Cuba Develops Four Cancer Vaccines, Ignored by the Media

Cuba Develops Four Cancer Vaccines, Ignored by the Media.

Video: The Explainer: The Balanced Scorecard – Harvard Business Review

Video: The Explainer: The Balanced Scorecard – Harvard Business Review.

 

Video: Always Be Open to Dissenting Opinions – Harvard Business Review

Video: Always Be Open to Dissenting Opinions – Harvard Business Review.

 

Recalling Frederick Douglass; Applying His Insights to Ferguson

Not protesters but the system of American justice is morally and intellectually out of control. Justice is in the hands of vigilantes who are brutes intent on robbing liberty without fear of rebuke, and America is proving false to its own promise, indifferent and deaf to its whirlwinds of cruelty. Much of America revels instead in the brutish delight that shines in its inner soul, as it calls others demons and reveals how it has lost its reverence for providence or truth.

With blood on its hands, it has no legitimacy lecturing the aggrieved when its lust for killing spreads unchecked to every border, when a single prosecutor cloaked as an agent of authority manipulates the system and calls its darkest evils fair play. His displayed contempt and arrogance pretends concessions as it silently approves citizens’ peril: life emptying from souls lying still against curbstones—bodies left in plain view for all to see the pride of termination taken in the kill and the madness of this accruing demand and the political taste for blood, blood to gratify an exasperated illogic, that bullets weighed on the scale of human powers make some unworthy and inferior, and that their general dislike warrants this impression and sanction of foul play.

Michael Brown’s death was a modern, “justified” lynching. Months after, his killer is uncharged.

Families Denied Now Have Hope

Families without resident status live in fear. Fear of separation, fear of discovery, fear of being torn away from their children, the fear that the place where they reside has the power to abruptly void their efforts at happiness and success, to abritarily interrupt their security and peace, to arrest their hard work to build a life of promise–merely because they live in a place that places property rights in front of people–that to live in this place, people not born here must get in line.

But what happens when there’s no line? Three percent of America, around ten million people including children, entered the country outside of the non-existent line and their presence challenges whether the laws of immigration are just. That argument, whether the law is fair or just, is ignored by politicians and many citizens who claim a law is a law–until they find a law with which they disagree–Obamacare, for example, one they claim denies their freedoms; or background checks for gun ownership which is envisioned as part of an imagined conspiracy to create a national roster in order to take away private guns.

What happens when there is no line is people who entered the country without attention to the administrative details are left in limbo and hide in the shadows. They feel hunted, haunted by living on the edge even as they join in the mainstream to cook meals and make beds, even for the families of persons nominated to Cabinet offices, so deeply are they a part of America’s fabric.

Myths about these families and workers are a part of politics of denigration: among the disaraging claims: “they” hold down wages, overcrowd schools, draw heavily on social benefits, deny others opportunity, undermine the social order. Much of this is victim blaming: often low wage jobs are all that is open to them as workers; many are not eligible for social benefits. They work jobs for which there is little demand or competition. Their incomes help the American economy grow.

Because they were unable to get in line, they are a constant source of blame. Even the exodus of children from Central America in the spring and early summer of 2014 were seen as willing to walk hundreds of miles for a hot box lunch and an air conditioned cot, even as the children themselves spoke of the desire for education and opportunity, or reunification with their family, or spoke of fleeing gangs in their communities who had threatened them with rape or violence, even death.

Is it illegal, under the authority of law by precedent and court rulings, to grant work permits to families already working? Is it illegal to say you will not be removed from your jobs? Is it illegal to perform background checks on people already here? Is it illegal to charge a $500 fee to meet the administrative costs? Is it legal to set priorities for deportation that puts working families who have been here for 5 years, who pay the fees and pass the review in a program category safe from deportation for the next 3 years?

Congress only funds 400,000 deportations annually. Sensibly, creating effective priorities for deportation means sorting out bad guys and latecomers from the earnest and long term earners. The funded level of deportations will continue–as the law requires–400,000 annually, by why is it illegal to secure in a program those working who represent no threat?

