this information comes from revelation of secret court documents, not a PR statement itself.

I believe I read that this declassified opinion from FISC was written *after* the Snowden documents were leaked. So we cannot actually be too sure that this opinion was not written as a matter of PR.

You will appreciate this.

A widow in PA lost her $280,000 home over $6.30 in unpaid property taxes. Well, after interest and penalties, the $6.30 became $235 - still less than 0.1% of her home value.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100975448

Fortunately, a Judge has decided she has a chance to appeal the loss of her home. But it has already been auctioned off.

The NYT link does not back up your side of the story. In fact, it explicitly debunks the other two links.

Moreover, their claim depends on careful selection of the starting and ending points. The starting point is almost always 1998, a particularly warm year because of a strong El Niño weather pattern.

Somebody who wanted to sell you gold coins as an investment could make the same kind of argument about the futility of putting your retirement funds into the stock market. If he picked the start date and the end date carefully enough, the gold salesman could make it look like the stock market did not go up for a decade or longer.

Emphasis mine. Every time someone says "global temperatures are not going up" - literally, every single time - it is because they use 1998 as the starting point. 1998 sets off all kinds of alarm bells, because it's a cherry-picked date.

Worse, it's not even proper statistics. These people are using high-school-level point-slope form; (Y2-Y1) = m(X2-X1). That's the only way you can get "flat". If you do a proper undergraduate-level Least Squared Linear Regression, even using 1998 as your starting point isn't enough to claim "flat". If you don't feel capable of performing undergraduate statistics, you can always use Excel, or any number of free online spreadsheets, to do the Linear Regression for you.

It is not a matter of "how do you know that that's not supposed to be [the] temperature?"

It's not like we have real "equilibriums", i.e. a global minima/maxima. It's more like we have a lot of local minimas/maximas. Enough forcings can push us out of our current local min/max and into a new min/max - like a flip flop that went metastable, sure it's not "supposed" to be at half-voltage, but it's a local minima that is relatively stable until something forces it toward the global minima. In all cases, the earth is at temperatures it's "supposed" to be at, otherwise we'd be violating laws of physics.

The question is, can humanity deal with the new local min/max as well as humanity dealt with the old min/max? That is why arguments about what temperature the earth was back in prehistory are red herrings. We didn't have massive civilizations with skyscrapers and monoculture farms feeding billions of people back in prehistory.

No?

So it's not true that the 1979 revolution in Iran was in part fueled by anti-American animosity for our role in installing and supporting the Shah as ruler of Iran?

I mean, sure, in 1953, they might not have been opposed to what was happening (if they even knew what was happening at the time). But then again, in 2003, the US and most of the world thought Iraq had WMD and planned on using it. Funny how time has a habit of changing how an action is perceived. Just because someone isn't against it at the time it happened doesn't mean that it isn't viewed as a "disagreement" after-the-fact.

Bad analogy. You're choosing an evil target and a sympathetic target - that is not the case in Syria. On one side, you have Assad. On the other side, you have a coalition of rebels, a significant portion of whom align themselves with al-Qaeda (they are referred to as "al-Nusra" in media reports)

Better analogy: you have two neighbors, Assad and al-Nusra. You hate them both, they're both deadbeats, they leave garbage all over their lawn, beat their wife and kids, etc. You see Assad and al-Nusra get into a fight with each other.

Doing nothing in this case is prudent because you don't want either of them to win the fight. They're both bad guys.

Damascus is not a remote village full of civilians. It is the capital of Syria.

This would be not unlike Obama gassing a suburb of DC because he's in a disagreement with Republicans.

Keep in mind that the gas attack happened in a suburb of Damascus.

Damascus is the capital of Syria. Assad's palace is like, what, 10 miles from where the gas attack happened?

Do you REALLY think that he would launch a gas attack when a change in the wind could bring that gas directly to him? That reminds me of the people who think Iran would blow up Israel, not realizing that the land Israel sits on is holy land for Iran, too; the epitome of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Could that little disagreement have anything to do with another little disagreement the Iranians had with the US in 1953?

1) Competition is good, right? Well, if these health exchanges that PPACA sets up provide more competition to provide insurers, isn't that a good thing? I mean, if the private insurance is so much better than the public health exchanges, everyone will just buy private insurance.

2) Congress isn't exempting anyone. Congress pays for some of the staffers' insurance. This little "exemption" thing (lol) is about how the payments will be handled under PPACA.

3) Tort reform isn't going to fix the incentives. Patients don't have enough knowledge to make intelligent decisions, and their decisions are frequently made under duress. Doctors have huge debt burdens that need to be taken away. Insurance companies have shareholders that they need to pay off. Hospitals make money on every service, so their incentive is to provide as many services as possible, even if they aren't necessary.

