As announced earlier this year, the viagra cialis online pharmacy pharmacy 2.0® conference – in 2008 and 2009 hosted in Toronto – goes global and will in 2010 be organized in Europe. The University of Twente (UT), the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre (UMNC) and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) will host Medicine 2.0 Congress (Medicine 2.0’10: 3rd World Congress on Social Media and Web 2.0 in Health, Medicine, and Biomedical Research) on November 29-30, 2010 in Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Medicine 2.0® 2010 will be supported by the core Medicine 2.0® team in cooperation with scientists from UT, UMNC and RIVM; the website will remain at http://www.medicine20congress.com, and the submission and dissemination process will remain centralized.
Medicine 2.0'10 will serve as an umbrella for REshape (Fall edition, UMNC) and the ‘Supporting health by technology’ (IIIrd edition) symposium series (University of Twente, RIVM). I am sure we will hear more from this capable Local Organizing Committee through this official blog and the Medicine 2.0 website (my personal role for this and future Medicine 2.0 Conferences is that of a conference series producer).
As of today, abstract submissions for the Medicine 2.0'10 congress in Masstricht are open.
As in previous years, we are very transparent and allow interested parties to track what is being submitted in real time through our RSS feed at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/med2submit (contains the last 10 submissions - slightly delayed). If you follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/medicine20) you can also see the titles of recently submitted abstracts. We hope that seeing the submissions over the next 6 weeks will motivate some people to also submit a presentation proposal.
The call for abstracts is on the Medicine 2.0 website at http://bit.ly/dCOIeT .
The second big news is that we have signed an agreement with the Local Organizing team at Stanford University, led by Larry Chu MD MS.
Yes, it's official: Stanford University will host the Medicine 2.0 congress in 2011, at the brand new Li-Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge Conference Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine (mark the dates: Sept 16 to Sept 18, 2011 - last day: workshops only). I am very excited not only because of the extremely capable local organizing committee and the location of being in the heart of Silicon Valley (and some good kiteboarding spots for me!), but also because of the association with many leading scientists in this field, including the Stanford Department of Medical Informatics, which is a leader in ontologies and knowledge-based approaches, so expect an additional emphasis on Web 3.0 in 2011 (but no, we are not renaming the conference series)!
For 2012 and beyond we are negotiating with future organizers, and we have expressions of interest from teams in Boston, New York, Barcelona, London, and Seoul, so Medicine 2.0 truly has gone global!
And another innovation: All Medicine 2.0 talks will be transcribed and (hopefully) PubMed indexed. As this is unprecedented we have to see what the NLM says to our proposal, but if accepted, it will be even more attractive and important for researchers and practitioners in the field to present at Medicine 2.0.
Finally, I am excited that the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) has renewed its commitment in supporting the conference series and will again sponsor the IMIA Medicine 2.0 Award.
Gunther Eysenbach MD MPH
Medicine 2.0 Conference Series Producer
Martes, Nobyembre 1, 2011
Sabado, Oktubre 29, 2011
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ADHD / ASPERGERS /BIPOLAR Is there a link to alcahol / drug abuse
A recent question i asked to Professor Cinda Johnson and her amazing daughter Linea:
Hi Linea and Cinda
I have a lot of theories into the whole mental health / Aspergers / Bipolar issues
One I have which im hoping you can clarify for me is as follows
Is it so that a childhood illness like ADHDA / Asperser’s / Giftedness / ADD / Depression etc is left undiagnosed and un treated that your body is so chemically imbalanced that it is a high risk of forming Bipolar disorder.
I will explain
I know of a girl (several to be honest) who had ADHD type hyper behaviour as a child, it was extreme when she was younger. She was very intelligent and yet refused to co operate in class. Her teachers always suspected something more serious than just being difficult as an issue but the mother could never get any help for the child.
