because I work two days a week as a physician at a historically queer focused women's health clinic. So I think that hostility you are feeling has more to do with the fact that you are a mysogynist prick rather than the fact that you have a prick.
If only about 25% of Americans have a passport and a state does not comply, then 75% of that state's citizens won't be able to board a plane. What is mandatory about that?
And apparently you've never heard of mission creep? It can be a de factor National ID card even if it is not a de jure one. As soon as it is perceived as the most reliable ID that the most people have, it will become necessary to do even the most mundane of tasks. You won't even be able to rent a fricken DVD at Blockbuster or buy a BigMac with your bank card without a RealID.
Hint: AIDS doesn't come looking for you. You have to go looking for it. That means you are not entitled to any free drugz, kthxbye. You're "entitled" to pay for your mistakes in life, just as I am, and just as everyone else is.
You mean like the half a million children who died last year of HIV related illness? (Over 90% of these cases were acquired during childbirth or breastfeeding.)
Spoken like someone in the first world. Someone who doesn't have HIV. Someone whose lungs are not filled with fluid teeming with Pneumocystis jirovecii. Someone who is not gasping to take the next impossible breath. Someone who will not die today once they finally lack the strength to take another tortured breath.
I've watched people die from Pneumocystis pneumonia. I've watched people die from Cryptococcal meningitis. I've watched people be literally consumed by Kaposi's sarcoma or Lymphoma.
But so you can get a clue, try this: have someone hold your head under water for a while. If you can just sit there passively and NOT struggle to save your life, you go ahead and tell these people to not manufacture HAART drugs for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on how you are measuring fitness. As an individual or as a species? A species that had a relative paucity of genetic diversity may not survive as much environmental stress. Diversity helps species survive new threats.
An example is the black plague that killed between 30-60% of Europe's population in the 1300s. People who carried one copy of a mutant gene for the Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Receptor are more likely to survive illnesses that cause severe dehydration (like plague, typhoid, etc.) So the genetic diversity of the population (that there were some people who carried mutations in the CFTR) was a critical factor in survival of that population (because it was not just polymorphisms in the CFTR that were responsible - multiply that out by many genes and many stressors.)
Of course it also resulted in about 1/25 people of European descent being a carrier of a CFTR mutation (which if you have two results in a quite deadly illness.) So diversity isn't all great on the individual level.
Um, the way that smart kids avoid pregnancy and STIs is not by remaining virgins, but by using condoms when they do have sex.
Um... he's pro-life, supports continued exclusion of gays from the military, anti-stem cell research, and voted to support large subsidies for oil companies. He's highly socially conservative and is only fiscally conservative when it comes to a few popular issues.
I'm not at all a Libertarian. However, I have a few Libertarian friends, and they don't give a rats ass what I do in the bedroom or that I write prescriptions for the morning after pill. Calling Ron Paul a Libertarian is not only incorrect, but insulting to people who really are.
Nick
Actually if they threaded a temporary pacemaker though your groin, it was a transvenous pacemaker. An external pacer is attached via pads on your chest/back that basically send a repetitive shock through your chest wall to buy a few minutes till you can insert the transvenous as an hours-days bridge to a permanent pacemaker. And if you've ever been transcutaneously paced, you'd be quite aware of it - it hurts like an MF. Though generally people don't seem to mind them or pull them off when you let them know what the little shocks are doing.
Nick
Oh, 7,500 - so that makes it only $50,000 per resident. Of course we can't spend $5,000 a year on the poor to provide them with basic primary medical care. In fact that same money used to pay for that bridge could have been used to save the lives of the 18,000 American's who died last year for lack of health care.
But you are right. Being able to drive over a bridge in 2 minutes versus taking a grueling 8 minute ferry ride is way worth it.
Ted Stevens cheats on his wife with a prostitute (thus betraying her trust as well as placing her at risk of serious STIs.) And then he lies about it. This makes one wonder what reverence he holds for the sanctity of marriage?
p g/ (who kinda looks like a dude... but hey, look whose talking?)
However, you might ask what is the root cause of Stevens' infidelity, stupidity, and dishonesty? Why would a man who so highly values family, marriage, and apple pie betray the sacred trust given him by his wife?
I think Ted himself gave us a pretty good answer: gay marriage.
