What's wrong with pig guts? Isn't insulin made from pigs? Plus yummy bacon.
Or, at least, yummy sausage casings!
I thank God that Obama is about to be elected and deliver us from evil by changing the course of the history of the entire world. He (or at least his most vocal supporters, in his name) promises to usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation within America, and of international cooperation upon the global stage. Well, I heard it in a Youtube video. Yes.We.Can. They sang and spoke of freedom and suffrage and stuff, which is all to the good and all very good, but I also heard something about the moon as a "new frontier," which to my ears smacked of "manifest destiny" and of an extension of American hegemony even well beyond the reaches of our own sorry planet.
Oh, okay. Sorry!
Yeah, I read this with interest and with a bit of concern, because my dad is on heparin (not as a one-off deal, but more or less regularly, as in, a low dosage every day) and I can't help but wonder about the state and health of the pigs' intestines.
I think that anyone who believes (in a "true believer" sense) in market forces willy nilly is either a). Wilfully stupid; or b). Genuinely stupid; or c). Some combination of the above.
Oh god, I had to inject that stuff into my Mom for much of '06. I really, really hope she doesn't see that article.
I thank God that Obama is about to be elected and deliver us from evil
Cult! Cult! Cult! Thanks be to God for the meme that has recovered Noble HRC's fortunes!
If you were infected, it would be your own fault, ogged. For getting cancer. God has obviously passed judgment on you.
Kosher beef heparin no longer made.
See, people always talk about isolated individual cases who die, without factoring in the millions of people who get cheaper heparin.
sorry to know that Ogged had complications
in my physician period it was always safer to use a lower than recommended dose then taper, coz many asians are slower metabolizers
may be it's not that strange but i was shocked to learn first that they use dura mater or sclera (cadaverosa!) in scleroplasty
The thread in 9 is a round table by medical professionals. It's very interesting, because both Islam and Judaism apparently allow pork heparin: because the quantities are small, because it's processed, because medicines are not food, or because saving a life overrides purity rules. (That may not be universally true, but there's no contrary testimony on the thread).
The energy on the thread comes from vegans, multiculturalists, and sticklers for medical ethics. And also, I suspect, pious rule-following Christian medical professionals who have a beef against secular medicine and are going to stick up for religious taboos per se, even if the religion concerned doesn't actually care.
Get it? "Beef" against secular medicine? Ha.
OT: Another raid on Gaza. Over sixty Palestinians have been killed in the last few days, with hints of a full invasion to come.
Ogged needs a hot beef injection.
After reading the thread in 9, I feel bad that time in my life when I worked at a sex toy shop, when I sold pork dildos to orthodox Muslims.
16 may be if it was porcine tissue less shock may be coz who likes to know that you carry cadaver tissue in yourself, sure transplants are consoling :)
13 sometimes i think if they really wanted to solve the Palestinian problem they would do it long time ago like if they'd only have showered Palestinians with all kinds of priviledges and benefits their resistance would subside etc like the Marshall's plan worked in Japan or Germany
coz water erodes stone or 'as strong as you were, tender you go'
i like that song
If it makes you feel any better, everything is made in China and has a barely regulated supply chain, so it's not like you got particularly unlucky here.
19.1: presumably zombies don't mind.
felix makes the salient, if terrifying, point. When did we decide that health and safety regulations were deprecated?
22: Why would one even ask such a question? The Invisible Hand is our special friend. It's all good.
The invisible hand is made of pig intestine.
13 -- Oh come on Stras. Don't you understand that if the Israelis kill just a few more Palestinian children, the Palestinians will accept that violence isn't the right way to solve problems?
25: Well, if we're going to talk about Palestine, how about that Israeli deputy minister of defense talking about how the Palestinians will bring a 'shoah' upon themselves if they don't knock it off?
Obviously, 'shoah' has more than one meaning, but it's certainly a very unpleasant word to use in this context. Later he was all like "oh, but I didn't mean that shoah", which isn't very convincing.
Depressing.
Alternatively, why don't we not talk about Palestine?
Yeah, actually, perhaps we shouldn't.
When did we decide that health and safety regulations were deprecated?
Also labor laws and environmental laws.