Later in her teens, the child started to experiment with alcohol; this seemed to be a quick fix until her body got fed up and craved more intense chemicals. She then went onto light weight drugs before finally turning to heroin. She spiralled so out of control and had many suicide attempts and over doses
The girl then became manic and could take on the world and succeed before she became so down that she would quit before she finished her projects
Now my theory, she had undiagnosed ADHD or/and Aspergers syndrome. Her body was starved of intervention and cheap cialis of any kind so it went onto the next best chemical, alcohol; again not good enough so craved light drugs, and then the final blow out heavy duty chemical drugs.
She is now diagnosed with Bipolar 2 and had an underlying intellectual disability which can no longer be recognised in her and there for diagnosed. She is on a serious amount of cheap cialis for the rest of her life. When she dips after being manic, she is so violent and could kill all in her way and has almost done so to her mother,
She is still dipping with drugs constant and has taken to being involved with a heroin supplier and thinks she is ready for the next big adventure, A BABY. She is also paranoid beyond belief that her mother is talking about her and her boyfriend one minute and then the mother’s best friend again 2 months later. Mother gives in as too worn out not to.
My big question, Is it possible that if you have an undiagnosed and untreated illness in childhood that you are high risk of Bipolar disorder and that it can be prevented with early diagnosis for original problem and treatment
I will post with her permission the answer she gives to me, if and when she can
Hi Linea and Cinda
I have a lot of theories into the whole mental health / Aspergers / Bipolar issues
One I have which im hoping you can clarify for me is as follows
Is it so that a childhood illness like ADHDA / Asperser’s / Giftedness / ADD / Depression etc is left undiagnosed and un treated that your body is so chemically imbalanced that it is a high risk of forming Bipolar disorder.
I will explain
I know of a girl (several to be honest) who had ADHD type hyper behaviour as a child, it was extreme when she was younger. She was very intelligent and yet refused to co operate in class. Her teachers always suspected something more serious than just being difficult as an issue but the mother could never get any help for the child.
Later in her teens, the child started to experiment with alcohol; this seemed to be a quick fix until her body got fed up and craved more intense chemicals. She then went onto light weight drugs before finally turning to heroin. She spiralled so out of control and had many suicide attempts and over doses
The girl then became manic and could take on the world and succeed before she became so down that she would quit before she finished her projects
Now my theory, she had undiagnosed ADHD or/and Aspergers syndrome. Her body was starved of intervention and cheap cialis of any kind so it went onto the next best chemical, alcohol; again not good enough so craved light drugs, and then the final blow out heavy duty chemical drugs.
She is now diagnosed with Bipolar 2 and had an underlying intellectual disability which can no longer be recognised in her and there for diagnosed. She is on a serious amount of cheap cialis for the rest of her life. When she dips after being manic, she is so violent and could kill all in her way and has almost done so to her mother,
She is still dipping with drugs constant and has taken to being involved with a heroin supplier and thinks she is ready for the next big adventure, A BABY. She is also paranoid beyond belief that her mother is talking about her and her boyfriend one minute and then the mother’s best friend again 2 months later. Mother gives in as too worn out not to.
My big question, Is it possible that if you have an undiagnosed and untreated illness in childhood that you are high risk of Bipolar disorder and that it can be prevented with early diagnosis for original problem and treatment
I will post with her permission the answer she gives to me, if and when she can
On Kirby, Marvel, Copyright and Moral Claims: Scattered Thoughts
See also: purchase cialis | cialis |
Thoughts on the copyright reclamation by the heirs of Jack Kirby, sparked by this post by Alan David Duane.
(In reading the below, remember I'm neither a lawyer nor a policymaker nor even one who has read the relevant legal documents; I'm going by a (semi-informed, but distinctly) layman's readings of the news stories about them. If that doesn't interest you, bail now.)
1)
The heirs of Jack Kirby have filed a notice of copyright reclamation in the case of superheroes he had a hand in creating for Marvel in the early 1960's, characters such as the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and even Spiderman (who was created by Steve Ditko more than Jack Kirby).