My partner and I have been in a monogamous relationship for the past 11 years. We finally got married in Ontario in 2004 when I was at a medical conference in Quebec. You see, it was all well and good that we practice all the gardening, cooking, and sodomy that we wanted until we decided to call it a marriage.... because ultimately that resulted in the downfall of Senator Stevens. Before 2004 - Stevens was a respected Senator from the great state of Alaska. He was the chairman of the Senate Commerce and then ultimately the Appropriations Committee. He was happily married to a beautiful woman http://www.adn.com/photo/2007/05/29/2854015-sty.j
Then after we get married, he ends up being continually hounded by the news media for his porktastic appropriations, his bribery scandals, his complete lack of any understanding of a medium of which he is charged to monitor and regulate, his work to allow drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, and numerous other slimy crap he's heretofore been able to keep under wraps.
Coincidence? I think not!
No, this is proof positive of not only the existence of the homosexual agendahttp://www.bettybowers.com/homoagenda.html but that it is succeeding. Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha.
Oh, and BTW, the hypocrisy would be that previously as a District Attorney Stevens had a record for coming down hard on prostitution.
Nick
You too are partially correct. 'Search and destroy' missions are effective at eradicating one particular bad actor - MRSA. However it does not prevent Staph infections in general since we are all swimming in a sea of Staph and Strep. So you can still get cellulitis and Staph pneumonia - however, you can treat it with rocephin instead of vancomycin (or doxycyclin, bactrim, clindamycin, macrodantin, and other antibiotics to which MRSA is still sensitive.) However 'search and destroy' does not eradicate all resistant bacteria. For example VRE (vancomycin resistant enterococcus) is more prevalent in Europe largely because there is a high rate of community carriage because glycopeptide avoparcin is used to promote livestock in Europe (but not in the US where community VRE is essentially unheard of) and promotes high levels of VRE.
As a physician VRE scares the snot out of me more than MRSA. I treat patients with community acquired MRSA infections all the time - with oral antibiotics as outpatients. VRE is often a ticket to the ICU if not the ECU (Eternal Care Unit.)
Moreover, while 'search and destroy' does definitely save some patients from serious illness or even death, it also likely causes serious illness or even death in those pariahs who are isolated. There is pretty good evidence that patients who are on contact or respiratory isolation get poorer quality care when hospitalized. You get less face time with the staff, are less likely to get needed procedures and tests, and are more likely to be discharged earlier from the hospital when corrected for level of severity of illness. In addition those 'profiled' for possible infection are often the sickest in the hospital anyway (dialysis patients, AIDS patients, transplant recipients, cancer patients.) So the cure in this case may be worse than the disease.
That's not to say that both the US and Europe could do better than we are. I think a modified version of 'search and destroy' would benefit the US. However its not as simple as simply adopting one particular technique to decrease the prevalence of one particular bug. We need a comprehensive plan of attack against antibiotic resistance that is the Infectious Disease version of the Kyoto Protocol. It needs to involve comprehensive surveillance, R&D into best practices for infection control (lets start with a head to head of 'search and destroy' that doesn't just measure success by lower rates of MRSA infection, but in overall morbidity and mortality), monetary support for the implementation of such practices, immediate cessation of all antibiotics in agriculture, and R&D into the development of new classes of antibiotics (and cool stuff like TFA talked about.)
Nick
However, in the US, a significant minority of the population does not have access to preventative and basic primary care medicine necessary for survival. So yes, just like I would expect the government to get involved if 8% of American children and almost a quarter of non-elderly adults were starving to death, I would expect the government to get involved if 8% of the American children and almost a quarter of non-elderly adults are unable to get basic health care.
But hey, nice demo of a great slippery slope fallacy!
Nick
I would easily choose to have every patient that I see in the ER (or in clinic) have their bills paid at the Medi-Care rate because then all of them would would be paid. For example, say I see 100 people and charge $120 a patient. However only 70% of people are insured, so rarely get paid on the other 30%. I make $8,400. However, if I see all 100 and am paid $100/patient, I make $10,000. So Medicare costs are only lower based on the idea that you have to cost shift. If everyone is insured, cost-shifting becomes unnecessary.
