real solution #8 had already been tried, i guess.

i mean, what's the relative success rate of stem cells v chemo?

you're a lot better off with stem cells.....

when i think of stem cell research, though, i don't think of cancer treatments, i think of organ and tissue growth. in the end, it might be easier to grow and implant new organs than to try and get the body to clear the cancer out on it's own, but even beyond that the bioengineering applications of stem cells are enormous.

as has been pointed out here on numerous occasions, i lost my dad to cancer in mid 2013. if you haven't already lost somebody to cancer, you will - that's as statistically sure a statement as there is. and, if you have, you know the desperation that sets in near the end.

for my dad, it was mushrooms. my sister had been feeding him some trash about magic mushrooms (not those kinds.) from japan that could cure cancer. he was near death; what can you lose from trying mushrooms? but i'm the more science-y one of the two of us, so he ran it by me first, and i ended up having to talk him out of eating something that was just going to put dangerous stress on his liver. first, do no harm.

so, when you see headlines that reference things like "untested stem cell therapies", you need to be careful with them on two levels. yes, it may be true that the success rate is kind of shady at this point, but that's not the same thing as writing it off as magic beans, like you would with cancer-curing mushrooms. and, i think the disconnect is in not understanding what you're doing - if you're just holding still and taking a needle, what's the difference between accepting the syringe or popping a cap?

the difference is that there is no known mechanism whereby any unknown agent could survive digestion long enough to defeat cancer cells, whereas injecting somebody with antibodies is a tried and tested method to kill all kinds of things. see, and this is the thing about immunotherapy - it is eminently plausible that it will eventually work once we finally get it right.

is it there yet? adamantly not.

but, there's a huge difference between interpreting success rates in the context of a plausible work in progress, and interpreting them in the context of some kind of sympathetic magic - namely, the science under the hood.

i understand that it doesn't always work, but you have to understand that sometimes it does work, and spectacularly well when it does. and, that means we need more research to try and get it to work more often, not less.

so, if you find yourself nearly dead, should you spend $100,000 on immunotherapy injections?

well, it's a lot better than eating magic mushrooms.

if you can, and you want to live, i'd say you should - yes.

so, what are they actually doing?

it seems like they're centralizing funding decisions into the minister's office. these networks had a lot of autonomy; that was kind of the point. science operates best on peer review.

by pulling funding decisions directly into the minister's office, they'll be able to approve or deny projects based on their political interests.

and, we'll see what happens to stem-cell research in the medium term.

https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/government-of-canada-launches-new-research-fund-to-push-beyond-the-frontiers-of-canadian-science-702060001.html

in the mean time, canadians are going to have to get used to things like ending sex ed, and ending funding for stem cell research, as our government is overrun by special interest groups pushing their religious dogma from the top down.

we're going to have to rebuild a left-populist movement from the ground up.

and, it could take a while before we have the numbers to do it.

canada is slowly becoming a very religious and very conservative society.

there is no future for publicly-funded science here; the populace won't support it.

this is something that he had a strong mandate to stop. but, it's pretty abundantly clear that the government operates everything through a pr filter, and it clearly thinks science is unpopular. and, with the way the society is collapsing right now, he might be right.

i've pointed this out a few times before - there isn't an answer to this in the spectrum. the greens might be a little better one day, but they don't exist right now, and the dying ndp is probably even more focused on satisfying the religious and even less science-friendly. when we can't even count on the other parties to be less anti-science than the conservatives, we've really hit a cultural cross-roads.

the reality is that canada is in for a long period of decline.

it's best to try and get out.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-trudeau-wants-canada-to-be-a-global-leader-in-science-so-why-is-he/

i think the example i used in the past was mind-control ray guns from aliens.

let's say the president decides she wants to pass a law that says that everybody has to wear tinfoil hats, to protect us from alien  russian mind-control weapons. i think we can all intuitively understand that this ought to be unconstitutional. but, how do you win the case?

a naive response may be to argue against the premise: you're going to want to prove in court, somehow, that there aren't really russian mind-control weapons. and, you will no doubt be flabbergasted when you lose, as the court really has no ability to interpret national security documents, or otherwise create presidential policy. if the president thinks there are russian mind-control weapons and we need to be protected from them, that is his prerogative.

