20 Reasons Why Paul Ryan Was a Good VP Pick - Godfather Politics - 0 views
The leading cause of death and injury in the United States - 0 views
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A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million. (1) Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC , in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics. (2, 2a) The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. (3) The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. (4) The total number of iatrogenic [induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures] deaths is 783,936. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate is 553,251. (5) It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.
Today's Must-See Animated Capitalist Takedown from RSA and David Harvey | The New York ... - 0 views
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If you watch just one funny and handsome Marxist critique of the financial crisis, make it the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce's animated version of David Harvey's RSA speech "Crises of Capitalism." It's been making the rounds this afternoon, and for good reason: Mr. Harvey, a Marxist scholar who heads CUNY's Center for Place, Culture & Politics, describes not just the failures that caused the ongoing fiasco, but the failure of how we've explained it.
The Democratic Party and Blanche Lincoln - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views
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The run-off between Democratic Senate incumbent Blanche Lincoln and challenger Bill Halter, which culminated on Tuesday night in Lincoln's narrow victory, brightly illuminates what the Democratic Party establishment is. Lincoln is supposedly one of those "centrist"/conservative/corporatist Senators who thwarts the good-hearted progressive agenda of the President and the Party. She repeatedly joined with Republicans to support the extremist Bush/Cheney Terrorism agenda (from the the Protect America Act to the Iraq War and virtually everything in between), serves the corporate interests that run Washington as loyally as any member of Congress, and even threatened to join the GOP in filibustering health care reform if it contained the public option which Obama claimed he wanted. Obama loyalists constantly point to the Blanche Lincolns of the world to justify why the Party scorns the values of their voters: Obama can't do anything about these bad Democratic Senators; it's not his fault if he doesn't have the votes, they insist.
Amazon.com: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free eBook:... - 0 views
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Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise.
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Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect? Charles P. Pierce: I don't know if there's one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.”
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Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don't notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.
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LRB · David Runciman · How messy it all is - 0 views
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Sometimes inequality is bad for almost everyone, and sometimes only for certain people; sometimes it is worst for the people at the bottom, and sometimes it is just as bad for the people at the top. Different societies are equal or unequal for different reasons, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice. More equality is a good thing and it's an idea that's worth defending. It would be nice if there were more politicians willing to stand up and defend it, however they saw fit.
Christine O'Donnell at "Values" Summit: White Conservatives Have Always Ruled... - 0 views
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Thanks to intrepid twitterers like Sarah Posner and our own Addie Stan, I'm getting a good picture of the utter depravity on display at the "values voters" summit without having to actually listen to it on C-Span. Here are some bits from newly-minted Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's Palin-esque speech.
YouTube - Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck in Right Wing Radio Duck - 0 views
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This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed using 50 classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald's life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck. Will Donald's feelings of disenfranchisement lead him to be persuaded by his radio's increasingly paranoid and divisive rhetoric? Or will our favorite Disney duck decide that this voice is not actually on his side after all? Watch and find out! * Listen to Glenn Beck's response on his radio show to this remix video: YouTube via stopbeck.org - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHHByFFSh54 * Better yet check out ikat381's remix of Beck's response using Mickey Mouse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbjjTLVrkKA This transformative remix work constitutes a fair-use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. "Right Wing Radio Duck" by Jonathan McIntosh is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License - permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. * Please link back to my website: http://www.rebelliouspixels.com * English captions are now working in case you're not fluent in duck-speak * Learn about fair-use at the Center for Social Media: http://centerforsocialmedia.org * Learn about transformative works at the OTW: http://transformativeworks.org * Useful Media Matters archive of Glenn Beck clips: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Jonathan McIntosh http://www.rebelliouspixels.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * List of Cartoons used: * Window Cleaner - 1940 * Lucky Number - 1951 * Symphony Hour - 1942 (Mickey Mouse Cartoon) * Put-Put Troubles - 1940 * Donald's Dilemma -19
Hedges Laments The 'Death Of The Liberal Class' : NPR - 0 views
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Liberals have conceded the good fights -- organizing workers, preventing war, a greener economy -- to corporations and the ruling powers for decades, argues Chris Hedges. In his book, Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges slams groups and institutions from academia, to the church, to the Democratic par
Progressives, Obama and the Democratic Party - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views
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Earlier today I posted video of a Civil Liberties and Terrorism speech I gave last night at the University of Wisconsin, along with some notices of events and media appearances tomorrow, but I wanted to separately post this 13-minute discussion I had on MSNBC this afternoon with Dylan Ratigan and Cenk Uygur about the Obama presidency, progressives and the Democratic Party, because I thought the discussion was quite good and touched on some important issues:
Chris Hedges: Real Hope Is About Doing Something - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig - 0 views
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On Dec. 16 I will join Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern and several military veteran activists outside the White House to protest the futile and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this.