In addition, I would not spend so much money to have my stuff coded by a professional biller/coder (who knows the 1000+ insurance policies in CA) I would save even more and would get a large chunk of that $100 to go in my pocket. Lastly I would not spend as much of my time dicking around looking up whether or not a person's insurer covers X, Y, or Z proton pump inhibitor and more time seeing patients - thereby making my productivity and pay higher.
So from this doctor - and many more: Medicare for all? Hell yeah!
Nick
Not just factually dubious, factually bullshit.
It is so interesting hearing conservative whack jobs talk about the bottom line as the ultimate measure of success in an endeavor. Then have them develop selective hearing loss when the bottom line is revealed for a social justice policy like universal health insurance. For example, average life expectancy at birth in the UK is 78.7, in the US its 78. Average spending on health care in the US as a percentage of GDP is 15% in the UK its 9.4%. (And remember for that 15% we don't cover about 15% of the population, while the UK covers 100%.)
So either the British are significantly healthier than us, it is cheaper to provide inexpensive preventative care for all in the long run, or there is a large sucking sound that is coming from the health insurance industry and Pharma taking about 30% off the top of what we spend.
I will tell you the only two thing that is keeping my partner and I from immigrating to Canada is the fact that it would be hard(er) to take his parents with us and I hate cold weather. With global warming and time, Canada looks a whole lot better. And this is a sentiment that I have heard from a lot of my colleagues. Few physicians want to work in a system where 15% of people are uninsured, where people die for lack of simple basic preventative care, where in order to write your patient an rx for an antibiotic, you have to check one of a thousand formularies to determine which they will pay for. For a group of people who, when they started medical school were largely idealistic and wanted to help people, this is a soul-crushing system. However our kids, parents, whatever obligation prevents us from moving. But leave it for a few years, and you may find that the trend of Canadian Physicians emigrating to the US, which slowed and then halted in 2004, may reverse course with US physicians emigrating to Canada.
Nick
I would hope for, but the AMA can be a very conservative organization at times.
It also depends on whether or not you are asking for single-payer or universal coverage. If you are asking the later, many physician organizations (including the AMA) support that - essentially the system as it stands, but everyone who is uninsured gets government insurance. This situation is similar to what they have in the UK. Anyone can go to the NHS, but if you have private insurance you can go to private facilities. The reason for this support for UC but not SP is that the former makes it more likely that in the short term physician salaries will stay high. This is shortsighted because in the long term overall I think SP would increase or at least keep the same physician compensation. (This may come in the form of lower pay, but also lower malpractice and operating costs. A large chunk of most malpractice claims is to cover future costs of care. If the future cost of care is $0, then that lowers malpractice awards and ultimately malpractice insurance costs. If you look hour per hour, US physician pay is not far off of most other developed nations. And if you ask many physicians they would take a pay cut to avoid having their souls sucked out of their eyeballs by having to care for patients in the system we have now.)
However the problem with a system that is not single payer is that they savings needed to finance this venture would not be as great. The big savings you will get with single payer is 1) no 30% off the top for 'profits and administration', 2) negotiated priced for drugs on par with the rest of the developed world, and 3) lower administrative costs (for example, if you see me in the ER, in addition to the cost of me, the nurse, the supplies, etc, you pay about $50 for me to pay someone to take my charts and code them, create a bill for the insurer, send it, follow up on it to ensure its paid, etc. The reason I have to use a billing company is that there are over 1000 health plans just in CA. I could easily self code, taking about a minute if there were one unified charge/billing system.)
So I believe that support of a non-SP but universal coverage system is actually fiscally irresponsible. That said, in the current political environment and with Pharma and the Insurance Industry paying millions of dollars to buy congressmen I don't think we could get a single payer system through. However, I do think that if we got universal access, the number of people covered under that program would increase to the point that insurers and Pharma lose some of their power. Ultimately this might be the only way that we get single payer. Its not just a battle, but a complicated war. Moreover, currently 50 people die every day due to uninsurance. A melange system of public and private care that was universal would be superior to the immoral and unsustainable system we have today.
Nick
That would be a tax to cover a percentage of the population: those who are over 65 who have worked (or their spouse worked) ~10 years while paying that tax, many of the disabled, and those who have end stage renal disease (ESRD) who need dialysis. That would not be what I spoke of in the quote you used which is health care for all.
