Probably that he'll be on chemotheraphy. Am I right, toast? All the chemotheraphy cases I have heard resulted in extended life but at near-constant sickness/lethargy.
From what I understand, it's near-constant sickness and lethargy DURING the chemotherapy treatments. My aunt had breast cancer and she underwent chemotherapy. It really sucked during chemotherapy, but she beat the cancer and now I get to see her several times a year. She's now in perfect health and always looks very healthy.
He could just smoke some weed after each chemo session? Chemotherapy patients are always touted as potential medicinal marijuana beneficiaries in combating that sickness/lethargy/whatever. And it's all natural, so maybe his batshit insane parents will be mollified!
I don't think that that means that he'll ONLY live five more years. I think what it means is that, of all the people who have had this cancer and have been treated, 90% of those patients were STILL alive five years later. It doesn't mean that they drop dead after five years, it just means that, after five years of no cancer, it's pretty safe to say that they're cured.
(CNN) -- A Minnesota judge issued an arrest warrant Tuesday for the mother of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy who is refusing treatment for his cancer, after neither she nor the boy showed up for a court appearance.
"It is imperative that Daniel receive the attention of an oncologist as soon as possible," wrote Brown County District Judge John R. Rodenberg in an order to "apprehend and detain."
"His best interests require it," Rodenberg wrote.
The judge had scheduled the hearing to review an X-ray ordered by the court to assess whether Daniel's Hodgkin's lymphoma was worsening.
The boy's father, Anthony Hauser, did appear at Tuesday's hearing, where he testified that he last saw the mother, Colleen Hauser, at the family's farm on Monday night, when she told him she was going to leave "for a time."
He said he did not know where they had gone.
During the hearing, Dr. James Joyce testified he saw the boy and his mother on Monday at his office. He said the boy had "an enlarged lymph node" near his right clavicle and that the X-ray showed "significant worsening" of a mass in his chest. In addition, the boy complained of "extreme pain" at the site where a port had been inserted to deliver an initial round of chemotherapy. The pain was "most likely caused by the tumor or mass pressing on the port," testified Joyce, who called the X-ray "fairly dramatic" evidence that the cancer was worsening.
Rodenberg ordered custody of the boy transferred to Brown County Family Services and issued a contempt order for the mother.
A call to the family's home in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, was not immediately returned.
Philip Elbert, Daniel's court-appointed attorney, said he considers his client to have a "diminished capacity" for reasons of his age and the illness and that he believes Daniel should be treated by a cancer specialist.
Elbert added that he does not believe Daniel -- who, according to court papers, cannot read -- has enough information to make an informed decision regarding his treatment.
Daniel's symptoms of persistent cough, fatigue and swollen lymph nodes were diagnosed in January as Hodgkins lymphoma. In February, the cancer responded well to an initial round of chemotherapy, but the treatment's side effects concerned the boy's parents, who then opted not to pursue further chemo and instead sought other medical opinions.
Court documents show that the doctors estimated the boy's chance of 5-year remission with more chemotherapy and possibly radiation at 80 percent to 95 percent.
But the family opted for a holistic medical treatment based upon Native American healing practices called Nemenhah and rejected further treatment.
In a written statement issued last week, an attorney for the parents said they "believe that the injection of chemotherapy into Danny Hauser amounts to an assault upon his body, and torture when it occurs over a long period of time."
Medical ethicists say parents generally have a legal right to make decisions for their children, but there is a limit.
"You have a right, but not an open-ended right," Arthur Caplan, director of the center for bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said last week. "You can't compromise the life of your child."
At least they clarified what that 5 years thing means. He has a 80-95% chance of being completely cured after 5 years of chemo and maybe some radiation. So, he got a little ill and the mom and dad decided to let him die. That's some great parenting right there. Every day they waste the kid's chances of survival go down. I hate people so much.
The sad thing is that these people don't know they're hurting their kid. They've been brainwashed by this new age shit into thinking that chemo is bad and that "natural" remedies are good. They honestly believe they are doing the right thing here, and that's what makes this so pitiful.
These new age cults are really frightening. I've read up a little on these holistic remedies, and the hatred and misinformation they spread about conventional medicine is abundant. I was reading this one website earlier supporting this family. They were making some big argument about how chemotherapy has never cured a single case of cancer. Which as we all know is absolutely ridiculous because many of us probably have a friend or family member who went through it and came out cured.
Anyway, this is why the government should sterilize children before they hit puberty and require young adults and married couples to take aptitude tests before having the procedure reversed.
to me, "natural"=impure cocktail of chemicals with a small amount of the desired chemical in it (like tree-brak soup vs aspirin). If the desired chemical can be taken without all of the extra chemicals associated with the production of the desired one, isn't that "purer"?
