News Stories

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

The small, eye-tiring screen?

Actually they watch TV on their PSP. Mine is a Japanese made and it had the TV-Wifi option.

Now here is an interesting article about modern medicine, or rather, a summary of what we should do with regards to our own health and the medical industry :

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Occupy Wall Street, meet your medical equivalent.

Health care needs a total revolution so it starts promoting and paying for health instead of disease. That’s the conclusion Dr. Walter Bortz has come to after writing 150 scientific articles, authoring seven books and spending 40 years as a geriatrician at the Palo Alto Medical Clinic. He is a Stanford University professor of medicine who at age 81 still runs multiple miles three times a week and keeps a rigorous travel and speaking schedule.
Dr. Walter Bortz.

In his new book “Next Medicine,” Bortz argues that health care in the U.S. has become a “body shop” so focused on protecting the profitable status quo that it’s all but turned its back on protecting public health through disease prevention. His diagnosis of modern medicine isn’t pretty.

“It’s expensive, it’s unfair, it’s dangerous, it’s corrupt, it’s inefficient. But the big one is it’s irrelevant,” he told an audience at the University of California-San Francisco in September.

“My profession wants you to be sick for one reason: We can send you a bill.”

Nothing against capitalism, he says. “It’s central to our economy, but it’s got to sell the right product.”

His candor can raise hackles, and he’s not shy about courting controversy. He uses the word “fat,” for example, when describing the obesity problem that increasingly harms children as well as adults.

He questions the head of his own institution about whether the planned $3 billion expansion of Stanford’s hospital facilities includes any funds aimed at keeping people from needing its services. Some critics accuse him of being unrealistic, but he’s flexing a rare muscle in the medical world these days: courage.

“The revolution has to go to prevention from repair,” he told me in a recent interview. “The body-shop gang is not going to like it if you don’t bring your car in. Their country club memberships depend on it.”
Almost everyone can live to 100

Automotive metaphors figure prominently in his work. He advises people to think of four major determinants when considering their long-term health: design, accidents, maintenance and age. While he acknowledges that some high-tech medicine is necessary, Bortz argues that very little of U.S. health spending, which now totals 17% of gross domestic product, goes where it could be most productive.

“Ninety-five percent of our $2.8 trillion is [spent on] body work,” he says, noting that virtually none of it goes to good health maintenance.

I met with Dr. Bortz on Stanford’s campus on a beautiful late October day. He drove up in a sporty green Mazda Miata; he radiated both cheer and seriousness of purpose. If there is a rock star of geriatric fitness and health promotion, he’s it and he knows it.

Two recent events have alternately saddened and galvanized him: the death of his friend and longtime patient John McCarthy, the eminent computer scientist and artificial-intelligence pioneer, at age 84, and the victory of Fauja Singh, the first 100-year-old marathon runner to cross the finish line, in Toronto.

Bortz expects to have another 19 healthy years ahead of him, and he has long said it’s biologically possible for everyone to become centenarians without major ill health or disability. It requires both guts and smarts, he told the UCSF audience with a smile. But the growing incidence of chronic diseases threatens to undermine the big longevity gains achieved in the last century.

“The threat to the world is chronic disease,” he says, pointing to hundreds of millions of diabetic patients in China and India, among other places. “It’s going to bring the world to its knees, and we can’t afford it.”

The number of people with diabetes had doubled worldwide to 347 million in 2008, from 153 million in 1980, according to a study published June 25 in the Lancet.
A national ‘health-care spending’ clock

Bortz is working with corporate and other leaders to help people steer clear of serious ills such as obesity and diabetes. Among his ideas: a national health-care spending board akin to the national debt clock where people could see how the number of steps they take per day can reduce the collective financial burden. A fitness blood test that could be used to charge people less on their health insurance if they stay fit. And preventive orthopedics that could help people identify and correct joint and muscle-strength problems before they degenerate into arthritis.

Medicine’s mission, he says, should be the assertion and assurance of human potential. Bortz argues that after an era when infections were the primary killers, the tools in the modern tool kit — surgery and drugs — are mostly outdated to treat the kinds of behavior-born threats we now face.

Knowledge of what it takes to preserve health is now at a tipping point, he says, making it incumbent upon people who understand the basic science to teach and encourage those who don’t.

Bortz isn’t alone in sounding the alarm about chronic disease. Addressing it is key to national solvency, says Ken Thorpe, a health-policy professor at Emory University in Atlanta and executive director of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease, a nonprofit coalition of more than 100 organizations that focus on prevention and chronic-disease management.

