5 libertarian oligarchs who made fortunes off the government they want to destroy

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The cult of the libertarian-minded ultra-weatlhy would make an intriguing anthropological case study. But it would be a case study with a twist: its research subjects increasingly control our economy, our politics, and even our personal lives.

Were dealing with a cohort of highly fortunate, highly privileged and highly unaware individuals who have been inappropriately lionized by society. That lionization has led them to believe that their wealth and accomplishments are their own doing, rather than the fruits of collaborative effort effort which in many cases was only made possible through government support.

But instead of thanking the government and the taxpayers for their good fortune, theyve allowed their own good press to go to their heads. And theyre biting the hand that feeds them, attempting to shut down the system of taxpayer support and government action which created their world.

Our money-obsessed society gives them far more praise and then they deserve. Our corrupted political system gives them far more influence than we deserve. And, slowly but surely, they are now turning their considerable resources to dismantling governments role in society.

Call them the cool tycoons of libertarianism. They have neat ideas (when theyre not talking about government or the economy, that is). They have neat toys and neat houses. But what they would do to our society isnt neat at all.

Here are five of them.

1. Tom Perkins

Perkins has already received well more than his deserved 15 minutes of fame. But, while hes been appropriately reviled for his infamous Kristallnacht comment, comparing the treatment of Americas 1% to that of Jews in Nazi Germany, too few people have taken to task for the depth of his ignorance on economic issues.

That ignorance was in full display when he went on Bloomberg television to apologize for his Nazi reference an occasion in which he spent far more time defending his ugly worldview than he did apologizing.

In his original comments, Perkins compared the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the rich with Nazi persecution of Jews. But as we firstreported, much of the persecution which triggered Perkins outrage involved his ex-wifes hedges; it was a one-paragraph item in the San Francisco Chronicle criticizing author Danielle Steeles landscaping. It wasnt a progressive critique; it was an aesthetic one.

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5 libertarian oligarchs who made fortunes off the government they want to destroy

Castaway now staying in hotel in Marshall Islands

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MAJURO, Marshall Islands, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- Jose Salvador Alvarenga, who says he survived 13 months at sea before washing up in the Marshall Islands, moved from a hospital to a hotel Friday.

Alvarenga was hospitalized Thursday, CNN reported. But he was released to a hotel in Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands, a day later.

Dr. Franklin House, a retired U.S. physician, told CNN Alvarenga may be suffering from scurvy. House, who is not the doctor in charge of Alvarenga's treatment, said the man has complained of pain in his kidneys since he arrived in the islands.

Alvarenga, a Dominican who had been living illegally in Mexico, said he went fishing for shark in late 2012 with another man. They got caught in a storm and then lost their engines, and he survived for 13 months on a diet of raw fish and turtles.

The other man, Ezequiel Cordova, 23, refused to eat raw meat and died after about four weeks, Alvarenga said.

Officials say Alvarenga's story, improbable as it sounds, appears to be true. Cordova disappeared in December 2012.

Cordova's mother said she wants to talk to Alvarenga to find out exactly what happened.

"My brother was kind, he was responsible for my mother," Cordova's brother told CNN. "In fact, he worked in the sea because of her. He wanted to improve himself. He didn't want to be poor, like us."

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Castaway now staying in hotel in Marshall Islands

Marshall Islands castaway released from hospital after second admission

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MAJURO, Marshall Islands, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- The castaway who landed on a beach in the Marshall Islands after reportedly 13 months lost at sea was released from a hospital Friday, after his second medical admission within a week.

37-year-old Jose Salvador Alvarenga landed his badly damaged boat in a remote area of the Marshall Islands on January 30 with a story of having been lost at sea since December 2012, and having survived by eating birds, turtles, fish, and small sharks, and drinking rain water -- and occasionally -- his own urine.

Doctors who examined Alvarenga initially found him to be in relatively good health except for swelling in his legs. He was admitted and released from a hospital within 24 hours earlier in the week. On Thursday, Alvarenga was readmitted to a hospital when his health deteriorated, with doctors reporting he was severely dehydrated, low on vitamins, and his legs still swollen. It seems the castaway's health improved Friday, as he was released from the hospital and is now staying at a hotel in the capital city of Majuro.