Though to be honest paying that tax pisses me off a bit precisely because of one specific wastefulness: Medicare Renal (for those with ESRD.) Diabetes affects about 20 million Americans (mostly type-2). If you have diabetes and no insurance, you are most often unable to treat your diabetes. Untreated diabetes results in many complications, but a common one is kidney damage resulting in ESRD.
So instead of paying $1000/year to treat a type 2 diabetic with a pill costing $1/day, we wait till he has developed severe and inevitable complications of that untreated diabetes. Then once the horse is out of the barn, we decide to treat him at the cost of $30,000-40,000 per year plus often a kidney transplant (about $100,000 of yours and my taxpayer dollars). So in addition to costing much more, this squanders a scarce resource (kidneys for transplant) into a group whose ESRD could have been easily an inexpensively treated. An ounce of prevention is not only worth a pound of cure, its a shitload less expensive as well
Its like refusing to pay to put oil in your car till the engine seizes and then buying a new engine. That is, fucktarded.
Nick
Pharma and the insurance industry are evil. Moreover in the case of the health insurance industry they serve no purpose. Previously insurers would assume risk and in doing so merit some financial reward. With the advent of capitation and risk selection, they don't even do that anymore. They are leeches, that in the words of Sicko: Flat Suck.
And I can also assure you that the denials of care that Moore described were not the exceptions, but the rule. I have a patient (whose details are a bit obscured in this story) who has a number of serious medical problems. He has a history of a bleeding ulcer and recently began to have symptoms that were the same as he'd had when he had the ulcer. So I prescribed a Proton Pump Inhibitor (the one that was the preferred drug on that insurer's formulary.) They denied it saying that he had reached the limit of the number of medicines he was allowed to have. In order to have the ulcer medicine he would have to go off of one of his diabetes, blood pressure, or asthma medicines or pay for one of them out of pocket.
And sorry, but the cries of 'socialized medicine' being worse than what we have are for shit. If everyone has the same insurance, then every doctor and hospital would take it. I transfer patients every day from the ER to other hospitals when mine is perfectly able to provide them treatment and the patients want to stay at my facility. But their insurer says they won't pay for them to stay to have their appendix removed at the community hospital in their town, but demands they be transfered to a facility 40 miles away that is 'in network.' Of course they can choose to stay if they want (and we would treat them as required by the EMTALA law.) However their insurer gives them the ultimatum: be sent to another hospital they don't want or be faced with the $30,000 bill for their surgery and recovery in the hospital they do want. So the claims of not being able to 'choose your doctor or hospital' are not what you'd have in a single payer system, but are what you get every day if you are insured under an HMO, PPO, or other device used by the insurance industry to deny you care.
And that is what its like for those with insurance. For those without it can mean death or permanent disability. I see people in the ER every day who have delayed or avoided care because of uninsurance who experience severe consequences because of it. Perforated appendicitis because of a delay due to worries about costs. A child admitted to the hospital with a kidney infection that could have been easily treated with oral antibiotics days before but wasn't because of lack of access. Renal failure in a person with diabetes left untreated. People with bent forearms because while they were appropriately treated and splinted in the ER, they were unable to see an orthopedist for subsequent definitive treatment because of lack of insurance. That is stuff you expect to see in the developing countries, not the richest country in the world. Of course it is easy to see the villain in that scenario as the evil orthopedist who would not see him for free. (And I will admit ortho is one of the worst offenders for unwillingness to provide uncompensated care.) However why should one group of professionals (health care providers) be expected to shoulder the cost of health care for 15-20% of the US population simply because the country refuses to? I don't mind paying taxes to support health care for all in the US, but I do take issue with the tax being exclusively applied to doctors and nurses and PTs and RTs etc, while an attorney or programmer or businessman who makes as much or more than I do pays nothing.
The saddest part is that we already spend in GNP well more than enough to cover every man, woman, and child in the US with a health care system that the world would envy. We pay about 15% of our GNP for health care, while most developed nations spend around 7-8%. If we took all of the money that goes to 'profits an administration' (about 30%) in the for profit health insurance industry, as well as negotiating for drug prices that were on par with what the rest of the developed world we would have enough to pay for everyone.
So I think Moore is right: Its sicko.
Nick
That is exactly true.
And if my cell rings when I am driving to the ER or clinic, my options if cell phones were prohibited while driving is either a) not taking the call from or about a patient, or b) pulling immediately over to the side of the highway and thus causing a significant risk for accident.
