In New Study, HIV Prevention Pill Truvada Is 100% Effective 226
An anonymous reader writes: A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases details the recent trial of a drug named Truvada, which researchers think might excel at preventing HIV infections (abstract). The scientists administered the drug to 657 people at high risk for contracting HIV, including users of injected drugs. At the end of the study, every single subject was still free of the virus. This is encouraging news in the fight against AIDS, though it shouldn't be taken to mean the drug is perfectly effective. Since researchers can't ethically expose people to HIV, we don't know for sure that any of the subjects were definitely saved by the drug. Other studies have also had to be stopped because it was clear subjects who were on a placebo were suffering from noticeably higher rates of infection. Leaders in the fight against AIDS say this new study closes a "critical gap" in existing research by demonstrating that Truvada can work in real-world health programs.
How long? (Score:3)
How long until resistance is developed? Or how does this drug prevent it?
Re:How long? (Score:5, Informative)
People don't become resistant. Viruses become resistant. And that only happens AFTER infection, in the replication process. Prevent infection and you prevent the development of resistant strains. Treat HIV-positive people so they do not transmit their virus - a significant body of research and experience shows that HIV-positive people with undetectable viral loads simply do not transmit the virus - and give HIV-negative people effective tools for prevention, and resistance is a non-issue.
AFAIK, there are already commonly observed HIV mutations resistant to the these type of nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors: M184V, M204V/I/S, L80V/I, V173L and L180M... Apparently, most of these mutations make HIV less virulent, but still able to reproduce. This is why these treatments are primarily aimed for PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis, or basically given to a high risk patient) because you are inherently less likely to get infected with these weaker mutated strains.
It also somewhat targeted at PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis, e.g., if you fear you have been recently exposed like you got raped or your partner fessed up about something), but not yet ill. Unfortunately, with the PEP regimen, if you have been exposed to a resistant strain, this NRTIs may not work as well (in the PrEP case the drug is already circulating in you blood when you are exposed), but of course given there is nothing else to do now, it's better to try these classes of drugs than do nothing. The only PEP cases that has been shown to be highly effective with these drugs is when HIV researchers get accidental needle sticks at work and of course they start take the drug immediately after exposure (not a few days later)...
For someone already with full blown HIV infection, they will currently need a cocktail of drugs to keep the virus at bay, these all-in-one pills like Truvada are not gonna do it for them... HIV is known to hide out and replicate/mutate outside the reach of the drugs we currently have and these NRTIs only attack one part of the problem.
Well that's half informative (Score:4)
The scientists administered the drug to 657 people at high risk for contracting HIV, including users of injected drugs. At the end of the study, every single subject was still free of the virus.
Can anyone who can view more than the abstract tell me how many they would normally expect to contract HIV?
Re:Well that's half informative (Score:5, Informative)
The scientists administered the drug to 657 people at high risk for contracting HIV, including users of injected drugs. At the end of the study, every single subject was still free of the virus.
Can anyone who can view more than the abstract tell me how many they would normally expect to contract HIV?
Nevermind, buried in the NYT article:
That amounts to 388 “person years” of observation.
By contrast, in a 2014 clinical trial among gay men in England, participants who received a placebo instead of Truvada had nine infections for every 100 person years of observation, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
So assuming similar populations 388 * 9 / 100 = ~35, of course I'm too lazy to compute the confidence intervals.
Re:Well that's half informative (Score:5, Informative)
So you would have expected 35 +/- 11 cases.
A 99% confidence interval would be 3.7%, or 35 +/- 14.5 cases. So these are very promising results. Though converting 657 people to 388 person-years may be a bit suspect. Maybe HIV isn't detectable in some people after just a half year post-infection? And I'm not sure how the fact that a person can only be infected once skews the distribution (e.g. a sample of 2 people for 100 person-years has a maximum of 2 infections, while a sample of 200 people for 100 person-years has a maximum of 200 infections.)
No more circumcision? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Eager masturbation to achieve prgas? Anal sex, where lubrication is normally applied as part of the act but may prove insufficient partway through the act?
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s/prgas/orgasm/g
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Speaking as a circumcised male, I wish I'd had a choice in the matter. If I found myself too sensitive at age 18, I'd be able to make the right choice for me.
Other findings... (Score:3)
Causation, correlation, or conspiracy? Choose your own adventure.
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100% of participants also did not get lap dances from a Kardashian.
We cannot be sure of that. In fact, if her highly public behavior is any indication of her private behavior, the odds may be better than anyone realizes, depending on the length of the study.
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And on how fast we can run the other way.
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100% of participants also did not get lap dances from a Kardashian.
Causation, correlation, or conspiracy? Choose your own adventure.
Or just good luck.