2)
It's important to remember what's going on here. Kirby's heirs aren't suing anyone -- at least not yet. They are filing a notice of reclamation. They are able to do this because of the odd nature of our current lengthy copyright system.
Until 1976, copyrights were good for 56 years -- an automatic 28 with a single optional renewal. In 1976, Congress extended that period -- first to 75 and then later to 95 years (oversimplifying but in essence). This was not only prospective, applying to works copyrighted in 1976 and later, but retroactive, applying to old works too.
But this created an odd situation for those who had sold their copyrights prior to 1976. What they'd sold was copyright as it existed then, i.e. the 56 year term. What to do about the extensions for sold copyrights? Should they belong to the original owner (on the grounds that they only sold the existing copyright of 56 years and not any more), or should they belong to the new purchaser (on the grounds that the purchaser bought the copyright and the extension doesn't affect that)?
(Note that this is also a different legal situation than the one involving DC/Superman/Jerry Siegel's heirs.)
3)
This entire debate is distorted by a broader misconception in our culture about the relation of worth and wealth to merit and effort.
It is a strong cultural myth in our society -- an essential undergirding of one of the two major political philosophies of this country, and an almost-as-important one for the other -- that people who get rich deserved it. They worked hard, or had a good idea, and therefore they made it. Conservatives tend to (implicitly) assume this is the end of the story: if you work hard and/or are smart, you'll get rich; if you're poor, it's your own damn fault. Liberals, in contrast, recognize unfairness and randomness to a degree, so they tend to say that people can work hard and stay poor. But neither side tends to see the fact that wealth is at least a much a matter of chance and luck as it is of merit or effort.
The reason we don't like to see that, of course, is that it upends the supporting intellectual assumptions of most of our society: if the rich are simply lucky, then the enormous favor they receive is unearned and unfair.*
This is never more true than when we are talking about intellectual property.
I'm not (repeat, not) saying that artistic merit has no relation to how well a work does. But it's been extensively argued on theoretical grounds, amply seen throughout history and shown in controlled laboratory studies that merit is, at best, a necessary but not sufficient factor. Harry Potter may have been a good series of children's books -- but there are a lot of other books that are equally good (as I've had children's librarians say to me); J. K. Rowling may have been good, but she was mostly very, very lucky.
However true this is of the success of original works, how much more strongly true is it of intellectual properties** which have success in derivative works!
This distorts our discussion in numerous ways. In part it leads to people saying things like
The fight that will follow over the ownership of the Fantastic Four isn't quite like a fight over a lottery ticket; but it's far, far closer than anyone is granting in this discussion.
4)
There is a third party to every legal battle over intellectual property, one which has neither lawyers nor lobbyists on its side. Thanks to the recent intellectual growth of the copyleft movement, it has some advocates; but their position is largely based on reason and fairness and the public good, and is therefore extremely weak. But it is the most important party nonetheless.
I speak, of course, of the public.
Intellectual property -- a misnomer, really, since there is no thing to be owned -- is a government-enforced monopoly restricting freedom of speech. It restricts your ability to say what you want to say, in person or print or on film or in comics -- if what you want to say is, for example, "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane; I was [REMAINDER DELETED DUE TO DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE]" It equally, and even more indefensibly, to your ability to tell an original story -- if that story is about, for example, Superman or Spiderman.
There are reasons for so limiting speech -- which is why the power to do so is explicitly granted in the Constitution -- but given that it is limiting very basic human rights, the power is moral only insofar as it is necessary to accomplish its stated ends. (Whether or not it is legal is a separate matter.)
5)
The moral case for creators' rights is both essential and irrelevant to the Kirby-copyright issue.
It's irrelevant because neither party has a very good moral (as opposed to legal) claim. On one side we have Kirby's biological heirs; on the other, the corporate descendents of the companies he worked for. Neither set of people had much to do with the effort or talent put into these characters; they are fighting for an inheritance, and like any fight for inheritance they are fighting for things they may have title to but don't in any moral sense particularly deserve.