There is no perfectly safe way to drive. Preferably you do it at noon, on a sunny day, without other cars on the road, with good breaks, airbags, and seatbelts, after a long 10 hour rest, physically healthy, with no other occupants of the vehicle (including no kids), no radio, no cell, stone cold sober, etc.
However that doesn't happen. Deaf people drive. Parents drive their kids around. People sometimes have to drive at night, or when they are hungry, or when they are sick, or when there is a lot of traffic on the road, or when it is raining. Moreover, I like to listen to music when I am driving. Or to have a conversation with my partner.
Unfortunately there is no great way to regulate stupidity and that is what's involved in most wrecks. I would say that of the wrecks I see in the ER, more than half have some recognizable stupidity that directly caused them. Its not one single distraction, but rather some douchebag that is driving after no sleep, eating a Big Mac, talking on his cell, speeding, while his kid whines in the background. That is way more risky than me driving carefully while talking to a patient on the phone.
My personal thoughts about how you could make the roads more safe: 1) graduated licenses - and getting a full licenses is no guarantee you'll keep it. You should just as easily be able to put restrictions on people's licenses after they are fully licensed as you are to take it away. Cause an accident due to putting your makeup on in the car - get your license limited to driving between 0600-2200 and with no other occupants in the vehicle. Do that for a few months, and people will be more careful.
2) require people who have any first accident to take an 8 hour defensive driving course. Even if you were not 'at fault' you still have to take it when you get in your first accident. (Because if you get rear-ended when you stop abruptly without warning with a guy 10 feet off your bumper when you see the street sign for the road you are seeking, you are not paying as much attention as you should.) 3) Make it so everyone has to pay a real penalty when they get a moving violation ticket. A $300 fine and $1000 extra premiums for me for 2 years is not a real deterrent because I make a lot of money. If however, the penalty was picking up garbage off the side of the road for 4 hours, that would be a helluva deterrent. 4) Place momentum limits on vehicles rather than speed limits. Driving my little civic at 75mph is far less dangerous than an average SUV at 60mph. If you limit momentum, people will buy smaller cars that are better at avoiding accidents.
I save about 20% of my income (largely in mutual funds) and donate about 10-15% to charity each year. I've always done the charity thing even when I was making minimum wage and/or putting myself through school selling my plasma. However it was not until I got into 6 figures that I started regularly putting 20% away in savings annually.
;)
Either way, you don't have to spend at or beyond your means. Whether that means is $100/week or $100/hour.
And no, that 10-15% is not because I'm Christian and its a tithe... I'm a secular humanist. So its largely just doing my part to piss off the religious right by funding organizations that they hate.
I agree. Making sales taxes apply to internet purchases makes sales taxes slightly less regressive than they already are. That is, if you spend 50% of your income on purchases subject to sales tax (as the poor are likley to do since things like food is a larger part of your budget) you pay a greater percentage of your income in sales tax than people who are more affluent. The wealthy spend a smaller percentage of their income on things subject to sales tax and are thus taxed at a lower rate.
For example:
Person X: $2000/month take home pay of which $400 is spent on things subject to a 5% sales tax. He pays $20/month in sales tax - or 1%.
Person Y: $8000/month take home pay of which $1000 is spent on things subject to sales tax. He pays $50/month in sales tax - or 0.6%.
So sales tax is inherently regressive. When sales tax doesn't apply to internet purchases, that means that those with internet access (the more affluent) pay less sales tax than the poor. So taxing internet purchases makes those who are more affluent (and more likely to purchase things from the internet) pay even less in taxes.
So I think this is EXTRA good!
Continually challenging the concept that race has nothing to do with intelligence or propensity to commit crime is no different from the creationists harping on scientists about transitional fossils: Fossil 1 becomes Fossil 2, so the creationists demand a transitional fossil between the two. So we find fossil 1.5 and say: 'See, here you go! A transitional form between 1 and 2.' At which point the creationist wingnut then demands a transitional fossil between 1 and 1.5....
There is a point when the "yeah but..." needs to stop - especially since the motives that underlie that sentiment are racist to begin with.
You are describing surrogate endpoints. If you study the correlation of crime and skin color, you are actually using skin color as a proxy for other characteristics like poverty, parental education levels, and the per child expenditures for education in the inner city versus suburbia.