Editors, lol (Score:3)
Headline;
In New Study, HIV Prevention Pill Truvada Is 100% Effective
Summary;
This is encouraging news in the fight against AIDS, though it shouldn't be taken to mean the drug is perfectly effective.
Slashdot needs new editors.
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Those statements aren't necessarily contradictory. The drug has been perfectly effective in the study - nobody who was on it got infected. At the same time this might not be sufficient to claim that the drug is perfectly effective in general. It's possible that the test group was just lucky or there are people for whom the drug won't work, but they didn't get into the test.
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OK let me explain it for you:
"In new study, pill is 100% effective"
No one studied got HIV when taking the pill.
"It's not perfectly effective"
Just because it worked for those 650 people doesn't guarantee it would work for everyone always.
Battle #2, the insurance companies. (Score:2)
Great.
Now, let's get mandated to be covered as preventative care, or at least part of the tier-1 formularies, under the ACA. As it is, many health care plans refuse to provide Truvada at all. Or, in some cases where they do, they ignore the FDA's approval and claim its use in PrEP to be "off-label" and classify it at their highest tier (non-preferred and brand-name) and highest co-pay; making it prohibitively expansive for many people.
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Case in point, I just checked my own health plan's website, and if I wanted to go on Truvada, it would cost me $1762.61 for a 90-day supply.
Rounding to make the math simple... $600 a month is a car payment, for a fairly expensive car. In some places, that could be an entire rent check or even mortgage payment. That's overtly extortionate for a life-saving preventative treatment. And I, at least, would have *some* coverage for it. According to drugs.com, retail pricing runs about $1500 per 30-days. That
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Case in point, I just checked my own health plan's website, and if I wanted to go on Truvada, it would cost me $1762.61 for a 90-day supply.
Rounding to make the math simple... $600 a month is a car payment, for a fairly expensive car. In some places, that could be an entire rent check or even mortgage payment. That's overtly extortionate for a life-saving preventative treatment. And I, at least, would have *some* coverage for it. According to drugs.com, retail pricing runs about $1500 per 30-days. That rises up to a C. Montgomery Burns level of inhumanity.
Want to keep your luxury car, then spend $5 on a pack of condoms instead.
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Want to keep your luxury car, then spend $5 on a pack of condoms instead.
You don't have to buy a two year supply of them you insensitive clod!
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When sold in Africa, or procured by other organizations, it can be acquired for about 24 cents per pill (International Drug Price Indicator Guide [msh.org]).
Without getting into the dark world of drug pricing, it's clear that $18.58 a pill, which nearly a 75x markup, is probably a wee bit too high, particularly for a drug whose two components aren't exactly on the cutting edge of anti-retroviral therapies.
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You are quoting prices where the patent has expired and a generic is available. Similar prices will be available in the United States when the patent expires in 2021.
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I looked up the price and got $3978 for a 90-day supply. Which seems like a reasonable price when a new drug costs over one billion dollars to develop.
http://www.manhattan-institute... [manhattan-institute.org]
Rather than complaining about the drug companies you should be complaining about the high costs the FDA imposes on drug companies in order to obtain FDA approval.
BTW, a generic will be available in 2021.
Can It Be Had? (Score:2)
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It already is. It has been approved by the CDC since May, 2014 for about a year as a preventive (for HIV) drug. I've actually been on it for about a year (I'm in the US).
Looks like god... (Score:2)
...sent another second-rate punishment to kill off all them gays. Poor ol' geezer appears to be losing his mojo.
Either that or the ignorant morons who insisted AIDS was god's way of punishing homosexuals for being, um, homosexual, yet again proved to be full of shit.
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Yes. Continue promiscuous behavior and see what other diseases will evolve.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Good comeback. I like your use of the word "evolve."
Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually that's been one of the real concerns of the drug. Apparently people on the drug are seeing higher incidences of HPV (genital warts), herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis.
I am curious though -- why isn't this drug able to effectively shut down the virus in infected patients? I understand why it could never cure it (there would be plenty of hiding places for the virus that the drug likely wouldn't end up) but not why it can't remove all of the symptoms. It's not a vaccine, so it doesn't rely on your immune system to remove an early infection, hence you'd figure it would work on somebody already infected. Can somebody explain the biochemistry on that? I'd like to know.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who is gay, I have done a fair bit of research in to HIV, the way people become infected, treatments, preventative measures, etc. I am not HIV positive, so perhaps not as much research as someone who is HIV positive... but in being gay, HIV is a topic that pops up. I am not a biochemist, but I know the basics.
Truvada IS one of the drugs you can take if you become infected with HIV. If you are HIV positive, it works in combination with other drugs to prevent the virus from replicating itself. It inhibits some process the virus uses to attach to other cells in order to get the cell to manufacture new copies of the virus. This means the virus is unable to replicate itself in your blood stream.
