Doctors Join Patients to Demand Big Pharma Lower Cancer Drug Costs

Tara Culp-Pressler ThinkProgress
On Thursday more than 100 prominent oncologists came out in support of a patient-driven initiative to lower the high price of cancer drugs, charging at least 20 percent of their patients can’t follow their cancer treatment because they can’t afford the drugs. In their article in Mayo Clinic Proceedings the physicians also called upon the federal government to, among other things, allow Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices.

London Activists Repurposing Anti-Homeless Spikes

Maria Sanchez Diez Quartz
London activists have found a creative way to subvert the proliferation of metal studs and other devices purposely designed to discourage homeless and other people from occupying public spaces. The collective, called Space, Not Spikes, is transforming them into cozy bedrooms, complete with tiny libraries. Anti-homeless spikes and an anti-loitering device that only teenagers can hear are part of a movement some have defined as “defensive architecture.”

Socialism, American-Style

Gar Alperovitz, Thomas M. Hanna The New York Times
Public ownership is already widespread in the United States, and is popular in practice, if not in the abstract, with both liberals and conservatives. It includes hospitals, parks, public utilities, public Internet systems, hotels, and Public Wealth Funds generated by state owned oil and mineral wealth that subsidize public education and provide guaranteed incomes to millions of people. With skepticism about capitalism growing, will we see more such endeavors?

Massacre in Louisiana: The Shooter's Ideology, and the Governor's

Kira Lerner, Ryan Lenz
When mass shootings fit into Gov. Bobby Jindal’s view of “radical Islamic terrorists” he is quick to condemn the violence as terrorism. But when the incidents are results of lax gun control laws and radical right-wing shooters he simply calls the situation tragic and is quick to move on. The evidence already indicates that the shooter in the Lafayette Theater was a fan of David Duke, neo-Nazis, and antigovernment conspiracies.

Discovering a New Dinosaur Helped Us Prove Velociraptors Had Feathers

Stephen Brusatte The Conversation
In Jurassic World, Velociraptors are depicted as big, drab-coloured, scaly brutes. We've known for some time that wasn't true - Velociraptors had feathers. And now, thanks to a spectacular fossil of a new dinosaur, we know in detail what the real Velociraptor would have been like. Far from being a scaly-skinned reptilian monster, Velociraptor would have been a fluffy, feathered poodle from hell.

Friday Nite Videos -- July 24, 2015

Portside
Slavery to Mass Incarceration. Mess Within Texas - Sandra Bland's Arrest. Traffic Stop. Are We Really 99% Chimp? The First Openly Asshole President.

Slavery To Mass Incarceration

An animated short film by acclaimed artist Molly Crabapple, with narration by Bryan Stevenson, illustrating facts about American slavery and the elaborate mythology of racial difference that was created to sustain it. That mythology persists today. Slavery did not end in 1865, it evolved. #SlaveryEvolved

Traffic Stop

Alex Landau, an African American, was raised by adoptive white parents to believe that skin color didn’t matter. But when Alex was pulled over by Denver police officers one night, he lost his belief in a color-blind world. Alex tells what happened that night.