But it's essential because it was only because of the (perceived) moral rights of creators that copyright was extended in the first place.
If the case before Congress had been that companies wished to extend their intellectual monopolies to make more money from them, then even that bribery-pliant group of sellouts would have a hard time justifying such a vote. So it was all talked up in terms of the struggling, lonely dreamer, hoping to turn his or her talent into a win for his or her heirs.
This was a fiction, of course -- as much of a fiction as the notion that estate taxes hit small farmers rather than wealthy businessmen, and a fiction of the same kind, i.e. a propagandistic one designed to hide the true beneficiaries of public policy. But in terms of the copyright extensions passed in the 1970's, and then again in the 1990's, and then again whenever Mickey Mouse next threatens to go out of copyright, it's an essential one. Without this fiction, the extra value that came from the copyright for years 57 - 95 of an intellectual property simply wouldn't exist -- or would, rather, be held by the public and not by anyone in particular.
This is why you can't say of copyrights what you'd say of, for example, real estate. If you sell a house in a poor neighborhood, and then it becomes trendy, and the owner therefore (through luck) becomes rich, you can't complain that you didn't know its worth when you sold it. But no one seriously doubts (pragmatically if not morally) the perpetual property rights to real estate.****
Whereas the purchasers of these monopolies, which have become valuable only due to chance (and the efforts of thousands, morally and artistically indistinguishable from similar efforts which led nowhere), have any chance of extending them at the expense of the public only by appealing to the moral claim of their creators.
Marvel wants to argue that, for the good of people like Jack Kirby, it must have the right to hold a monopoly on his creations -- against, in this case, his actual heirs. They need the appeal to Kirby's rights to win the broader public debate, and need to squash that same appeal to win the narrow legal one.
The myth that wealth is earned is necessary to make us think that the financial windfall is significantly due to Kirby's talent in the first place, and that this fight over a lottery ticket is a fight over who really deserves it -- blinding us to the real answer, no one.
7)
Artists can't threaten to withhold their next breakthrough character from big companies if they're not fairly compensated, because they have almost no say in whether they can create one. They put their effort and talent into what they make; but what makes it valuable is fashion, and the efforts of others, and luck, and a host of other factors.
Companies have extended copyright based on a myth of the individual creator -- who they are trying to screw over at every other moment so as to make money for themselves.
Of course artists should be fairly compensated for their work -- and there is, as I have said, a very strong pragmatic argument for copyright, one I don't disagree with (assuming that said copyright is, as provided by the U.S. constitution, "for limited terms"). But the vast wealth at stake here is irrelevant to that right, since it is all-but-irrelevant to that success.
And of course companies should be able to get funding to make (say) movies, and then profit from those endeavors. But they want more than that; they want to maintain a public monopoly on the ability to tell stories about certain characters who, for whatever reason, have caught the public's imagination, so that not only can they make and profit from stories about their characters, but so that they can ensure that theirs are the only stories about those characters that are there to be told.
8)
Since I'm not a lawyer or policymaker, but simply a citizen with opinions on public policy, I can say that I support neither Kirby's heirs nor DC/Marvel. I think that, 56 years after their creation, all works should be in the public domain. The supreme court, alas, disagrees -- which seems to mean little more than their unwillingness to open the can of worms of recognizing that our current Congressional system is so poisoned by legalized bribery that no judgments of Congress (or the President, or really the Courts) can be understood as representing the public interest save incidentally. They said it was Congress's call to make -- which would have been a reasonable argument if Congress wasn't bought and paid for by the stakeholders on one side of this particular issue.
But the Congress was bought and paid for, and the Court was unwilling to enforce the rights of the public. So what we are left with is a debate over who should get to steal from the public the winnings of a lottery.