WASHINGTON -- Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings spent $24,730 in taxpayer money last year to lease a 2008 luxury Lexus hybrid sedan. Ohio Rep. Michael Turner expensed a $1,435 digital camera. Eni Faleomavaega, the House delegate from American Samoa, bought two 46-inch Sony TVs.
The expenditures were legal, properly accounted for and drawn from allowances the U.S. government grants to lawmakers. Equipment purchased with office expense accounts must be returned to the House or the federal General Services Administration when a lawmaker leaves office.
But as British politicians come under widening scorn for spending public money on everything from candy bars to moat-dredging, an examination of U.S. lawmakers' expense claims shows Washington's elected officials have also used public funds for eye-catching purchases.
U.S. politicians, unlike their counterparts in Great Britain, can't bill taxpayers for personal living expenses. The U.S. Treasury gives them an allowance to cover "official and representational expenses," according to congressional rules, and the lawmakers enjoy a fair amount of discretion in how they use the funds.
The Senate and House release volumes of the reimbursement requests for these allowances, but do not make them available electronically. A Wall Street Journal review of thousands of pages of these records for 2008 expenses showed most lawmaker spending flowed to areas such as staff salaries, travel, office rent and supplies, and printing and mailing.
But it also turned up spending on an array of products, from the car leases and electronics to a high-end laptop computer and $22 cellphone holder. Rep. Howard Berman expensed $84,000 worth of personalized calendars, printed by the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, for his constituents. A spokeswoman for Mr. Berman, a California Democrat, didn't return requests for comment.
The records show that some lawmakers spent heavily in the final months of the year to draw down allowances before the end of December -- a time when U.S. households were paring their budgets and lawmakers were criticizing Detroit auto executives for taking private aircraft to Washington to plead their case for taxpayer funding.
Rep. Hastings, a Democrat, and Rep. Turner, a Republican, made their purchases in the third quarter. Rep. Faleomavaega, a Democrat, bought the TVs for $1,473 apiece in mid-November. Spokespeople for the three didn't return requests for comment.
House members get a government expense allowance of $1.3 million to $1.9 million a year. Senators get $2.9 million to $4.5 million. The disparity is based on several factors, with lawmakers whose home states are far from Washington, for example, typically receiving more to cover their higher travel expenses.
If lawmakers don't seek reimbursement for all of their allowance money for the year, the remainder doesn't roll over to the next year, but stays with the Treasury. The review showed that the increased year-end spending went not only toward equipment but also to fund year-end "bonuses" to aides. The average House aide earned 17% more in the fourth quarter of the year, when the bonuses were paid, than in previous quarters, according to an earlier Journal analysis. Payments ranged from a few hundred dollars to $14,000.
The current system of governing lawmaker expenses was designed to bring the system greater transparency and public accountability. Scandals over congressional mismanagement -- including penalty-free overdrafts at the House bank and spending abuses at the Congressional post office -- led to new House rules in 1996 that consolidated lawmakers' various expense accounts into a single allowance.
Even so, the accounts aren't easy to view or parse. House lawmakers submit receipts and records to the chief administrative officer, who publishes a statement each quarter that runs more than 3,000 pages. Each member's expense ledger takes up about six pages and includes a short description of each expense, its amount and the date incurred. The Senate publishes two volumes every six months, with descriptions that are less detailed than those published by the House.
Members of the public can request specific receipts, but lawmakers aren't required to provide them. Officials said they are exploring the possibility of publishing the information electronically but have no immediate plans to do so.
"This information is not widely available to the public," said Steve Ellis, vice president of the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense. "This is stuff that every constituent should be able to know."
The House and Senate administrators can deny reimbursement if they deem an expense request to be inappropriate. Jeff Ventura, spokesman for House chief administrative officer Daniel Beard, said no formal records are kept on the number of claims deemed inappropriate, but that such instances are rare. The Senate operates similarly.
Staff salaries are the largest cost in most members' budgets, according to published details. Travel is another big cost center, with many lawmakers claiming funds for commercial air or train travel to and from their district, and for mileage on their cars or personal planes while they are there.
Around 100 lawmakers lease cars using their official allowances. The majority lease American cars. Sport-utility vehicles, such as Ford Escapes and Chevy Tahoes, are among the most popular choices.
The fourth-quarter congressional expense records, bound in three thick beige-colored volumes, show that Rep. Rodney Alexander of Louisiana paid $20,000 for a 2009 lease on a Toyota Highlander, a hybrid SUV. Mr. Alexander said in an interview that the vehicle was for his state director's official business. The Highlander was appropriate, he said, given the size of his district and House rules setting fuel-efficiency standards for leased vehicles. "We have a large district, the largest in Louisiana," he said. "We didn't want to lease a bicycle for him to ride on."