At the time of his disappearance, Alvarenga, who is a native of El Salvador, worked for a Mexican company and has expressed a desire to be repatriated to Mexico. Because Mexico has no diplomatic presence in the Marshall Islands, the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs directed embassy personnel posted to the Philippines to travel to Majuro "to learn directly about the case." On Wednesday, Deputy Chief of Mission Christian Clay Mendoza from the Mexican Embassy in Manila arrived in Majuro to address Alvarenga's repatriation request.

On December 21, 2012, Alvarenga said he and a 15-year-old fisherman named Ezekiel set off for a one-day fishing trip when the motor on their 24-foot boat stopped working. They then drifted into the Pacific Ocean. Ezekiel died four months later. Alvarenga said he survived off of birds, turtles, fish, and small sharks. He said he drank rain water and occasionally drank his own urine to quench his thirst.

[CNN] [Daily Mail]

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Marshall Islands castaway released from hospital after second admission

Islands of inspiration

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Outside the Lee Ufan Museum, Naoshima. Photo: Getty Images

An unlikely art trail in a remote corner of Japan has Danielle Demetriou captivated.

I am standing in a dark, windowless room resonating with the sound of a human heartbeat, each pulsating thump accompanied by a strobe-like flicker of light.

This is not because I am in the bowels of an underground nightclub in Tokyo. Nor am I detained in a mental institute (despite the presence of a woman in a clinical white outfit just the other side of the door).

Giant pumpkin at Shikoku Island. Photo: AFP

My location is a wooden building on a forest-fringed beach on a tiny fishing island in Japan - and I am inside a modern art installation.

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The appreciation of contemporary art usually takes place in a gallery. But things are done differently in Japan - in particular, in the Seto Inland Sea area. Scattered with 3000-plus islands, this idyllic expanse of blue water is dubbed the Mediterranean of Japan on account of its temperate climate and olive trees.

It is in this region, about 640 kilometres south of Tokyo, that hundreds of artworks - the heartbeat house included - have been installed across rice fields, beaches, shrines and old houses as part of an unusual project to revitalise ageing communities.

Benesse House Art. Photo: Inside Japan Tours

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Islands of inspiration

Marshall Islands castaway appears weaker in public appearance

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand The Salvadoran man who says he spent more than a year drifting across the Pacific Ocean before finally making landfall in the Marshall Islands last week made a brief public appearance Thursday looking much weaker than he did earlier in the week.

Jose Salvador Alvarenga greeted about 50 officials and media at the Marshall Islands Resort hotel where he is staying. Sporting a haircut and a shave, he was assisted into the room by two people while others stood by ready to help.

Speaking in a low voice, he thanked the government and his friends for their help, but declined to take questions. The Associated Press listened into the meeting by cellphone and had it described by an official who declined to be named because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media.

"He walked in but he needed a lot of help," the official said. "I would say he made an impression that is really now far more consistent with the journey he said he made. He was much weaker, extremely tired looking, much less animated and was speaking extremely slowly. He looked exhausted, frankly. Like someone who has run two or three marathons."

Alvarenga's spritely appearance Monday when he greeted hundreds of well-wishers in the capital Majuro after making landfall last week on a remote atoll had many questioning his story. He earlier told officials he left Mexico in late 2012 with another fisherman, who later died, for a day of shark fishing when a storm threw them off course and they began drifting.

Officials at the meeting said Alvarenga needed to be taken back to the hospital for more medical checks and it would likely be three or four days before he was fit enough to travel back to El Salvador.

Also speaking at the meeting was the Marshall Islands foreign minister, Phillip Muller, and Mexican diplomat Chris Clay Mendoza.

Muller said the Marshall Islands was happy to live up to its humanitarian obligations and do everything it could to assist Alvarenga.

Clay Mendoza said he'd immediately departed from Manila for the Marshall Islands after initial reports indicated Alvarenga was a Mexican national. He said he was now assisting El Salvador in its efforts to repatriate Alvarenga.