Lawmakers need to figure out how to reduce or slow the growth of the share of patients with chronic disease “if they’re going to deal with entitlement spending,” Thorpe told me last summer as the debt-ceiling debate raged in Congress. “We need to reorganize how care is provided and managed and we also need to do a better job of keeping incoming patients to the Medicare program healthier.”
Exercise acts as armor

An only child, Walter M. Bortz II grew up in a row house in Philadelphia. He had regular contact with intellectual luminaries such as Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel Prize winner, and Frederick Banting, one of the Canadians who discovered insulin. He recalls the way his father, an internist, would regularly accept barter such as oil paintings as payment for his medical services. The senior Bortz was president of the American Medical Association in 1947.

The father-son bond was a defining one. It’s part of what drove the younger Bortz to complete a marathon every year for the last 41 years.

“I picked it up when I was 39 and my father died,” he says. “It was very much a grief reaction. I was smart enough to know running was the best therapy for depression.”

Decades later, he’s still running, albeit at a slow pace. He completed the San Francisco marathon this year and plans to go to Ferrara, Italy, to run his 42nd marathon in 2012.

His habit serves a biological purpose, he says, noting that exercising is like acquiring “armor” against the risk of disease. “As I’m running, I’m conjuring up my genes to be properly expressed.”

Bortz’s physical and intellectual discipline can be intimidating, but he has a few indulgences, too. He drinks beer and wine every night and loves ice cream, though he limits himself to once a week. He enjoys Stanford football and has a rich family life with his wife, also an accomplished marathon runner, four adult kids and nine grandchildren.

His thinking on health policy has changed significantly over the years. He supports Obama’s health-reform law, saying universal health insurance is a must, but he cautions against covering too many services. Of concern is the potential to overuse MRIs, stents and other big-ticket items while shortchanging prevention.

Bortz opposed the Medicare prescription-drug benefit that Congress approved in 2003. “Old people don’t need more pills,” he says. “They need to take a walk.”

The drug benefit, he wrote in his book, “is destined to cost future taxpayers trillions of dollars, and the principal beneficiaries will be the stockholders of Merck, Pfizer and the other drug companies.”

Bortz favors the collective personal responsibility that he found more in evidence when he traveled outside U.S. borders.

“Australia is ahead of us,” he says. “They’re more socialistic. They do more for other people than we do here.”

He’s unfazed by criticism that his proposals to upend health care as we know it are unworkable. “I’d much rather be right and be proven so eventually than concede to the pragmatics of corporate greed.”

In contemplating mortality, Bortz cites Irvin Yalom’s book “Staring at the Sun,” and says that after death, human energy may remain as ripples.

He turns humble at the thought.

“My dad is my reference point. He was a great man,” Bortz says. “Every time I think I have a certain competence, I say he had it before me. I’m just kind of playing out his ripples.”

[MrTerrorist]

Well this just stinks.

Megaupload users face data deletion US prosecutors warn

[sa547]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

In the next ten years or so, everyone would get used to their threats. Being an export based economy, they dry themselves out if they don't wish to play ball or do good business - magic lights is all they can muster when people stop buying in bad times.

They think overtaking the US economy will make them the king of the world and they can do whatever they want ; the ruling party is certainly blinded by power.

No doubt about it, but most of us know that China's seemingly rosy picture of economic health is cracking at the seams (i.e. Foxconn labor troubles, environmental damage). Fine, they try penalizing us, we'll be rather be doing fine business with our local neighbors.

Apart from the Spratlys, the Mekong could be a potential flash point because China is making its presence felt as they have gained a foothold on Laos' economic zone and trying to make it its own outpost.

[Ithekro]

Somehow I don't think the Vietnamese governement will appreciate the Chinese doing that.

[Doraneko]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72114.html

Why punish us economically when we're already being dumped with dirt-cheap goods?

The points on China's scramble for land and resources against the interests of its neighbour are totally valid - but you guys are quoting the wrong source.

Every time I see Global Times being quoted as some sort of China policy indicator (which sadly isn't rare) I just cannot stop face-palming.

Yes it has a party connection, but so is many media outlets in China. (Isn't too much of a surprise considering that we are talking about a socialist country with one of the lowest degree of press freedom in the world - you need some sort of special "license" just to start a press). But that is it. It is certainly no People's Daily, the true mouthpiece of the party as a whole, or official statements from the Foreign Ministry. In fact the GT has a proven track record of being so extreme that it is more like a joke than to be taken seriously.

People should stop thinking CCP as one single gigantic creature. It is no different from LDP in Japan, or Republicans in US. There are countless factions inside it representing different vested interests fighting among each other. The CCP policies are simply compromises between all of them, with weights attached to the relative strengths of each faction.