Other expenses included five-figure printing bills. Rahm Emanuel, who resigned from his Illinois congressional seat in January to become President Barack Obama's chief of staff, recorded a $33,000 printing expense in the fourth quarter. An aide to Mr. Emanuel said it was for an official mailing sent to every household in his district.
The records show several examples of spending on high-end electronics.
Rep. William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat, spent $2,793 on a Panasonic Toughbook laptop, which is marketed to the military, in September, about three months before he lost his re-election bid in a December runoff. A lawyer for Mr. Jefferson, who is facing an unrelated federal bribery trial, declined to comment.
Some members detail small expenses. The office of Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Pennsylvania Democrat, described a $22 expenditure on a Liz Claiborne cellphone pouch. A spokeswoman for Mr. Fattah said it is standard for staff members to get a holder with their phone and that the pouch was "nothing fancy."
Other members itemized spending on everything from bottled water to pest control and office plants. The accounts of former Rep. Darlene Hooley, an Oregon Democrat, listed an $81 payment to the Plant Tender.
Ms. Hooley, who retired at the end of the last Congress, said her office had "tried to be as transparent as possible and report every little thing." Her expenses "would look a whole lot better if other people had done the same thing," she added.
Other expense explanations bore few details. The accounts for Rep. Tim Mahoney, a Florida Democrat, include an $11,000 payment on his House-issued credit card to cover airfare for him and an aide incurred in September, with the line "A/F Mahoney/Mitchell."
Mr. Mahoney, who lost his re-election bid, said in an interview that the line represented 13 trips over a two-month period. He is required to submit receipts for the card to the House, which decides how much information to publish. "As Congressman, I took every precaution to make sure that my office was fully in compliance with all ethics rules and financial reporting regulations," Mr. Mahoney added.
Many lawmakers don't spend their full allocation. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) had about $57,000 remaining in her budget at the end of 2008. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) had $228,000.
It was a reference to the fact that Twitter messages are only 140 characters, and I've read articles before about how people are gradually preferring shorter articles and news bites, and Twitter is the epitome of this movement.
Why is that a bad thing? Don't hate on twitter because of some principled stand against certain new developments in communication, hate it because of all the hipster douchebags who use it (present company excluded)
Don't tell me what I can and can't irrationally hate!
Edit: But seriously, news agencies across the country thought it was vitally important to write about the race to 1 million Twitter followers between Ashton Kutcher and CNN. That was really stupid, I think I'm justified in hating that.
I personally don't really like Twitter, and don't think I'll be having a Twitter account on the near future (note how I don't say never). However, I see where Ryan is getting at: it really feels to me like people's language skills (and hence a bunch of other analytical skills, too) are steadily decreasing, and Twitter is a confirmation of this trend.
I can understand the supposed innovation of limiting everyone's updates to 150 (140?) characters, because honestly normal folks don't have time to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of each of their friend's current life situations. Yet, at the same time, I hate how it makes a bunch of people inclined to consume shorter and shorter pieces of information.
And about what mario said, well, while it's generally true that media writes about what people want to read, you've got to admit that it's a pretty idiotic subject.
I'll give twitter a pass, the same way I skipped on myspace, and facebook, and the same way I'll ignore every other frivolous trend I don't care about. I don't need such distractions in my day. I have more things to occupy my time than I can quite find time for already.
I like Facebook, it helps me keep in touch with old friends from different schools and times in my life. And, I use it to talk Asian politics and economics with a small circle of different friends I wouldn't have really talked to in the first place.
I can understand the supposed innovation of limiting everyone's updates to 150 (140?) characters, because honestly normal folks don't have time to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of each of their friend's current life situations. Yet, at the same time, I hate how it makes a bunch of people inclined to consume shorter and shorter pieces of information.
Twitter's 140 character limit is not an innovation, it's a necessity. The service was originally designed to be updatable via text messages, and the SMS protocol is capped at 160 characters. The remaining 20 characters are to accommodate the user's own handle when the message appears in someone else's phone as a text message.
That said, I appreciate the limitation in the same way I appreciate the strictness of haiku, or Dinosaur Comics. If you don't use asinine Internet abbreviations, it forces you to choose your phrasing wisely in order to get a point across in a concise manner that still properly conveys what you're trying to express.
Twitter Inc. users across China reported that the popular networking service appeared to be blocked Tuesday, two days ahead of the sensitive 20th anniversary of the military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square.
If the site is being blocked by government censors, as many users suspect, it would mark the first time that Twitter has been widely inaccessible to users in China.
The so-called microblogging service, which garnered attention domestically during the immediate aftermath of last year's earthquake in Sichuan, hasn't previously been subject to restrictions in China. As a result, a number of prominent Chinese activists use Twitter regularly, either under their own names or using aliases.