Warren Buffett: I 'Should Be Paying A Lot More In Taxes' - 0 views
Poll results for first presidential debate: Obama wins | Midwest Voices - 0 views
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CBS Insta Poll shows Barack Obama won 39% to John McCain's 25% with 36% saying the debate was a draw. Insider Advantage reports those polled Obama won 42% to McCain's 41% with Undecided 17% CNN reports voter opinions that Obama "did better" 51%, McCain "did better" 38% The CNN poll showed men were evenly split, but women gave Obama higher marks 59% to 41% for McCain.
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How to show that someone is cranky - Barak did it by agreeing and giving credit - McCain reinforced it by being dismissive and talking down to Barak. How to did Barak show McCain's out of touchness - by showing that that McCain's claim that Barck was stubborn by giving McCain credit when it was approprate - Being graceful does that
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The MSNBC on-line (non-scientific) poll showed Obama winning the debate 52% to 33%. (But this is what one would expect from such a poll at MSNBC because of the nature of its viewers.)
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women voters especially would be turned off by McCain's sarcastic tone because women do tend to be the conciliators in our society and saw Obama display those conciliatory qualities very well in the debate. Obama looked at McCain, and McCain wouldn't return the eye contact but rather glared or displayed a tight and angry expression.
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We're so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong - 0 views
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Statistical validation of results, as Shaffer described it, simply involves testing the null hypothesis: that the pattern you detect in your data occurs at random. If you can reject the null hypothesis—and science and medicine have settled on rejecting it when there's only a five percent or less chance that it occurred at random—then you accept that your actual finding is significant. The problem now is that we're rapidly expanding our ability to do tests. Various speakers pointed to data sources as diverse as gene expression chips and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provide tens of thousands of individual data points to analyze. At the same time, the growth of computing power has meant that we can ask many questions of these large data sets at once, and each one of these tests increases the prospects than an error will occur in a study; as Shaffer put it, "every decision increases your error prospects." She pointed out that dividing data into subgroups, which can often identify susceptible subpopulations, is also a decision, and increases the chances of a spurious error. Smaller populations are also more prone to random associations. In the end, Young noted, by the time you reach 61 tests, there's a 95 percent chance that you'll get a significant result at random. And, let's face it—researchers want to see a significant result, so there's a strong, unintentional bias towards trying different tests until something pops out. Young went on to describe a study, published in JAMA, that was a multiple testing train wreck: exposures to 275 chemicals were considered, 32 health outcomes were tracked, and 10 demographic variables were used as controls. That was about 8,800 different tests, and as many as 9 million ways of looking at the data once the demographics were considered.
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It's possible to get the mental equivalent of whiplash from the latest medical findings, as risk factors are identified one year and exonerated the next. According to a panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, this isn't a failure of medical research; it's a failure of statistics, and one that is becoming more common in fields ranging from genomics to astronomy. The problem is that our statistical tools for evaluating the probability of error haven't kept pace with our own successes, in the form of our ability to obtain massive data sets and perform multiple tests on them. Even given a low tolerance for error, the sheer number of tests performed ensures that some of them will produce erroneous results at random.
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