Scattershot news

Americans throw away 40 percent of their food every day

Less government...

Someone who is very displeased with Windows 8.

Why Pennsylvania's Voter ID Law Is Unconstitutional

But will the pharmaceuticals let this kid ruin their business?  I bet no.

Depression comes from eating too much trans-fats.

Never insult an Irishman:

Michael D. Higgins (who was elected president of Ireland last year) is fed up with over-the-top Tea Party rhetoric, and he isn't afraid to show it. Listen to him call out radio host Michael Graham on everything from health care to foreign policy in this heated exchange from 2010. Trust me, you don't want to miss this one.

The Drought Map.  And those who make money off of food shortages caused by drought.

The Problem with Men Explaining Things.

We knew this all along

US medical staff experimented on terror suspects: report

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Medical personnel apparently experimented on terror detainees during CIA-led torture after the September 11 attacks, aiming to improve interrogation techniques, a human rights group said Monday.

"There is evidence that they were calibrating the harm inflicted by these techniques allegedly and also looking to extend their knowledge about the effects," said Nathaniel Raymond, from Physicians for Human Rights.

The group said it had used public records showing health professionals worked under the supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency during interrogations of "war on terror" detainees after the 2001 attacks.

The doctors and medical staff witnessed waterboarding, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes and prolonged isolation among other techniques.

"What we see is doctors collecting data that is used to draw conclusions related to whether or not the techniques or behaviors that they are observing violate the Department of Justice standard on what constitutes a level of harm, what makes it torture," Raymond told a press conference.

Who are these people? Did we just raise a generation oblivious to the horrors of WWII? Did we just create our very own Dr. Mengeles?

Who on earth could justify any of this?

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the former president told a business audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I’d do it again to save lives.”

Oh yeah. Him. And what about Cheney?

To many, Cheney is the dark side of the Bush administration, and this program will only cement that judgment. ``Frontline" chronicles the brutal campaign by two consummate political in-fighters -- Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- to decimate the CIA, politically emasculate Secretary of State Colin Powell, and construct a near-limitless concept of executive power during war. While many of these strands are familiar, they have not been assembled as effectively before on television to present a coherent picture of what happened after 9/11.

Cheney didn't trust the CIA after it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Iranian revolution, and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, so he created through Rumsfeld's Pentagon his own intelligence network to suit his agenda. Powell and former CIA director George Tenet were no match for this pair, who have known each other for three decades. By the time that Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis ``Scooter" Libby, was indicted last fall, Powell and Tenet were long gone and the CIA was in shambles.

My theory is that these guys got off on torture. You don't need to waterboard somebody 183 times to get information. You do it because it makes you feel powerful. Non-military, cowardly, craven blunderers, they thought it made them manly and tough. What it actually did was make everything ten times worse.

And these 'doctors' who were involved in the torture?

We want their names.

Would Health Care Reform Help You?

A post by Barbara O'Brien of Mahablog:

Many obstacles and stumbling blocks remain in the way of health care reform. The House and Senate bills will have to be merged, and then the House and Senate both will vote on the final bill. We don’t yet know what will be in the final bill, or if the final bill will be passed into law. Passage will be especially difficult in the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to pass. It is still possible that after all this angst, just one grandstanding senator could kill the whole thing.

But just for fun, let’s look at what conventional wisdom says will be in the final bill and see if there is anything in it that will be an immediate benefit to people with peritoneal mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease.

It is likely that the final bill will provide additional funding for state high-risk insurance pools. Currently more than 30 states run such pools, which are nonprofit, state-sponsored health insurance plans for people who can’t buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The biggest problem with such pools is that, often, the insurance they offer is too expensive for many who might need it. Both the Senate and House bills provide $5 billion in subsidies for state high-risk pools to make the insurance more affordable.

Under the Senate bill, beginning in 2014, private companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions, nor could they charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Until then, the state high-risk pools could provide some help.

Closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap — also called the “doughnut hole” — is another potential provision that could help some patients with asbestos-related disease. The “doughnut hole” is the gap between the coverage for yearly out-of-pocket expenses provided by Medicare Part D and Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage” threshold.

For example, in 2009 Medicare Part D paid at least 75 percent of what patients paid for prescription drugs up to $2,700. After that, patients must pay for all of their prescription medications until what they have paid exceeds $6,154. At that point, the catastrophic coverage takes over, and Medicare pays for all but 5 percent of the patient’s drug bills. The final health care reform bill probably will provide for paying at least 50 percent of out-of-pocket costs in the doughnut hole.

You may have heard the bills include budget cuts to the Medicare program, and this has been a big concern to many people. Proponents of the bill insist that savings can be found to pay for the cuts, and that people who depend on Medicare won’t face reduced services. But this is a complex issue that I want to address in a later post.

The long-term provisions probably will include many other provisions that would benefit patients with asbestos-related disease, including increased funding for medical research. Although there are many complaints about the bill coming from all parts of the political spectrum, on the whole it would be a huge benefit to many people.
— Barbara O’Brien
March 4, 2010

It's WTF Saturday!

Irony? Or just stupidity?

Major U.S., Canadian and British life and health insurance companies have billions of dollars invested in tobacco companies, says a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Wesley Boyd, the study's lead author, found that at least $4.4 billion US in insurance company funds are invested in companies whose affiliates produce cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco.

"Despite calls upon the insurance industry to get out of the tobacco business by physicians and others, insurers continue to put their profits above people's health," said Boyd, a faculty member of Harvard Medical School.

"It's clear their top priority is making money, not safeguarding people's well-being," he wrote.

Fish? What fish?

An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.

Money? What money?

Bernie Madoff, the $60bn fraudster, ordered his London office to sell its $165m portfolio of UK gilts only a month before he confessed to the FBI that his business was a "big lie".

The London directors followed his instructions, transferring the sale proceeds to Madoff's New York office. However, it is still not clear where this money went to.

Trust insurance companies? Paul Krugman warns Congress:

Health reform will fail unless we get serious cost control — and we won’t get that kind of control unless we fundamentally change the way the insurance industry, in particular, behaves. So let me offer Congress two pieces of advice:

1) Don’t trust the insurance industry.

2) Don’t trust the insurance industry.

Hypnotize your patients! What could possibly go wrong?

Doctors should be taught to hypnotise patients not to feel pain instead of using general anaesthetics during some operations, the Royal Society of Medicine will be told today.

So what's a few lies between friends?

Army officials, alerted by Dr. Andersen, began an investigation. They uncovered an apparent case of falsified research by a doctor who had befriended Dr. Andersen when they both worked at Walter Reed, treating American soldiers severely injured in Iraq.

The full report of that Army investigation, recently obtained by The New York Times, provides an unusually detailed anatomy of a suspected case of medical research fraud — one all the more disturbing because it occurred at the nation’s premier military research hospital.

[snip]

The Walter Reed episode also shows how medical journals may fail to conduct adequate due diligence on the studies they publish — information that other doctors rely on for guidance. As happened in the Kuklo case, for example, they often deal only with a study’s principal author, rather than all the credited contributors. In his study, Dr. Kuklo, who has not responded to repeated interview requests, reported that a bone-growth product sold by Medtronic, called Infuse, performed “strikingly” better than the traditional bone-grafting technique used to heal soldiers’ shattered shin bones. Other Walter Reed doctors told an Army investigator that claim was overblown.