Krugman and DeLong are the guys to ask. They were vicious to the opponents of NAFTA, etc.
Back to tainted pig guts, then!
I think it'd be hilarious if lax health and safety standards led to a couple-three pole vaulters getting impaled at the olympics. Now that would get people's attention.
31: I would have thought this could be blamed more specifically on granting China MFN status, which happened under Bush 1.
The invisible hand is too busy jerking off the invisible cock to pay attention to safety.
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Is every season of The Wire going to introduce characters so they can break my heart around the tenth or eleventh episode?
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Season 5, having only 10 episodes in total, will break your heart on an irregular schedule.
Speaking of heartbreak. Molly and I saw Sweeny Todd last night, and I left so depressed that I vowed only to watch movies about flowers and puppies from here on out.
Alternatively, why don't we not talk about Palestine?
Yeah, because all the not-talking-about-it sure has helped things so far.
33: Nah, note things like this. US politicians and appointees decided to let this happen generally, not just with regards to China.
Although I wasn't very sentient then, my impression is that it dates from the Reagan years, when regulators stopped serious enforcement of health/safety/environmental laws. (More on the enforcement side than actual deregulations.)
In drugs specifically, a divide is visible in 1992. What does it say about the FDA when more than half of its budget comes from big business? Another generation would have called it institutionalized bribery, but now it's business as usual.
At a closer look, half of its drug-review budget.
40: Right. There's nothing special to do with China here; it's just that any kind of serious regulation and oversight has been eagerly tossed out the window over the past couple decades.
28: Well, if we're going to talk about Palestine, how about that Israeli deputy minister of defense talking about how the Palestinians will bring a 'shoah' upon themselves if they don't knock it off?
I'm pretty sure Ha'shoah is the Holocaust -- think Yom Ha'shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day -- whereas shoah just means "disastrous." If the minister just said "shoah" and it was translated as "Holocaust," that'd seem to me a poor translation.
Plus companies (Baxter certainly counts as big pharma) that look for rock-bottom prices and strategically fail to ask how they're achieved.
43: Isn't "ha" just the definite article in Hebrew?
Or, to elaborate, I recognize that there is a difference between referring to something as "a disaster" and "the disaster," but we can't really tell what was said from the English quoted above, and either way "shoah" is pretty marked in Hebrew.
It is, but it's akin to saying "They're having the Civil War in Iraq," which conveys the wrong (but somewhat amusing) message that Lee and Grant are slugging it out in Baghdad.
43: That kind of hair-splitting begs an analogy, but I'll restrain myself. I will say however, that if you wanted a clearer example of a political dog-whistle, you need look no further than the statement in question. It's a pretty clear signal to the base that the Israeli military is planning on upping the level of violence significantly.
Gaza's already the biggest penal colony/concentration camp that the world has ever seen, so why not dredge up the specter of the Totenkopf while they're at it?
Now that I'm looking at the quote, it makes absolutely no sense to translate it like that:
"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, told army radio.
Why not translate it as "disaster," which is all it means there? The only reason it's translated like that is to make it sound inflammatory.
(Not that I'm defending Israel here, as I'm pretty staunchly against what Israeli militarization stands for. It's a language thing, and that translation strikes me as unnecessarily and inaccurately pointed.)
The word "holocaust" doesn't have to refer to Nazi Germany's extermination of six million Jews, either. But everyone is aware of the historical connotations of "holocaust." If I were addressing a predominantly Jewish/Israeli audience, like that minister is in that quote, I'd have to be pretty fucking out of my head to toss around a word like that carelessly.
5500 hits and I'm sure they aren't all tongue in cheek.
On the larger issue of Gaza and the Palestinians: Olmert and the Israeli defense establishment have been hurting since the war with Lebanon, especially since the Winograd Commission recently chewed them out. They're looking for a nice clean military victory, and killing lots of penned-up Palestinians in Gaza is probably looking better and better to them every day.
This thread would really, really benefit from a native Hebrew speaker. I suspect it is indeed a dog-whistle, but can we be sure "shoah" isn't used in a wide variety of contexts, enough that it's not subjective?
