Debate continues over a controversial provision which aims to extend indefinite military detention (without charge or trial) to cover US citizens, rather than just foreign terrorist suspects.
The whole “indefinite military detention” aspect of the bill is heinous enough even if it just ends up being used against foreign suspects. But the decision to declare US territory as a “war zone” in order to mobilize the military against US citizens is particularly worrisome. Due to the fact that this provision is highly controversial and yet another in a long line of post-PATRIOT Act attacks on the Bill of Rights, Congress has decided to move the discussion behind closed doors, presumably to avoid any scrutiny from the very public it wishes to foist this legislation upon.
Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.
But, in a story that’s been in the making for over a year, and which we’re exposing to the public for the first time now, this is exactly the scenario that has played out over the past year — with the only difference being that, rather than “a printing press” and a “magazine,” the story involved “a domain” and a “blog.”
As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.
When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
Even when the right preparations have been made, the system can still swallow people up. One of my patients was a man named Jack, a 78-year-old who had been ill for years and undergone about 15 major surgical procedures. He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again. One Saturday, however, Jack suffered a massive stroke and got admitted to the emergency room unconscious, without his wife. Doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support in the ICU. This was Jack’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at the hospital and took over Jack’s care, I spoke to his wife and to hospital staff, bringing in my office notes with his care preferences. Then I turned off the life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later.
Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it. But the prospect of a police investigation is terrifying for any physician. I could far more easily have left Jack on life support against his stated wishes, prolonging his life, and his suffering, a few more weeks. I would even have made a little more money, and Medicare would have ended up with an additional $500,000 bill. It’s no wonder many doctors err on the side of overtreatment.
—
How Doctors Die - Ken Murray
My wife is an ER and ICU doc. Please, please please make end of life plans. Document them, and make sure that your family knows what they are.
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little.
In a recent fMRI study, a salmon was shown a series of pictures of human faces showing various emotions: can a salmon distinguish them? and what brain regions are involved. 15 pictures, ten seconds each.
I won’t bore you with the anatomy. Because of the small size of the brain, exact brain structures could not be distinguished, but something in the brain did light up. A statistically significant number of voxels, comprising an area of 81mm3 in the midline of the brain, were active (pSo can fish interpret human emotions from a picture? I have no idea. I do know, however, that that fish can’t do it: it was dead.
The [DMCA takedown notice] requirement deters an awful lot of people who are randomly trying to censor Stack Overflow for hosting answers that they don’t find convenient.
We respond by notifying the person who posted the material, giving them a chance to make a case for why the material is non-infringing.
The important thing about DMCA is that if we follow this fairly decent procedure, we, as a website, are legally protected from the claim that we contributed to the copyright violation.
The SOPA dramatically alters the careful balance in favor of “alleged” copyright holders. It makes it impossible for websites to find a reasonable safe harbor allowing them to continue to host user-generated content. And that is life-threatening for websites like Stack Exchange.
Meanwhile, I met other academics that had run the same regression as me. Famous ones you have probably heard of. Their reaction was the same as mine: “Oh, I found that result,” several said, “but I’m worried there’s nothing there because my data have problems, and the specification wasn’t quite right. So I left it out of the paper. I’ve been meaning to get back to that.”
Let’s follow a simple decision rule: run your regressions with inevitably imperfect data and models. If you get the theoretically predicted result (any of them), publish. If not, wait and look into your data and empirical strategy more.
The result? As in the natural sciences, most published research findings are probably false.
After assuming the banking system’s downside risk, the US government engineered a wide variety of favorable circumstances that helped banks “earn” their way back to quasi-health. The government provided famous and obvious transfers like paying unwinding AIG swaps at 100¢ on the dollar. It forced short-term yields to zero and created an environment in which medium-term interest rates would be capped for several years, granting banks a near-risk-free arbitrage for a while. It emitted trillions in excess reserves on which it continues to pay interest. It forewent investigations and prosecutions that by law it should actively pursue, and settled what enforcement it could not avoid for token fee.
…But who has lost anything from the bailouts? Wasn’t it a win-win? This all sounds very abstract. Where are the transfers?
If the government borrowed or printed a trillion dollars and gave the money to me, would there be any losers? If you don’t think there has been a wealth transfer, if you don’t think ordinary people have lost, please call your Congressperson and ask her to cut me a trillion dollar check. In some abstract sense, this policy of giving me money would push government debt higher. But that is so very vague a cost! I promise I’d do great things with a trillion dollars. My ideas are so much cooler than Goldman Sachs’, despite all the wholesome commercials they are running.
Qatar’s successful bid [for World Cup 2022] became implicated in a broad-ranging corruption scandal that plagued FIFA this year, with FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke saying in a leaked email that they “bought the World Cup.”
There were accusations of corruption in the bidding process and Mohamed Bin Hammam, the president of the Asian Football Confederation and a campaigner for his native Qatar to host the World Cup, has since been banned for life from all soccer activities on charges of trying to bribe Caribbean voters in his quest to unseat Sepp Blatter as president of FIFA.
What is most ethically troubling is that the authors implicitly treat people as if they were the property of the state. Thus, an emigrating physician is a loss even though the physician improves his life prospects and those of his children. Development is about making people better off not about making geographic units “better off.
Sperm whales use unusual rheological properties of wax esters in order to control buoyancy, and these properties also make such chemicals an ideal lubricant for extreme pressure applications. When the world relied on whales as a source of hydrocarbons, these were too expensive to use as fuels, and the demand was self-limiting. When the whales were “saved” by petrochemical industry, it was only a short respite. Petrol-powered machinery required new types of lubricants that increased rather than decreased the reliance on sperm oil. Petroleum was plentiful, the cars filled the world, and it is at that point that the whales began to disappear. Literally nothing was done to save these whales until the cars evolved to the point when the engines started to operate at a higher temperature; the latter was caused by the concern about human health and efficiency rather than the well being of these whales. The environmental activists drove their cars just like everyone else, and they consumed transported goods and benefitted from sperm oil based lubricants in a myriad other ways, sustaining the demand. It was not their attention grabbing activities that stopped killing whales, but the unsung efforts of chemists finding a synthetic replacement to sperm oil.
…Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments; neither did the numerous well-meaning international treaties, moratoriums, and other chest beating displays.
A chemist who saved the whales has not merited a Wikipedia entry. His name was P. S. Landis and he was a researcher at Mobile Oil.
Many in support of the SOPA bill will claim that enforcement would be balanced and fair. They would claim that I am exaggerating the effects of the SOPA bill through hyperbole. During the course of the hearing, Michael O’Leary not only showed support for SOPA, but stated that “the Internet isn’t broken” in places like China and Iran. Wait. Isn’t China the home of some of the worst copyright infringement in the world? O’Leary’s statement must be made from either pure ignorance or to fallaciously support legislation that is not truly intended to protect against copyright infringement. When countries notorious for human rights abuse are held up as successful Internet models, it’s quite apparent that the Great Firewall of America is an apt name for the SOPA construct.
This is something we have largely lost. With the exception of the most dedicated educators who fight for the combustion of jelly-babies in testtubes to make their lessons more engaging, science is bland and uninteresting and the teaching is completely clinical. The same is true for Maths and for Computer Science, frontiers in which upward mobility is still completely possible and innovation is commonplace, reduced to basic operation of of Microsoft packages, use of dead languages and outdated theories. Where are the pyromaniacs in Computer Science? How many programmers have we lost for lack of ‘blowing stuff up’?