Still, it's often difficult to tell whether a Web site has been purposely blocked by Chinese authorities, if other technical problems are to blame, or if services are blocked only in certain areas.
Officials at the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, China's main media regulator, couldn't be reached late Tuesday, when word of the outages first spread. Chinese regulators in the past have declined to comment on potential stoppages.
A Twitter spokeswoman didn't have an immediate comment and couldn't confirm whether the service was blocked in China.
Sites that include large amounts of user-generated content are intermittently unavailable to users in China, especially around important government meetings or anniversaries. YouTube, Google Inc.'s video-sharing site, has been blocked for several weeks in China and remains so, a Google spokesman said Tuesday.
Some users said it was still possible to use Twitter through certain software applications, such as Seesmic, that allow users to send and receive messages without directly using the Twitter.com Web site. But users trying to access their Twitter accounts through other programs said they encountered problems. Fanfou.com, a popular domestic site that is similar to Twitter, appeared to be functioning normally on Tuesday.
Twitter has given the Internet-savvy in China another new platform to voice complaints and race ahead of state-controlled news media platforms. The development of Internet channels has pressured the government to respond to news faster.
Also Tuesday, a magazine published by the official Xinhua news service called on local governments to respond more quickly and develop a greater online presence to respond to popular online movements.
The Chinese government considers the 1989 pro-democracy protests to have been a counterrevolutionary riot, and further discussion of them remains taboo. The police presence around Tiananmen Square has increased, and on Tuesday the Foreign Correspondents Club of China issued a statement protesting restrictions on journalists attempting to cover the anniversary.
In recent weeks, activist groups have reported a tightening of security in China, linking it to the coming anniversary. Human Rights in China, based in New York, said that authorities detained Wu Gaoxing, a free-lance writer from Taizhou in Zhejiang province, who co-wrote an open letter to China's top leaders recently asking for equal rights and social security for ex-Tiananmen Square prisoners. China's Ministry of Public Security deferred requests for comment to Taizhou's local public security bureau, which declined to answer any questions.
Word of Twitter's outage became a popular subject on the service's site Tuesday. A number of users adopted an obscene variant of a hash tag derived from the acronym for the Great Firewall, the nickname for China's Internet censorship efforts. Hash tags are used on Twitter to mark and link to similar posts.
The 20 year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is coming up tomorrow. To commemorate, the government has kept Youtube, Amnesty International, and now Twitter blocked to make sure that absolutely no one mentions anything about it.
Comments
From the actual court documents.
Also, from the Mayo Clinic.
I hate you all.
Mother, son missing in forced chemotherapy case
These new age cults are really frightening. I've read up a little on these holistic remedies, and the hatred and misinformation they spread about conventional medicine is abundant. I was reading this one website earlier supporting this family. They were making some big argument about how chemotherapy has never cured a single case of cancer. Which as we all know is absolutely ridiculous because many of us probably have a friend or family member who went through it and came out cured.
Anyway, this is why the government should sterilize children before they hit puberty and require young adults and married couples to take aptitude tests before having the procedure reversed.
Lawmakers Bill Taxpayers For TVs, Cameras, Lexus
kthxbai
Edit: But seriously, news agencies across the country thought it was vitally important to write about the race to 1 million Twitter followers between Ashton Kutcher and CNN. That was really stupid, I think I'm justified in hating that.
I can understand the supposed innovation of limiting everyone's updates to 150 (140?) characters, because honestly normal folks don't have time to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of each of their friend's current life situations. Yet, at the same time, I hate how it makes a bunch of people inclined to consume shorter and shorter pieces of information.
And about what mario said, well, while it's generally true that media writes about what people want to read, you've got to admit that it's a pretty idiotic subject.
*GASP*
Facebook makes internet stalking easy. I remember when it used to be HARD to find people on the internet. Hmph.
On a somewhat related note, I found my boyfriend's cousin's twitter on accident while trying to find his myspace page via google. Google is amazing.
Twitter's 140 character limit is not an innovation, it's a necessity. The service was originally designed to be updatable via text messages, and the SMS protocol is capped at 160 characters. The remaining 20 characters are to accommodate the user's own handle when the message appears in someone else's phone as a text message.
That said, I appreciate the limitation in the same way I appreciate the strictness of haiku, or Dinosaur Comics. If you don't use asinine Internet abbreviations, it forces you to choose your phrasing wisely in order to get a point across in a concise manner that still properly conveys what you're trying to express.
Twitter Service Blocked in China, Users Say
The 20 year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is coming up tomorrow. To commemorate, the government has kept Youtube, Amnesty International, and now Twitter blocked to make sure that absolutely no one mentions anything about it.