9)
To anyone not convinced by all of the above:
I have one more argument for my position. It's a knock-down, irrefutable, overwhelming argument, such that if you heard it you could not even begin to imagine disagreeing with me. It would, in fact, revolutionize your thinking on every aspect of this issue.
But since this set of concepts can, as it happens, only be expressed in metaphorical terms as an X-Men story, I'm not legally allowed to share it with you until the X-Men go into the public domain.
Until then, you'll just have to trust me.
Update: Now cross-posted at Alas, a blog. Thanks, Amp!
_______________
* Incidentally, the consequence of this argument isn't necessarily a socialist economy, which I wouldn't actually favor; there are extremely strong pragmatic grounds for favoring the retention of a capitalist system and, as part of that, a robust set of property rights. It's just that such a system should be supplemented by a far stronger redistributory state (in a tax-for-social-goods-sense) than is true of the U.S. today; and also (and this is almost as important) that the public culture and debate should recognize the preponderance of luck in the outcomes of economic lives.
** What a vile phrase.
*** Although in fact I think that Wolverine's blockbuster status has far more to do with Chris Claremont, and to a slightly lesser extent Frank Miller, than it does Herb Trimpe or Wolverine's creators -- although Claremont and Miller have even less legal claim than do Wolverine's originators.
**** Except the bible, of course, which wanted everything reset to zero every fifty years to ensure justice (Leviticus 25:13). What socialist commie pinko wrote that, eh?
Thoughts on the copyright reclamation by the heirs of Jack Kirby, sparked by this post by Alan David Duane.
(In reading the below, remember I'm neither a lawyer nor a policymaker nor even one who has read the relevant legal documents; I'm going by a (semi-informed, but distinctly) layman's readings of the news stories about them. If that doesn't interest you, bail now.)
1)
The heirs of Jack Kirby have filed a notice of copyright reclamation in the case of superheroes he had a hand in creating for Marvel in the early 1960's, characters such as the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and even Spiderman (who was created by Steve Ditko more than Jack Kirby).
2)
It's important to remember what's going on here. Kirby's heirs aren't suing anyone -- at least not yet. They are filing a notice of reclamation. They are able to do this because of the odd nature of our current lengthy copyright system.
Until 1976, copyrights were good for 56 years -- an automatic 28 with a single optional renewal. In 1976, Congress extended that period -- first to 75 and then later to 95 years (oversimplifying but in essence). This was not only prospective, applying to works copyrighted in 1976 and later, but retroactive, applying to old works too.
But this created an odd situation for those who had sold their copyrights prior to 1976. What they'd sold was copyright as it existed then, i.e. the 56 year term. What to do about the extensions for sold copyrights? Should they belong to the original owner (on the grounds that they only sold the existing copyright of 56 years and not any more), or should they belong to the new purchaser (on the grounds that the purchaser bought the copyright and the extension doesn't affect that)?
(Note that this is also a different legal situation than the one involving DC/Superman/Jerry Siegel's heirs.)
3)
This entire debate is distorted by a broader misconception in our culture about the relation of worth and wealth to merit and effort.
It is a strong cultural myth in our society -- an essential undergirding of one of the two major political philosophies of this country, and an almost-as-important one for the other -- that people who get rich deserved it. They worked hard, or had a good idea, and therefore they made it. Conservatives tend to (implicitly) assume this is the end of the story: if you work hard and/or are smart, you'll get rich; if you're poor, it's your own damn fault. Liberals, in contrast, recognize unfairness and randomness to a degree, so they tend to say that people can work hard and stay poor. But neither side tends to see the fact that wealth is at least a much a matter of chance and luck as it is of merit or effort.
The reason we don't like to see that, of course, is that it upends the supporting intellectual assumptions of most of our society: if the rich are simply lucky, then the enormous favor they receive is unearned and unfair.*
This is never more true than when we are talking about intellectual property.