Each of these factions of course have their own PR channels and whatnot, but that doesn't mean any of them is representative of the entire party or future government directions. Global Times is merely an outlet for the ultra-nationalists who have lost power since the 80s, with views that are so extreme that even Hu and Wen would be rolling on the floor while laughing like a three-year-old by merely reading them.

Quoting Reuters:

The Global Times has a nationalist bent and its commentaries do not amount to government policy positions.

I am no fan of China either. But please. Refer to a real, credible source, or else you are only defeating the purpose of any serious discussion. Quoting Global Times is no different from quoting some obscure Tea Party publications for its supporters as future directions of the US, or whatever ultra-right-wing stuff as policy indicators of Japan.

[SaintessHeart]

Neither would the rest of South East Asia. Everyone here is fine and dandy with 7th and 3rd Fleet making lives difficult for the Red Fleet before USSR's collapse, and today, pirates and North Korea in the South China Sea - they aren't exactly very welcome towards China's saber-rattling.

Right now Philippines is the first to say no to China's claim in the SEA waters. The following countries would follow suit if China steps up on their aggression :

1. Malaysia
2. Brunei
3. Vietnam (though I have no idea HOW they are going to go against the Chinese fleet with their small boats)
4. Australia

Once the Aussies step in it the next are going to be the Yanks. Singapore is going to be the last, but they have to honor their end of the Five Power Defence Arrangement.

Things are not going to be pretty.

[Ithekro]

Vietnam still has a few old (very old) US ships they captured from South Vietnam. Plus they seem to becoming more....happy I guess, about the idea of having American warships return to some of those old South Vietnamese bases....because it it better than the mostly ineffectualy Russian Navy verses the enlarging Chinese Army's Navy.

Though I doubt the Filipinos are going to want to start basing US ships in Subic Bay agian.

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

Vietnam still has a few old (very old) US ships they captured from South Vietnam. Plus they seem to becoming more....happy I guess, about the idea of having American warships return to some of those old South Vietnamese bases....

love global politics

Though I doubt the Filipinos are going to want to start basing US ships in Subic Bay agian.

there are plenty of other areas that would be glad to have a couple of thousand Americans spending their money there. Even with all the problems associated with hosting a American military base.

[ganbaru]

Mormonism besieged by the modern age
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80T1CM20120130

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by ganbaru

Mormonism besieged by the modern age
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80T1CM20120130

Moreover, church leaders have taught that the Book of Mormon is a historical document -- not a parable -- so the faithful are startled to find articles on the internet using science to contradict it.
For example, the book describes Israelites moving in 600 BC to the Americas, where they had horses and other domesticated animals. But Spaniards introduced horses to the New World many centuries later, and extensive DNA studies have failed to find any genetic link between Israelites and Native Americans, suggesting instead that North America's indigenous population came across the Bering Strait from Asia many thousands of years ago.
"I think you can find scientific studies coming down on both sides, but the Book of Mormon doesn't live or die on scientific evidence," Jensen said.

i love to see these scientific studies not pay for by the church of Mormon.

[Ithekro]

I recall Native American stories that they come from the south, not the north (which fits the pattern of higher civilizations better) Not all of them, but some of them. (several do not agree with the White Man's theory of the Bearing Straits. Some think they were always here, but most know they were not, but don't think the White Man knows best) Those stories fit a part of the Mormom's tales, but not the full part of it. (thirteenth tribe and all that). There use to be horses in North America..,.13,000 years or so ago. They became extinct in teh Ice Age (most supsect the native ate them into extintion). The Israelites tales are hard to pin down when and where things are until King Solomon. There is the possibility that some tales were from pre-history and some did braek off and somehow came to the Americans (why, I have no idea...maybe they thought Moses was nuts and decided the Promised Land was someplace else...a few Natives think the Americas are the Promised Land...not Israel). How did they get here...no clue, but some believe they did, and we know they Natives were not the first peoples in the Americas....at least not all of them. (some point to some of the traditional symbols used in I think it is Navajo rituals. The six pointed star is used...or the weaved star shape that looks like the Shield of David.

Eh.

One problem people have with the Mornmons was when they were retroactively baptizing people into the church. Dead people that had no say in the matter via their Geneology studies (which actually is one of the better sources for Geneology work).