51 i read the links on dual sitizenship of that search and thought
really, can't they become like the US of Israel and Palestine and all their sitizens'd enjoy equal rights with that dual sitizenship and have access to their Holy land etc it's not that their religious festivals coincide, right?
or is it absolutely impossible
The word "holocaust" doesn't have to refer to Nazi Germany's extermination of six million Jews, either.
"Shoah" doesn't mean "holocaust," it means "catastrophe" or "disaster." In fact, you never hear Hebrew/Yiddish speakers refer to genocide generically as a "shoah" because of the Holocaust. I'm trying to think of an equivalent in English, but can't at the moment.
This thread would really, really benefit from a native Hebrew speaker.
I'm not native -- not even very good -- but I think if Ari pops up he'll second me on this one. My grandmother used to say "something something something shoah gdolah" whenever things were going from bad to worse (be it at a party, in the kitchen, &c.). Again, my Hebrew's as shaky as my memory's thin, but I'm fairly certain she wasn't saying X was a "bigger Holocaust."
"Shoah" doesn't mean "holocaust," it means "catastrophe" or "disaster."
I'm aware. But there are other words in Hebrew for "disaster," and "shoah" isn't used very often outside of the context of the Nazi Genocide, just as "holocaust," in English, isn't used very often outside of that context.
Let me put it this way: if I were a military official of some kind talking to an Israeli newspaper, and I started talking about how Israel better change its policies or they'd "face an even bigger holocaust," there'd be a huge and quite justified shitstorm, and I wouldn't be able to weasel out of it by shrugging innocently and saying "What? 'Holocaust' just means a really big fire."
Or, for example, if a Palestinian speaking in Hebrew suggesting that the Israelis were bringing a big shoah down on themselves.
Or Sharpton, or Farrakhan, or Chomsky.
"Shoah"'s an odd word. My grandparents referred to the Holocaust as the Churban. "Shoah" doesn't refer to conflagration at all, but to devastation-by-wind, which is why the "Holocaust"/"Shoah" equivalence always confused me.
56: My grandmother used to say
With all due respect to your grandmother, my grandfather, a fluent Danish speaker and 2nd generation immigrant, once brought down the house in a Copenhagen bar by asking for directions to the restroom with an archaic phrase that translated to "the getting-it-out-of-you place".
Of course, we can posit any number of "innocent" usages of shoah, but it strains credulity to a ridiculous degree to assume that a member of the Israeli political class would not have the meaning of "the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews" at least partially in mind when he used that term in a public statement.
I thought we didn't do absurd counterfactuals around here.
Where'd the rest of my comment go? I'll try again:
"shoah" isn't used very often outside of the context of the Nazi Genocide
It's actually quite common. Ha'shoah's uncommon, its referent singular. Think of it this way: "shoah" is a good word -- not as optimistically inflected as "churban," which is a "creative destruction," like the necessary removal of a diseased kidney -- but it refers to something Jews generally, and Israeli's specifically, consider sacred. For an Israeli official to compare what they Israeli military would do to the Palestinians as you're saying would be, paradoxically, ennoble their suffering. If it were a dog-whistle of any type, it'd be aimed at Palestinian sympathizers.
Put another way:
No American general would ever say "We'll rain bombs on them like the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor," because the inflection's all wrong: it turns us into the Japanese, and since we know the Japanese were eventually defeated, it'd make us sound like we'd be launching a pointless, counter-productive military initiative.
That's the way the Holocaust is seen in Israel: a terrible thing that made the Jewish people stronger. No Israeli general would blow that whistle.
My grandparents referred to the Holocaust as the Churban.
But contemporary Hebrew speakers use "shoah." Maybe this indicates that your grandparents aren't terribly representative.
"Shoah" doesn't refer to conflagration at all, but to devastation-by-wind, which is why the "Holocaust"/"Shoah" equivalence always confused me.
It's not the literal meaning, but the cultural connotation, that matters. And in Israel, in Hebrew, "shoah" has a very particular cultural connotation. And when you use "shoah" within the context of killing lots of people, while speaking to a Hebrew-speaking, Israeli audience, it seems that the subtext leans more towards mass slaughter than grandmotherly kitchen accidents.