I'm not (repeat, not) saying that artistic merit has no relation to how well a work does. But it's been extensively argued on theoretical grounds, amply seen throughout history and shown in controlled laboratory studies that merit is, at best, a necessary but not sufficient factor. Harry Potter may have been a good series of children's books -- but there are a lot of other books that are equally good (as I've had children's librarians say to me); J. K. Rowling may have been good, but she was mostly very, very lucky.
However true this is of the success of original works, how much more strongly true is it of intellectual properties** which have success in derivative works!
This distorts our discussion in numerous ways. In part it leads to people saying things like
I won't argue with anyone who tells me Herb Trimpe is unlikely to return to Marvel and create a blockbuster, breakthrough character that generates millions of dollars, no matter what sort of compensation deal is in place....which implies that the talent and effort of Herb Trimpe (who was the first man to draw (although he did not create) Wolverine) was a major role in Wolverine's becoming a breakthrough character. This is not because of what Herb Trimpe did or didn't do.*** It's because time and chance -- and broad social forces such as create a market for characters such as Wolverine -- and, above all, fashion are what made Wolverine worth what he's worth today.
The fight that will follow over the ownership of the Fantastic Four isn't quite like a fight over a lottery ticket; but it's far, far closer than anyone is granting in this discussion.
4)
There is a third party to every legal battle over intellectual property, one which has neither lawyers nor lobbyists on its side. Thanks to the recent intellectual growth of the copyleft movement, it has some advocates; but their position is largely based on reason and fairness and the public good, and is therefore extremely weak. But it is the most important party nonetheless.
I speak, of course, of the public.
Intellectual property -- a misnomer, really, since there is no thing to be owned -- is a government-enforced monopoly restricting freedom of speech. It restricts your ability to say what you want to say, in person or print or on film or in comics -- if what you want to say is, for example, "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane; I was [REMAINDER DELETED DUE TO DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE]" It equally, and even more indefensibly, to your ability to tell an original story -- if that story is about, for example, Superman or Spiderman.
There are reasons for so limiting speech -- which is why the power to do so is explicitly granted in the Constitution -- but given that it is limiting very basic human rights, the power is moral only insofar as it is necessary to accomplish its stated ends. (Whether or not it is legal is a separate matter.)
5)
The moral case for creators' rights is both essential and irrelevant to the Kirby-copyright issue.
It's irrelevant because neither party has a very good moral (as opposed to legal) claim. On one side we have Kirby's biological heirs; on the other, the corporate descendents of the companies he worked for. Neither set of people had much to do with the effort or talent put into these characters; they are fighting for an inheritance, and like any fight for inheritance they are fighting for things they may have title to but don't in any moral sense particularly deserve.
But it's essential because it was only because of the (perceived) moral rights of creators that copyright was extended in the first place.
If the case before Congress had been that companies wished to extend their intellectual monopolies to make more money from them, then even that bribery-pliant group of sellouts would have a hard time justifying such a vote. So it was all talked up in terms of the struggling, lonely dreamer, hoping to turn his or her talent into a win for his or her heirs.
This was a fiction, of course -- as much of a fiction as the notion that estate taxes hit small farmers rather than wealthy businessmen, and a fiction of the same kind, i.e. a propagandistic one designed to hide the true beneficiaries of public policy. But in terms of the copyright extensions passed in the 1970's, and then again in the 1990's, and then again whenever Mickey Mouse next threatens to go out of copyright, it's an essential one. Without this fiction, the extra value that came from the copyright for years 57 - 95 of an intellectual property simply wouldn't exist -- or would, rather, be held by the public and not by anyone in particular.
This is why you can't say of copyrights what you'd say of, for example, real estate. If you sell a house in a poor neighborhood, and then it becomes trendy, and the owner therefore (through luck) becomes rich, you can't complain that you didn't know its worth when you sold it. But no one seriously doubts (pragmatically if not morally) the perpetual property rights to real estate.****
Whereas the purchasers of these monopolies, which have become valuable only due to chance (and the efforts of thousands, morally and artistically indistinguishable from similar efforts which led nowhere), have any chance of extending them at the expense of the public only by appealing to the moral claim of their creators.
