Monday, February 13th, 2012
Stephan: This is the truly dark side of the Illness Profit system. Could it be any clearer that health is not the first priority?
Medication used to treat the most common form of childhood leukemia is in short supply, adding to the largest nationwide shortage of critical lifesaving hospital medications in nearly a decade.
All five pharmaceutical companies that make the injection drug methotrexate, which treats acute lymphoblastic leukemia by slowing the growth of cancer cells, have either slowed and stopped manufacturing of the drug, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The companies have cited high demand or manufacturing delays as reasons for the shortage.
If the shortage continues, physicians and pharmacists fear thousands of children will be left without lifesaving treatment.
‘This, to us in oncology, is a national crisis,’ said Brooke Bernhardt, clinical pharmacy specialist in the department of hematology and oncology at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.
According to Dr. Michael Link, pediatric oncologist and president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, some hospital pharmacies have reported having only a couple weeks of supply left.
Many oncologists are especially worried about the shortage of the preservative-free form of methotrexate, which is considered less toxic.
Only the preservative-free methotrexate can be injected into the spinal fluid of cancer patients to prevent the spread and recurrence of the disease.
‘There are couple other drugs that can be […]
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Monday, February 13th, 2012
STEVE WATSON, - InfoWars.com
Stephan: The reach of DHS, even now is Orwellian -- and I will probably be put on some list for saying this. As a culture we are going to have to decide whether we will surrender to constant surveillance, or whether we are going to assert our personal liberties in a politically effective manner.
The only counterweight to this toxic trend is massive voter turnout on behalf of programs and politicians that support social wellness. The key is to focus on social wellness, based on data not ideology of theology.
A privacy advocacy group has swayed Congress to hold a hearing next week into the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of monitoring social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as media reports and organizations, including The Drudge Report.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) recently obtained close to 300 pages of documents, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, detailing the federal agency’s ‘intelligence gathering
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Monday, February 13th, 2012
CYNTHIA GRABER, - Scientific American
Stephan: I have often wondered why zebras have stripes. There had to be an evolutionary benefit, but what was it in response to? Here's the answer.
How did the zebra get its stripes? One theory holds that stripes help confuse predators. But stripes might be primarily to protect zebras from ferocious
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Sunday, February 12th, 2012
HARLEY GEIGER, - Aviation Pros/Center for Democracy & Technology
Stephan: I waited a couple of days to let this sort out, to see if a clarification might be forthcoming modifying it. No such luck. By anyone of a dozen measures, we are becoming a police state. It is astonishing to watch how quickly and easily it is falling into place. And it is going to involve a level of surveillance I don't think people really understand yet, because it is so pervasive and personal. You are going to be appearing dozens if not hundreds of times each day in government and corporate databases.
Congress is demanding drones in the air over the United States – without considering the civil liberties issues. Within the span of three days last week, the House and then the Senate passed a law – H.R. 658 – requiring the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to speed up, within 90 days, its current licensing process for government use of drones domestically and to open the national airspace to drone aircraft for commercial and private use by October 2015. While the law requires the FAA to develop guidance on drone safety, the law says absolutely nothing about the privacy or transparency implications of filling the sky with flying robots.
As CDT and others have pointed out, drones are powerful surveillance devices capable of being outfitted with facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, thermal imaging cameras, open WiFi sniffers, and other sensors. Drones’ unique ability to hover hundreds or thousands of feet in the air – undetected, for many hours – enables constant, pervasive monitoring over a wide area. Without clear privacy rules, public and private use of drones can usher in an era of unparalleled physical surveillance. Without transparency requirements, citizens will not even have the basic right to know who owns […]
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Sunday, February 12th, 2012
SARAH JAFFE, Associate Editor - AlterNet
Stephan: This is an excellent essay on social values, showing that Theocratic Rightist values produce social pathologies, not social wellness. One doesn't have to be very bright to understand that in an age when information is like oxygen, anything that short circuits education is a bad way to go. If we are to be successful in this world we must improve our education system. Yet here you see a conscious and purposeful move in the opposite direction by the Theocratic Rightists. Where a society spends its money reveals the truth of its intentions. Is this the way you want your money to be spent?
It’s budget time again, and with the economy still in rough shape, that means it’s time for governors to show where their priorities are.
It’s probably not surprising that right-wing governors claim they can’t fund education properly when revenues are low-we’ve been seeing this happen for years, even before an actual economic crisis knocked states sideways. But cutting funds to schools isn’t the only option for states even if they do have to balance their budgets. There are many other places to cut-and of course, they have the option of raising taxes, something the conservative crowd simply refuses to do.
Like any other choice made by a politician, budgeting is a decision laced with ideology. When state after state slashes education dollars (and often at the same time funnels more of the money they do spend to private companies running charter schools, or gives it away as vouchers) we see what matters to them. And when you take a look at the programs that get funded, or the people who get fat tax cuts as money is drained out of the schools, well, you see what matters to state governments.
Here’s a look at five of the governors taking money away from their […]
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