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

I recall Native American stories that they come from the south, not the north (which fits the pattern of higher civilizations better) Not all of them, but some of them. (several do not agree with the White Man's theory of the Bearing Straits. Some think they were always here, but most know they were not, but don't think the White Man knows best) Those stories fit a part of the Mormom's tales, but not the full part of it. (thirteenth tribe and all that). There use to be horses in North America..,.13,000 years or so ago. They became extinct in teh Ice Age (most supsect the native ate them into extintion). The Israelites tales are hard to pin down when and where things are until King Solomon. There is the possibility that some tales were from pre-history and some did braek off and somehow came to the Americans (why, I have no idea...maybe they thought Moses was nuts and decided the Promised Land was someplace else...a few Natives think the Americas are the Promised Land...not Israel). How did they get here...no clue, but some believe they did, and we know they Natives were not the first peoples in the Americas....at least not all of them. (some point to some of the traditional symbols used in I think it is Navajo rituals. The six pointed star is used...or the weaved star shape that looks like the Shield of David.

Eh.

One problem people have with the Mornmons was when they were retroactively baptizing people into the church. Dead people that had no say in the matter via their Geneology studies (which actually is one of the better sources for Geneology work).

the tribes could have gone south then cam back north. Besides which it depends on which tribe you are talking about. Well recent DNA studies have link NA to a people in Russia.

[Ithekro]

It does depend on the tribe. Also that a lot of people have died since those times. Including diseases from the Europeans as well as probably from the Asians that did come over the Bearing Straits in the long past.

Again, it is all a question of time. The Bearing crossing should have been in the last major Ice Age. Anything dealing with the Israelites should have been much later than that...but we don't know for sure...since oral histories are like that.

[ChainLegacy]

There's no need to discuss what's pretty much known to be false. I like the South Park episode on Mormonism, pretty much portrays my viewpoint on Joseph Smith.

[DonQuigleone]

It's practically impossible for Israelites to have reached america. They would not have had the ocean going vessels and navigation skills necessary to make the crossing. All they would have had were galleys fit only for the calm mediterranean, and most of their navigation would have consisted of hugging coastlines.

The Vikings were the only precolumbian people who made the atlantic crossing, and they did have the know how and vessels to succesfully do it.

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

It's practically impossible for Israelites to have reached america. They would not have had the ocean going vessels and navigation skills necessary to make the crossing. All they would have had were galleys fit only for the calm mediterranean, and most of their navigation would have consisted of hugging coastlines.

The Vikings were the only precolumbian people who made the atlantic crossing, and they did have the know how and vessels to succesfully do it.

Well, maybe they could do it by parting the Atlantic and getting regular food drops... (Not to mention, drinking water drops.)

[Zakoo]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

It's practically impossible for Israelites to have reached america. They would not have had the ocean going vessels and navigation skills necessary to make the crossing. All they would have had were galleys fit only for the calm mediterranean, and most of their navigation would have consisted of hugging coastlines.

The Vikings were the only precolumbian people who made the atlantic crossing, and they did have the know how and vessels to succesfully do it.

What are you saying, they just have to split the sea in two, if the book says it then it's obviously true.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

Well this just stinks.

Megaupload users face data deletion US prosecutors warn

Anyone who doesn't have backup copies of anything of value stored online is a fool. Valuable data should be stored in at least two, and better yet three or four different locations, including at least one copy on physical media.

To think a place like Megaupload would be a good location to store valuable data is, well, delusional. Anything that's so valuable that you can't afford to lose it should be kept far away from any site that has anything to do with illegal filesharing.

I'm not taking a position about whether what the DOJ did in this case was right or wrong, but I'm hardly surprised to hear that the data on these servers may no longer be available.

Originally Posted by ChainLegacy

There's no need to discuss what's pretty much known to be false. I like the South Park episode on Mormonism, pretty much portrays my viewpoint on Joseph Smith.

Many years ago I lived in upstate New York and decided to attend the son-et-lumière pageant the Mormons put together each year in Palmyra. It was my first encounter with Mormon beliefs and would have been my last except my daughter and I travelled around northern Arizona and southern Utah visiting National Parks. (The guidebooks hasten to point out that southwestern Utah, where we were visiting, is home to those Mormons who still practice polygamy out of the view of both church and state. It's also home to one of the best animal shelters in America.) Since every motel had a Book of Mormon in the nightstand, I read a bit and found it just as unbelievable as the presentation in Palmyra. I had to be careful not to laugh out loud when told that Jesus just happened to stop by upstate New York in the days between the Resurrection and Ascension. My Catholic side was outraged, and my atheist side was amused!

It's quite a pageant, though. If you're ever in upstate New York when it's happening, it's worth a visit just to see the extravaganza they present.

[ganbaru]

Top U.S. spies to face grilling on Taliban, Iran talks
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80T1UY20120130

[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by Zakoo

What are you saying, they just have to split the sea in two, if the book says it then it's obviously true.

Sorry, forgot the whole "god" thing. How could I be such an idiot!