Using surrogates is OK in some instances. If the study that answers a given question is outrageously expensive and one using a reasonably valid surrogate is a lot cheaper, using a surrogate can be valid. In addition, if the surrogate itself is a characteristic worth investigating independently, that adds to their validity. For example, using LDL cholesterol as a proxy for heart disease is reasonable since we know that high LDL cholesterol levels are involved in the development of heart disease. However for the kind of research that you are describing, using race as a surrogate for poverty is inane. It reifies race as a characteristic that validly describes ones propensity for crime, poverty, and drug use. Even worse its just as easy to ask people their income as asking them their race so it is generally not even justified to save you research dollars. So why use a surrogate for an easily measured characteristic that has jack shit to do with what you are talking about? It would be like correlating cancer incidence to individual net worth. Of course cancer incidence increases with net worth, but that's because as you get older you tend to have more money and you also tend to have more cancer.
Cancer versus net worth is as meaningless as race versus violent crime. Except that no one is really interested in studying the correlation between individual net worth and cancer because it does not provide craptastic pseudoscience in support of racist ideology...
However that is not the result of the fact that girls have an unfair advantage in college applications, but rather when you finally get rid of the unfair disadvantage that boys have had for a very long time in school, girls will on average do better. A hundred years ago, most colleges simply would not allow women to attend. Forty years ago many major US colleges would not allow women into advanced courses like graduate or medical school. But in the short time that women have been allowed an equal chance, they are doing better. We've been given the advantages for hundreds of years with women not even being allowed to attend the vast majority of colleges until well into this last century. Now women are doing a little better than men are, and we hear guys like you crying "That's not fair!" If your ego is so frail that the idea that girls might actually do better threatens you so much, you might want to think about your own emotional investments coloring how you are able to see reality.
You are kidding right? That's like me picking the most vitriolic fucknut from the heterosexual community and suggesting that his or her views represented the entire community. Newsflash: most of the queer and feminist community thinks Dworkin was a bitter, anti-sex, fucked-up little twat. However on that same note, I refer you to one of Fred Phelps' famous comments: "GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS."
Hmm. You'd better try to work though those anger issues more.
I haven't known either. I will admit that I met several women who were closeted straight girls, who wanted to be envolved in the lesbian women's movement so pretended they were lesbian (bisexual actually.) However, I think this is less now that straight people are more welcomed as allies in the movement. Though the point is that these women are about as likely to maintain an emotional and sexual relationship with a woman as the leaders of Exodus International are.
Nick
"Lesbians, for example, like to use the phrase 'testosterone poisoning' about men as a way of convincing women who have relationships with men to have sex with another woman."
First, lesbians don't want to have sex with straight women any more than I want to have sex with you. I am a man who likes to have sex with gay men. Though even if you are a closet case... um I'm on a drama free diet. However George Takei might be interested... at least if you play basketball. http://www.devilducky.com/media/58118/
Second, as a general rule lesbians have no problem with men who are neither sexist bastards nor think that lesbians 'just need a good man' to convince them to be straight. I can say that with pretty good certainty because I work two days a week as a physician at a historically queer focused women's health clinic. So I think that hostility you are feeling has more to do with the fact that you are a mysogynist prick rather than the fact that you have a prick.
If only about 25% of Americans have a passport and a state does not comply, then 75% of that state's citizens won't be able to board a plane. What is mandatory about that?
And apparently you've never heard of mission creep? It can be a de factor National ID card even if it is not a de jure one. As soon as it is perceived as the most reliable ID that the most people have, it will become necessary to do even the most mundane of tasks. You won't even be able to rent a fricken DVD at Blockbuster or buy a BigMac with your bank card without a RealID.
Spoken like someone in the first world. Someone who doesn't have HIV. Someone whose lungs are not filled with fluid teeming with Pneumocystis jirovecii. Someone who is not gasping to take the next impossible breath. Someone who will not die today once they finally lack the strength to take another tortured breath.
I've watched people die from Pneumocystis pneumonia. I've watched people die from Cryptococcal meningitis. I've watched people be literally consumed by Kaposi's sarcoma or Lymphoma.
But so you can get a clue, try this: have someone hold your head under water for a while. If you can just sit there passively and NOT struggle to save your life, you go ahead and tell these people to not manufacture HAART drugs for themselves.