if you want to actually win the case, you have to start by conceding the point and rather make an argument that there is no evidence that tinfoil hats are effective in shielding against russian mind-control weapons.

it's a function of the separation of powers. and, as crazy as it seems, there's a reason that the president is the president, and the supreme court isn't. courts simply don't have executive power.

i can't remember the exact argument the democrats tried to use with the travel ban, but it was instantly clear that trying to get it struck down because it was discriminatory against muslims was a bad legal argument, and wasn't going to work. i've been through this on this page a couple of times in the last few years; it's up there. was it early 2017? everything's dated.

there were two better arguments. the best argument would be to show that it wasn't a rational means to carry out the policy objective. in order to do that, you'd have to concede that the president would have the right to ban muslims if he really thought it was a national security issue (which, frankly, is not actually even controversial - of course he would), but rather show that a blanket travel ban wasn't going to actually work. broadly speaking, the president has almost no check on his authority in terms of what he decides is valid policy. the courts really have no jurisdiction in setting policy. what the courts can do is step in and declare that a specific action is or is not a rational means to actualize an actual policy. and, i'd like to see the administration argue that a blanket travel ban from iran is going to eliminate a terrorist threat that broadly doesn't even exist.

the other argument is that it was overly broad. again: you would have to concede the presidential right to ban muslims, but then argue that non-muslims would get stuck in a blanket travel ban, and the law should be struck down for that reason. and, i know that people aren't going to like it, but the actual fact is that it's the superior legal argument. that would have actually worked.

but, the reaction was never legal, it was always political; the arguments presented to the court were never serious legal arguments, and never had a serious chance. i have no training in american law, and i could very easily disassemble them as without merit. these arguments were meant to run on talk shows, and to generate rallies, not to win an actual case in an actual court.

they would string me up a tree in a jiffy, if they could.

it was the same thing with the travel ban.

it's not my country, of course. but, when trump said he was going to put a blanket ban on travel from a country like iran, i didn't say "what about about the muslims?", i pointed out that it's unfortunate that atheists and secularists are going to lose an avenue out of the country, and otherwise have their travel rights restricted.


it was overly broad alright - because there are plenty of people from these countries that aren't muslims or even religionists at all.

i know it's an old argument often used disingenuously, for example frequently by the israelis, but in the precise situation of raqqa, there is no such thing as an innocent civilian, due to the support that the population was providing to isis. see, and this is actually a big part of the reason i changed my opinion about this.

i don't normally support imperialist wars, you know. i was initially opposed to this.

it's not like i didn't realize how gruesome this was going to be - and it was in fact my argument against it. religious crazies tend to regenerate, and this particular religion is tribal, and operates on revenge and blood lust. so, to win this war, you'd have to blow up entire cities - you'd have to kill sons to stop them from growing into fighters, and women to stop them from breeding. i disagreed with the experts: we could do it, but is it worth the cost? then, as more evidence mounted that isis was indiscernible from the general population, i realized that they had to be slaughtered - that the cities were going to have to crumble. this wasn't a group of extremists to contain, it was becoming a popular movement - and that's how fascist ideologies spread.

i repeat: the high civilian toll necessary to wage this war was initially the argument against it, but as the nature of the civilian population's sympathies became more readily apparent, the high civilian toll became the strategic objective. if you support fascism, you're a fascist; if you support isis, you become it. it's simply too brutal to allow for sympathies around, and any growing level of sympathy for it had to be eradicated along with it.

and, i've been absolutely clear about this - i am absolutely at war against islam, which i consider to be a fascist ideology with no redeeming qualities whatsoever; the only good fascist is a dead one. to me, the tragedy is not about dead muslims, but about the secularists and atheists that are getting caught up in it; fundamentalist muslims are valid targets here, it's the secularists that are valid civilians and valid refugees. it would be a nice to find a way to avoid killing so many of the enemy's victims.

so, this comes up against a difficult definitional problem in trying to separate between the people doing the literal fighting and a civilian population that is actively aiding and abetting it. and, so, i don't mine giving these civilians this choice: convert or die.

but, my point is that it's a tricky situation, legally. it's not clear that these are really civilian populations, or that they ought to be protected under the law - and, if they are, there is a strong argument that this ought to be an exception to it, given the support they're providing.

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/05/syria-airstrikes-isis-united-states/