I get tired of the false meme that "oh, we would have cured disease X already if the results weren't being suppressed in a big conspiracy"

This guy was on to something good. When he was farting around in the lab, he got funding. When he started to get results, the funding vanished. I love his statement in bold below:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/science_news/4273366.html

So how did you get it funded up to this point?

There is some private funding and the university put some funding into it. And also, at early stages when we studied the mechanisms of these mice, we had one Mitchell Cancer Institute grant, several small grants from Cancer Research Institute. But they all stopped funding me. It was kind of a strange situation. I thought it was our common goal to come up with a new weapon to fight cancer, but the moment I announced I had a new weapon to test in real human cancer situations, everybody shied away.

there is no one single disease, "cancer."

Scientists are in "complete surprise" that cancers closely resemble each other across widely varying organs, according to Dr. Douglas Levine of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the principal investigator on a new endometrial cancer study published Wednesday in the journal, Nature.

"The problem," leading to existing drug treatments performing at an unsatisfactory 10% death rate, was in "the traditional methods for categorizing the leukemia," said Dr. Timothy Ley of Washington University in St. Louis, who co-led a study simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

"Cancer of the uterine lining closely resembles the worst ovarian and breast cancers... telling evidence that cancer will increasingly be seen as a disease defined primarily by its genetic fingerprint rather than just by the organ where it originated," says The New York Times' interpretation of these results.

Cancer gets cured about once a decade, sometimes by real doctors, sometimes by "quacks." I could show stats from real doctors with similar results to this one, which never saw the light of day once it was discovered (or rediscovered).

People don't actually like creativity, even in medicine:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/creativity_is_rejected_teachers_and_bosses_don_t_value_out_of_the_box_thinking.html

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.

In medicine, innovative things happen all the time. When *you* go to the doctor, you get the same ol' thing that has been done since 1952.

Then why to the rich from various countries with socialized medicine come to the US for treatment again?

The rich from various countries go to various countries, including the US. There are thousands of different medical conditions. The best specialist for any particular condition can be anywhere in the world. Nobody's saying none of the doctors in America are first-rate.

But life-expectancy in the US is lower than in our Western European peers with universal health care. So is the question, "What is the best system of medicine in terms of medical outcomes for billionaires?" Or "What is the best medical system in terms of medical outcomes for average citizens?"

If you're a billionaire, the first question is entirely to the point. Because billionaires determine the agenda of the Republican Party, FOX News, and the Wall Street Journal, we're having this debate still. Our European peers, whatever their political and economic shortcomings, server average people better. As for billionaires, there's no question but that we've got more of them, that they're happy here, and that they mold our system to server them well.

Young people are the poorest age group. Middle aged and older people are the wealthiest age groups. Why should relatively poor young folks continue to pay more and more and more to subsidize their relatively rich elders?

Young people with the lowest income get insurance under Medicare for free under the ACA (unless you're in a state where the population was stupid enough to elect a governor who has blocked that out of meanness and spite). Those with slightly higher income get it with high subsidies, so it doesn't cost much. The only young people who pay full fare are those with high incomes. If you're a young person with high income, you're in the only segment for whom insurance payments are possibly going up under the ACA, aside from those who are older and had junk insurance that basically didn't cover anything before. You're also, if a young person with high income, paying more for recreational drugs, fine dining and clubbing than your new insurance rates will come in at. If you give up one of your nights on the town each month to afford health insurance ... yeah, I feel your pain.

er, that's why they are getting ISPs to block the routes to the sites, rather than taking the sites down.

They already forced ISPs to do it for child porn, then the courts enforced blocks on "pirate" sites because the child porn filters proved that it was technically possible, next step (previously announced, due to come in soon) they are forcing every UK ISP to implement porn (_legal_ porn) filters.

And now it's "block stuff that isn't porn/child-porn/illegal-under-copyright-law, but we don't like it anyway". No surprise.

Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169254&cid=14107454

And the punchline is we're still surprised every time the ratchet turns tighter. Every. Fucking. Time.

Firing the guy, ignoring the fact that it's likely impossible, isn't going to solve the problem.

The problem is human beings shouldn't be allowed to have power over other human beings.

Don't worry, I'm sure our wonderfully competent amnd benevolent federal government will step in and take over everything and make it better. Because poor quality is always to be blamed on the free market, not past interference by our wise and saintly government. Or at least that's what I was conditioned to believe in school. (A government service.)

Or maybe...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt0tKl0J-S4 -- The Death of Healthcare, Part 1

I use TaxAct too. Not the online version, but the standalone. However the first year I used it I filed online through them after preparing it locally. The following year I went to file online again and found someone else had beaten me to it. Someone who had information that could only have been obtained from access to my prior year's return. Took me most of a year and help from a senator's office to straighten it out.

Now, where did the perp get access? The laptop that I only boot into Windows once a year to do taxes, and then only on a well-firewalled home network (I'm a network engineer, I have confidence in my work here)? From the IRS itself (which, if it were that vulnerable, should lead to far more identity theft even than what we see now)? Or from 2nd Story Software? Odds are it's 2nd Story Software which was compromised somehow. Since then I still use their product, but only file on paper. So this isn't a caution about just preparing returns online. Filing online is similarly dangerous.

Coincidentally, that same year I found a place where they misinterpreted state tax code. Confirmed that with my state's tax office. Contacted 2nd Story about it. Their response was, "We have expert advisors in every state. We trust them over your state's tax office." Fortunately returns are coded by which tax software is used, and the state office assured me they could spot and correct the mistake for all those using TaxAct, now that they knew to look for it.

That's wonderful! I hope this becomes a trend.

Your response to me is only a few lines long, with half of it dedicated to describing the ludicrous hypothetical of a first grader dropping out at 16, and I'm the one who's sans medication?

Child abuse is not universally against the law. Only a small subset of child abuse types are.

It's still legal to:
  - yell at your children
  - spank your children
  - force them go to child prison (aka "school") for 12 years of formative torture
  - and don't even get me started on organized religion...

When is google going to ban images of circumcision? Oh, right, they're using a popular-in-this-era-and-politically-acceptable definition of child abuse, rather than a consistent, rationally-derived one.

I can see both sides of a controlled burn. Yes, it is probably the right thing to do. But the first time it got out of control and burned a bunch of houses down, the crap would hit the fan. Can you imagine the news footage of the people who's houses were burned down by a fire set intentionally by the government. Wow. I don't generally like politicians more than anyone else, but even I could understand the motivation to not be put in this position.

The third annual Kong Off will run this Friday through Monday.

Lots of places to play even if you're not competing.

Denver, CO: The 1-Up (official Kong-off location)
New Hampshire: Funspot
Portland, OR: Ground Kontrol
Vegas: Pinball Hall of Fame (might not have Donkey Kong, but it sure is fun.)
SF Bay Area: Pacific Pinball and High Scores, and many more smaller spots.

Who's missing from this list? Where's your town's reboot of the vintage arcade?

Oh yes, please continue to to repeat that mass-murder-justifying state propaganda. It does wonders for our society's ability to think clearly about moral issues.