When you become HIV positive the virus also lives in parts of your body other than your blood stream. The HIV medications can't reach these locations so they just live there and it doesn't compromise your immune system for the virus to be in those parts of your body. Your blood stream is clear of the virus so your immune system operates more normally and can fight infections. But once you stop taking the drug, the component of the drug that inhibits its replication in the blood stream is no longer there. So the virus is able to then start replicating itself in your blood stream again and symptoms return.
Truvada as a preventative works because the virus can never gain a foot hold in your blood stream to make it to the other parts of your body it can live outside of the influence of the drug. If you get exposed to HIV while on Truvada, the virus just enters your blood stream, can't replicate, and it eventually dies.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being forced to take a drug forever to keep the virus at-bay with no cure, profitably for the pharmaceutical company, sounds like good fodder for conspriacy theorists.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
My guess is similar to how the virus that causes chickenpox (varicella) remains in your body permanently even after your symptoms are gone. Usually that's areas where there's no blood but there is fluidic tissue that provides homeostasis that it can survive in. For example, spinal fluid, brain tissue, etc.
Given that HIV is a really small virus (that is, smaller than most viruses) I'm sure there are plenty of areas that it can reside in.
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What other parts of the body does the virus reside in?
Being forced to take a drug forever to keep the virus at-bay with no cure, profitably for the pharmaceutical company, sounds like good fodder for conspriacy theorists.
HIV is a retrovirus, which means that it splices its genome into the genome of the infected human's cells, forcing the cells to produce copies of the virus as part of their normal operation. When the cells divide and produce new human cells the virus producing code gets copied to the new cell and when that new cell undergoes cell division the code gets copied again, and so on and so forth.
I guess you could say that there is an evolution-made conspiracy of evil viruses that makes it hard to cure HIV.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Informative)
As part of its lifecycle, HIV integrates its viral DNA into the DNA of the cell it infects. In a normal infection, the viral DNA is then processed by the infected cell's own gene expression machinery and the virus starts to replicate. However, sometimes instead of the virus being expressed and made, the DNA is "silenced" by the infected cell, meaning the viral DNA is there but not being actively expressed by the infected cell. These cells then harbor the latent virus for as long as these cells are alive, which for some memory immune cells can be for the rest of your life. This is the virus reservoir. If you take anti-retroviral therapy (ART) drugs, such as the NNRTIs mentioned before or protease or integrase inhibitors, these will inhibit active viral replication, but won't cause any harm to the reservoir viruses that are latent. Randomly* as well, these "silenced" virus DNAs in infected cells that make up the reservoir can become un-silenced, and the virus will start replicating. If you are still taking ART, then nothing happens. If, however, you stop taking the medication, these viruses that pop back up will re-start the HIV infection and within a few weeks you will be HIV+ with viral loads (amount of virus in your blood) the same as before the ART treatment was started. This is why the ART medication must be taken for the rest of the patient's life, not because big Pharma wants to make extra cash.
Interestingly, if you follow patients that have lapses in their ART treatment and sequence the viruses that repopulate the infection, they become more similar (clonal) over time, due in part to the reservoir cells! Since potentially a single virus will do the repopulating from a reservoir cell, you would expect the resulting population of viruses to be more similar to each other than in the original infection, and this is what is observed: Specific HIV integration sites are linked to clonal expansion and persistence of infected cells [nih.gov].
* Random by measurement, not necessarily by mechanism.
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This kind of solution is really the only kind that drug companies are actively researching and bringing to market.
They have no interest in one-pill fixes, because they don't make nearly the profit that 'forever' pills do.
Honestly the whole "drug companies only make treatments" conspiracy theory is a big load of uneducated horse shit. If there's a cure that "they" don't want you to know about, then go invent it yourself. There are a LOT of diseases that the pharmaceutical industry has cured, and continues to cure. Unfortunately these are mostly just bacterial infections. As it turns out, bacteria are a lot easier to fight than viruses. Same with cancer, which curing it effectively means killing tissue that's part of your own
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As for industry curing things, not so much. Most cures come about from publicly funded research, which industry then gets patents for. The public of course get screwed by high prescription prices due to guaranteed monopolies granted by the same government that gave these bastards the research to make the products in the first place.
The publicly funded research just finds a cause and effect. That's it. The process of formulating a chemical that both A) Target's the cause and B) doesn't kill the patient is a process that costs perhaps billions to do, and even more if there's a deadly side effect and it's necessary not only to recall, but to compensate those who took the drug (i.e. fen-phen.) Clinical trials are NOT cheap; hell just getting to the point of a clinical trial is not cheap. The chemical that results from this process is what
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How does it eventually die? AFAIK all it requires to just survive is homeostasis, which your blood provides. Unless its protein jacket has a very short chemical half-life or something.
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"Apparently people on the drug are seeing higher incidences of HPV (genital warts), herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis."