IMO, the true potential for reform involves two things.

a) Increase the supply of medical professionals. Supply goes up, price goes down. To make this easier, medical school needs to be less expensive. We need more GPs, fewer specialists, and you don't need to be top-tier to help people with checkups, or general medical treatments for colds, flus, etc.

b) Smaller patient care centers. Imagine a doctor's office, but instead of doctors, it's staffed almost entirely by nurses. They form a triage, identifying people who don't actually need to see a full-fledged M.D. They would take walk-ins, no appointment necessary, so that people are more willing to go see the nurse about their problem, instead of waiting for it to become so bad that they need to go to the hospital. This would take care of the bulk of medical appointments, reducing the burden on doctors so that they can spend more than five or ten minutes with each patient.

Unfortunately, neither of my two suggestions do anything to fix most of the incentives. I'm afraid to say it, but the only thing that can provide industry with proper incentives in this regard is government regulation.

I have seen the death panels, and thy name is "grievance review board". Allow me to elaborate...

My mother was in severe need of back surgery. Honestly, given the excruciating pain she was in, I'm surprised she didn't try to take her own life. She had an MRI that showed a massive slipped disc that was crushing her spinal card (the technical term for this is "spondylolisthesis with spinal stenosis")

Anyway, the doctor recommended surgery. But he said, "the insurance company won't pay for the surgery until you get these epidural steroid shots". You know, those shots from compounding pharmacies that gave a lot of people a fungal infection? Lucky for her, she got her shots about six months before those tainted shipments left Massachusetts. But I digress.

So she gets the shots. They're quite embarrassing; since the shots go right into the bottom of the spine, you pretty much have to be naked from the waist down. They're also very painful. And they aren't cheap, either; they need to use an X-ray machine to guide the needle in.

The result? Shots didn't do shit. Surgeon even said, "these shots will probably have minimal effectiveness due to the physical nature of your condition" - the shots are incapable of making the slipped disc stop crushing her spinal cord. So the surgeon schedules her surgery.

Then we get a call back. Surgery has been denied because "it is not medically necessary". Because literally the day before the surgeon scheduled her surgery, the insurer changed their guidelines as to what defines "medically necessary", such that in addition to the ineffective, painful, and embarrassing steroid shots, you also need physical therapy, regardless of whether PT will have any impact on the patient's condition (the exercises actually made her condition worse, partially because the therapist was unaware of what therapies are effective for spinal stenosis...and partially because exercises aren't going to make the slipped disc stop crushing her spinal cord).

So I start learning as much as I can about the spine. I start reading scholarly articles. I collect a ton of evidence and write a detailed report to her insurer's death panel - I mean, "grievance review board". After receiving my report, we were told we would have an opportunity to meet the death panel - I mean, "grievance review board" - in person. About one week before the meeting, I get a phone call that they finally approved her surgery.

What would my mother had done, if she didn't have a college educated son who was capable of reading highly technical academic research papers and collating the information together in such a manner that could convince the death panel - I mean, "grievance review board" - that surgery was medically necessary for her?

Excellent, good to see this here.

The only thing I would add is that a ketogenic diet is really hard on the kidneys (look at the studies of kids on ketogenic diets for epileptic seizures, their rate of kidney stones is significantly higher than those on non-ketogenic diets). And it makes your breath stink after a while, too.

In my opinion (and I'm a programmer, FWIW), you need one day a week where you eat a lot of carbs (and the other days, your carbs should be as close to 0 as possible, especially simple carbs). Call it a weekly thanksgiving, a cheat day, or whatever. The end goal is that you prevent the body from going fully ketogenic. This serves a few purposes. First, you don't have to give up your favorite foods, you just have to wait for your cheat day. Second, it helps protect the kidneys. Third, it also prevents the body from going into famine-mode, so that it is less likely to store carbs when they are consumed.

Agreed.It's amazing how the food industry fooled everyone into thinking that lipids were the bad guy making everyone fat, when all evidence seems to show that it's the abundance of carbs causing the problem.

Every single person I know who has restricted carbs to 1-2 days a week only has seen incredible success in managing their weight - a gradual loss of weight that does not come back. It's a mostly ketogenic diet, like what they put some epileptic kids on, but with a weekly "cheat day" where one can consume as many carbs as desired, which helps reset the metabolism and prevents the body from going all the way into ketosis, which can be hard on the kidneys (as evidenced by the high rate of kidney stones for those on ketogenic diets).

It's actually interesting in my wife's case, as once a year she has a "cheat week" where she eats carbs all week long. It's really remarkable to see how fast she gains and subsequently loses weight once she returns to her normal carb-restricted diet.

Seems like you didn't have the attention span to investigate what he actually leaked. Mr. Manning only released cables that were designated SIPDIS, i.e. already labeled for wide distribution. Nothing - not a single thing - was Top Secret.

I would ask what evidence you have that he "got impatient", but I doubt you have any.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "actively tracked". I think 21 CFR 1002.20 implies that any time a manufacturer finds out that anyone was injured by a laser, they have to send a notice to the FDA's director of CDRH "immediately".