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Marshall Islands castaway appears weaker in public appearance

New disease gene discovery sheds light on cause of bone marrow failure

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The study, published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, detected and identified a new disease gene (ERCC6L2). In its normal form, the gene plays a key role in protecting DNA from damaging agents, but when the gene is mutated the cell is not able to protect itself in the normal way.

The research findings suggest that the gene defect and the subsequent DNA damage was the underlying cause of bone marrow failure among the study participants.

Bone marrow failure is a term used for a group of life threatening disorders associated with an inability of the bone marrow to make an adequate number of mature blood cells.

Patients were recruited from all over the world to join an international bone marrow failure registry and researchers used new DNA sequencing technologies to study cases of bone marrow failure with similar clinical features. These included bone marrow failure associated with neurological abnormalities (learning defects and developmental delay), and patients whose parents were first cousins.

The findings mean it is now possible to carry out a reliable genetic test (including antenatal testing) in these families and get an accurate diagnosis. In the long term, with further research, the findings could lead to the development of new treatment for this specific gene defect.

Professor Inderjeet Dokal, Chair of Paediatrics and Child Health at Queen Mary University of London, comments:

"New DNA sequencing technology has enabled us to identify and define a new gene defect which causes a particular type of bone marrow failure. This is a promising finding which we hope one day could lead to finding an effective treatment for this type of gene defect. Clinicians treating patients with bone marrow failure should now include analysis for this gene in their investigation.

"Now we know this research technique works, we plan to carry out further studies to shed more light on the genetic basis of many other cases of bone marrow failure."

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The above story is based on materials provided by Queen Mary, University of London. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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New disease gene discovery sheds light on cause of bone marrow failure

Ranking disease-causal mutations within whole genome sequences

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Researchers from the University of Washington and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology have developed a new method for organizing and prioritizing genetic data. The Combined Annotation-Dependent Depletion, or CADD, method will assist scientists in their search for disease-causing mutation events in human genomes.

The new method is the subject of a paper titled "A general framework for estimating the relative pathogenicity of human genetic variants," published in Nature Genetics.

Current methods of organizing human genetic variation look at just one or a few factors and use only a small subset of the information available. For example, the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements, or ENCODE, catalogs various types of functional elements in human genomes, while sequence conservation looks for similar or identical sequences that have survived across different species through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. CADD brings all of these data together, and more, into one score in order to provide a ranking that helps researchers discern which variants may be linked to disease and which ones may not.

"CADD will substantially improve our ability to identify disease-causal mutations, will continue to get better as genomic databases grow, and is an important analytical advance needed to better exploit the information content of whole-genome sequences in both clinical and research settings," said Gregory M. Cooper, Ph.D., faculty investigator at HudsonAlpha and one of the collaborators on CADD.

The goal in developing the new approach was to take the overwhelming amount of data available and distill it down into a single score that can be more easily evaluated by a researcher or clinician. To accomplish that, CADD compares and contrasts the properties of 15 million genetic variants separating humans from chimpanzees with 15 million simulated variants. Variants observed in humans have survived natural selection, which tends to remove harmful, disease-causing variants, while simulated variants are not exposed to selection. Thus, by comparing observed to simulated variants, CADD is able to identify those properties that make a variant harmful or disease-causing. C scores have been pre-computed for all 8.6 billion possible single nucleotide variants and are freely available for researchers.

"We didn't know what to expect," Cooper said, "but we were pleasantly surprised that CADD was able not only to be applicable to mutations everywhere in the genome but in fact do a substantially better job in nearly every test that we performed than other metrics."

The CADD method is unique from other algorithms in that it assigns scores to mutations anywhere in human genomes, not just the less-than two percent that encode proteins (the "exome"). This unique attribute will be crucial as whole-genome sequencing becomes routine in both clinical and research settings.

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The above story is based on materials provided by HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Health Care Ethics Internship: Reflections by Briana Britton, Santa Clara University Alumna – Video

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Health Care Ethics Internship: Reflections by Briana Britton, Santa Clara University Alumna
Briana Britton, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics Health Care Ethics Intern 2012-13, reflects on her experiences as an intern, in light of Santa Clara Unive...