Especially, when Congress has repeatedly failed by law to establish a line?

Forward Goes Backward On Race

In Philosophy, where policy resides, a single person and idea drove this election—Obama, and race. Voters turned out to affirm that the wrong are not the weak, but the strong. Despite the success of his policies (healthcare, jobs and oil; peace, lower deficits) this election was never about policy or truth. Mainstream media maintains a shutdown; the GOP streams put downs.

Its votes were driven by anger and fear. The idea persists, expanded by every GOP candidate, that the President’s agenda is driven by race and incompetence, that every idea he proposes is a threat to America and American lives (read whites and recall death panels, debt, a refusal to go to war; immigration, Ebola, ISIL, food stamps), all distorted by a lens colored with racial prejudice (“buckwheat-in-chief,” posters with bones through his nose, soundbites, bad jokes, and daily syndicated national radio, magazine covers). The Democratic rearguard retreat reinforced these ideas.

In this churned climate, huge favors pass as policy; for example, tax cuts for the rich. The fear of change overwhelms common sense and wealth is increased instead of wages. The country is tilted by an historic item it again failed to confront. It stood by its disbelief.

Market Ideology and American Fiction

Why do high income neighborhoods pay higher wages than low income neighborhoods for the same work? Why do men earn more than women–for the same work? Why are full time workers also drawing food stamps because their wages are below the income needed to qualify? Why did a woman in New Jersey working 3 jobs die in her car, poisoned by exhaust fumes as she napped before going another shift in an effort to support her kids?

Why does Costco pay a livable wage and Walmart insist it can’t? The point is the market is rigged and filled with excuses that increase wealth–not wages. The labor market, from colonial times to now, exploits workers: as apprentices, indentured workers; as enslaved and sharecroppers and tenant farmers; in right to work states with no job protections, as temporary workers paid by third parties, as part-time workers scheduled for less than full-time workers, as corporate workers who see their pensions and insurance disappear in takeovers by vulture capitalists; in the growing gap with executive compensation.

Corporate free speech and a free labor market are both American fiction–both as ideals stand by evidence in stark contrast to America’s realities.

Burma Market.

Here’s a Look at Fall’s Favorites

How Google can unlock a trillion-dollar opportunity while improving search relevance

Gigaom

It’s every searcher’s dream to get actual answers to their search queries, instead of search results. Google can give us these “answers” now for a set of keywords called “buying keywords.” Here’s an explanation of how this change will improve the user experience and create a level playing field for product merchants in the search ecosystem. 

Keyword types

The keywords typed into [company]Google[/company] can be broadly classified into two categories:

1. Browsing keywords (for example, “coffee maker”)
2. Buying keywords (for example, “best coffee makers,” “coffee maker reviews,” “Cuisinart DCC-1200,” etc.

A person’s intent cannot be clearly defined when he searches using a browsing keyword. When he types “coffee maker” into Google, we can’t know for certain whether he is in casual browsing mode, researching mode or buying mode.

However, when the person submits a buying keyword to the search, he is at the near end of the purchase funnel. People…

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Fake Limbs The Work Like Real Ones, Ctd

A great post about media-touted of false hope, debunked.

The Dish

Last weekend’s post about mind-controlled artificial limbs left a reader his shaking head:

It frankly drives me crazy to watch videos about developments in myoelectric upper-extremity prosthetics like the one you posted and to read commentators like Victoria Turk “herald this breakthrough.” Yes, I can choose not to watch or read, but I’m an upper-extremity amputee, and I’ve worn a body-powered prosthesis most of my life. So why wouldn’t I let my curiosity reign?

Reports like this are crazy-making because for me, the products they tout inevitably disappoint. Indeed, I probably wouldn’t wear the prosthetic device with implanted electrodes, even in the very unlikely event that I were offered the opportunity. They evoke the hoary sci-fi cliché of the melding of man and machine, and while mildly interesting, they aren’t the answer for the everyday, prosthesis-wearing amputee.

I once tried a myoelectric arm with surface electrodes.

I promptly went back to my body-powered prosthesis, which is…

View original post 284 more words