Marvel wants to argue that, for the good of people like Jack Kirby, it must have the right to hold a monopoly on his creations -- against, in this case, his actual heirs. They need the appeal to Kirby's rights to win the broader public debate, and need to squash that same appeal to win the narrow legal one.
The myth that wealth is earned is necessary to make us think that the financial windfall is significantly due to Kirby's talent in the first place, and that this fight over a lottery ticket is a fight over who really deserves it -- blinding us to the real answer, no one.
7)
Artists can't threaten to withhold their next breakthrough character from big companies if they're not fairly compensated, because they have almost no say in whether they can create one. They put their effort and talent into what they make; but what makes it valuable is fashion, and the efforts of others, and luck, and a host of other factors.
Companies have extended copyright based on a myth of the individual creator -- who they are trying to screw over at every other moment so as to make money for themselves.
Of course artists should be fairly compensated for their work -- and there is, as I have said, a very strong pragmatic argument for copyright, one I don't disagree with (assuming that said copyright is, as provided by the U.S. constitution, "for limited terms"). But the vast wealth at stake here is irrelevant to that right, since it is all-but-irrelevant to that success.
And of course companies should be able to get funding to make (say) movies, and then profit from those endeavors. But they want more than that; they want to maintain a public monopoly on the ability to tell stories about certain characters who, for whatever reason, have caught the public's imagination, so that not only can they make and profit from stories about their characters, but so that they can ensure that theirs are the only stories about those characters that are there to be told.
8)
Since I'm not a lawyer or policymaker, but simply a citizen with opinions on public policy, I can say that I support neither Kirby's heirs nor DC/Marvel. I think that, 56 years after their creation, all works should be in the public domain. The supreme court, alas, disagrees -- which seems to mean little more than their unwillingness to open the can of worms of recognizing that our current Congressional system is so poisoned by legalized bribery that no judgments of Congress (or the President, or really the Courts) can be understood as representing the public interest save incidentally. They said it was Congress's call to make -- which would have been a reasonable argument if Congress wasn't bought and paid for by the stakeholders on one side of this particular issue.
But the Congress was bought and paid for, and the Court was unwilling to enforce the rights of the public. So what we are left with is a debate over who should get to steal from the public the winnings of a lottery.
9)
To anyone not convinced by all of the above:
I have one more argument for my position. It's a knock-down, irrefutable, overwhelming argument, such that if you heard it you could not even begin to imagine disagreeing with me. It would, in fact, revolutionize your thinking on every aspect of this issue.
But since this set of concepts can, as it happens, only be expressed in metaphorical terms as an X-Men story, I'm not legally allowed to share it with you until the X-Men go into the public domain.
Until then, you'll just have to trust me.
Update: Now cross-posted at Alas, a blog. Thanks, Amp!
_______________
* Incidentally, the consequence of this argument isn't necessarily a socialist economy, which I wouldn't actually favor; there are extremely strong pragmatic grounds for favoring the retention of a capitalist system and, as part of that, a robust set of property rights. It's just that such a system should be supplemented by a far stronger redistributory state (in a tax-for-social-goods-sense) than is true of the U.S. today; and also (and this is almost as important) that the public culture and debate should recognize the preponderance of luck in the outcomes of economic lives.
** What a vile phrase.
*** Although in fact I think that Wolverine's blockbuster status has far more to do with Chris Claremont, and to a slightly lesser extent Frank Miller, than it does Herb Trimpe or Wolverine's creators -- although Claremont and Miller have even less legal claim than do Wolverine's originators.
**** Except the bible, of course, which wanted everything reset to zero every fifty years to ensure justice (Leviticus 25:13). What socialist commie pinko wrote that, eh?
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