High School Girl Makes Massive Cancer Tech Breakthrough while Media Focuses on Santorum (literally and figuratively)

I spotted this story on Engadget back in December (original here: www.engadget.com/2011/12/08/high-school-senior-kills-canc... ) but have intentionally been sitting on it to see if the mainstream news would run with the story or just continue covering the same old Santorum (I'm not just referring to the Republican). Typically, this amazing breakthrough ("the Swiss Army Knife" of cancer treatments) has not become a major story in the news. Cancer kills more people in the US than terrorism kills around the world. I lost a college friend and a grand father to it, I know three people fighting it now, the current statistics say that one-in-three adults in the western world will get cancer. Yet the USG spends hundreds of billions (even trillions) of dollars fighting terrorism while cancer gets infinitely less and the press does nothing but exploit this focus on war and ignores the more realistic threats to American life (along with it's hopefully treatments). Why are America's priorities so screwed up?

China starts the Second Space Race without US

Found this via UnknownSkywalker:



According to an article at physorg.com, China is beginning work on a space station starting with this first module.  Now, this doesn't mean China will be conquering space before Christmas.  This first module is just for practice. The real station goes up in 3 parts starting in 2020.

Yeah, it seems like a pretty unimpressive start to the Second Space Race, but hey, the First Space Race started with the Russians tossing a 2-foot-diameter mirror ball into orbit in 1958. Consider that the first serious attempt at a space station, Skylab, wasn't until the 70s and Mir didn't go up until the 80s.  So, 8 years to launch the first third of a space station is actually pretty damn fast.

Of course, Americans won't have anything in space in 8 years because we put our economy in front of the advancement of human kind and, apparently, the spread of communism into space.

I swear, if, in 2030, we've got Space Commies to deal with, I'm blaming Obama!!

My own sense is that we should err on the side of telling the truth, even when it’s inconvenient or when it makes our lives—or the business of government—more complicated. And that people who tell the truth should at the very least not be denigrated. That’s something I learned when I was young, and that I tried to impart to my three boys when they were growing up. As Albert Einstein is reported to have said long ago, “The search for truth implies a duty. One must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.” And shouldn’t news organizations be defending WikiLeaks and doing some soul-searching of their own about why they aren’t devoting more resources to the search for the truth? Why is it that the National Enquirer and Internet blogs sometimes seem better than they are at finding out what’s really going on?

My own sense is that we should err on the side of telling the truth, even when it’s inconvenient or when it makes our lives—or the business of government—more complicated. And that people who tell the truth should at the very least not be denigrated. That’s something I learned when I was young, and that I tried to impart to my three boys when they were growing up. As Albert Einstein is reported to have said long ago, “The search for truth implies a duty. One must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.”

And shouldn’t news organizations be defending WikiLeaks and doing some soul-searching of their own about why they aren’t devoting more resources to the search for the truth? Why is it that the National Enquirer and Internet blogs sometimes seem better than they are at finding out what’s really going on?

NationalJournal.com - To Tell the Truth - Thursday, December 2, 2010

This is a great little piece on our priorities during a time when a website is made to seem like the greatest threat to democracy. 

Seriously—WikiLeaks a terrorist organization??

W.T.F.