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Health Care Ethics Internship: Reflections by Briana Britton, Santa Clara University Alumna - Video

Meditation for Valentine’s Day – How To Meditate for Beginners – You Have 4 Minutes – BEXLIFE – Video

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Meditation for Valentine's Day - How To Meditate for Beginners - You Have 4 Minutes - BEXLIFE - Video

Welsh Mountain Medical and Dental Center, Health Care, New Holland, PA – Video

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Welsh Mountain Medical and Dental Center, Health Care, New Holland, PA
http://www.superpages.com/bp/New-Holland-PA/Welsh-Mountain-Medical-Dental-Center-L2497363411.htm?lbp=1 Welsh Mountain Medical Dental Center provides qualit...

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Massachusetts Health-Care Law Improved States Finances, Chicago Fed Reports

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Massachusettss 2006 health-care reform law, which was similar in many respects to the 2010 federal Affordable Care Act, helped improve the financial health of Bay State residents, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

We find that the Massachusetts reform improved financial outcomes across many dimensions: it improved credit scores, reduced delinquencies, lowered the fraction of debt past due, and reduced the incidence of personal bankruptcy, wrote Chicago Fed senior economist Bhashkar Mazumder and University of Notre Dame assistant professor Sarah Miller in a recent working paper.

The 2006 law sometimes called Romneycare after then-Gov. Mitt Romney required residents to buy health insurance, expanded the Massachusetts Medicaid program and mandated many employers offer coverage to their workers. Mr. Mazumder and Ms. Miller, among others, describe it as a model for the controversial 2010 federal law, often called Obamacare after President Barack Obama.

The economists analyzed credit-report data for Massachusetts residents from the Federal Reserve Bank of New Yorks Consumer Credit Panel dataset. The 2006 law, they found, had a number of significant effects: credit scores rose, delinquent debt fell and bankruptcies became less likely. The probability of a person having more than $10,000 in delinquent debt fell by about 21% and the chances of having $5,001 to $10,000 past due fell by about 10%.

The effects of the reform on credit score, personal bankruptcy, and delinquency are most pronounced for those whose credit scores were lower before the reform, but those with higher credit scores (and therefore, better access to credit), experienced a larger relative decline in total debt, they wrote.

The bottom line, according to Mr. Mazumder and Ms. Miller, is that the implications of healthcare reform extend into credit markets and household balance sheets. These results show that health care reform legislation has a strong effect not just on health and the use of health services, but across many measures of household well-being, they wrote.

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Massachusetts Health-Care Law Improved States Finances, Chicago Fed Reports

Native Hawaiian health care provider closing Hilo clinic

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Hawaiis health care system specifically tailored to serving Native Hawaiians is shutting down its primary care clinic in Hilo next month.

Hui Malama Ola Na Oiwis multiple other services, including community outreach, case management, health education and transportation, will continue to operate, but the primary care clinic at 305 Wailuku Drive will close March 8.

Hui Malama Executive Director Michelle M. Hiraishi said Wednesday that the private nonprofits board opted to close the clinic last month after years of struggling with withering finances and a crippling doctor shortage.

Weve been dealing with this, struggling to maintain our clinic, for many, many years, she said. All the community health providers have been facing this kind of struggle.

With an average of 400 patient visits a month, about 78 percent of Hui Malamas primary care clients are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, with 2 percent being uninsured, she said.

Unlike traditional community health centers, which enjoy higher reimbursement rates from Medicare and Medicaid, Hui Malama must cover its costs as if it were a private practice, Hiraishi said, severely cutting into its revenues.

Meanwhile, the clinic has had to deal with the severe doctor shortage that other providers on the island continue to face. Hui Malama has largely relied on advanced practice registered nurses to keep the clinic staffed, but that means that many of the patients who come in with advanced illnesses must be referred on to other providers.

At times, weve been able to get an MD-level provider on board, but we just have not been able to retain them usually, Hiraishi said.

The nonprofits board ultimately decided, after several attempts to keep the clinic in operation, that it would be best to keep Hui Malamas focus centered on outreach and education efforts, rather than on providing primary care, she said.

It was a really, really lousy, hard decision for our board to have to make, and it came after five years of trying something else every time. We were just struggling to survive, she said.

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Native Hawaiian health care provider closing Hilo clinic