Read the summary a bit closer: "Other studies have also had to be stopped because it was clear subjects who were on a placebo were suffering from noticeably higher rates of infection."
Which is rather to be expected since these people think that they can fuck without protection, and were on a PLACEBO.
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Because keeping a virus from infecting a cell is one thing, and removing all viral DNA from millions of alread infected cells in the body is another thing entirely.
It's like the difference between preventing malware from installing a root kit on your computer, and getting rid of an already running rootkit (without rebooting the computer or reinstalling everything).
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Can somebody explain the biochemistry on that?
Usually, nucleus DNA gets transcripted into RNA. HIV takes the path backwards (this is reverse-transcription) and use specific biochemistry for that. The drug attacks that pathway.
I guess it must be effective to a much larger class of virus, but don't worry: they will adapt. After all there is no real need to infect the nucleus, RNA is enough for some viruses, ad far as I understand
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I guess it must be effective to a much larger class of virus, but don't worry: they will adapt. After all there is no real need to infect the nucleus, RNA is enough for some viruses, ad far as I understand
That would require quite a mutation, I would imagine; not likely something that would happen in only a few generations, or even a few thousand. From what I understand about HIV, the biggest problem with treating it is that unlike most viruses, it mutates VERY quickly. That said, if somebody does get infected with HIV while on this drug, they should completely abstain from sex, or else it's back to the drawing board.
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not likely something that would happen in only a few generations, or even a few thousand.
But how long is a generation for the HIV?
That said, if somebody does get infected with HIV while on this drug, they should completely abstain from sex, or else it's back to the drawing board.
If that is a requirement, it is doomed to fail, but why should people abstain?
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans have been promiscuous since before there was anything vaguely promiscuous. People fuck, and they fuck a lot, and they often fuck people other than the people they've promised to be the only ones they'll fuck, and they fuck even when fucking means they get bad diseases, so anything that makes fucking safer is a good thing.
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And if it don't move, they give it a shove and then they fuck it.
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> Humans have been promiscuous since before there was anything vaguely promiscuous.
Have you looked into bonobos, or dolphins? Bonobos are quite close primate relatives, and even more promiscuous in general than humans. And dolphins are _quite_ promiscuous. We're evolutionary latecomers, only a few million years old at most. Almost every physical trait and behavior we have was tried by many other species long before we evolved.
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You might want to mention that to Bristol Palin.
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Why would I give her a pass?
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You might want to look up what "contraception" is.
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"Yes. Continue promiscuous behavior and see what other diseases will evolve."
Another, less judgy way of looking at this is to think of gay men as the Windows users of the sexual world, encountering all the radical viruses and doing whatever it takes to have fancy cures developed for them, so the rest of us don't have to.
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Which version are you talking about? Catholics are very pro-sex. They want you to have lots of kids. It seems like liberal secularism is the death cult. With abortion, anti-children, and pro euthanasia. That why Western Europe is dying. It will be gone in a couple hundred years.
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They just don't want you to enjoy it, you know? Sex is just for reproduction. All that unnecessary wiggling and grunting was making the priests uncomfortable.
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Which version are you talking about? Catholics are very pro-sex. They want you to have lots of kids. It seems like liberal secularism is the death cult. With abortion, anti-children, and pro euthanasia. That why Western Europe is dying. It will be gone in a couple hundred years.
According to Nietzsche, Christianity is the death cult since it is opposed to some basic things required by all living things; greed and selfishness.
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You forgot anti death penalty. So not so much.
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"Promiscuity is only a problem for followers of the anti- sex death cult known as Christianity."
Or do you mean that other anti-sex death cult that's a lot more of a problem in the present day?
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That makes me wonder... Who the hell shares needles in this day and age? I no longer abuse opiates and was an IV drug abuser for years and years. Never, not once, did I share a rig with anyone. For two bucks you can get a ten pack. For twenty bucks you can find someone who gets insulin rigs regularly and buy a box of 1000 from them. I hadn't shot up much prior to the AIDS scare but I had and even then we didn't share rigs. I may have reused my own rig from time to time but sharing it? That's straight up ret
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AIDS being God's revenge on homosexuals is not actually a fundamentalist Christian belief.
The fundamentalist Christian view is that disease, all disease, exists because of man's rebellion from God. This is alleged to be not so much revenge on God's part because you can't blame a fire for not keeping you warm if you don't stay near it in the first place.
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I'm not going to speak for anyone else, but personally I find your 'God' of blood, vengeance, and death, to be significantly less than warm-and-fuzzy, so I think I'll just stick to atheism, OK?
Not sure why people think that a supreme being should be warm-and-fuzzy. If you were a supreme being, would you be warm and fuzzy? Not that we should make any god in our image...
On the other hand, if 9/10 [gallup.com] people believed in something (like global warming) and you didn't want to believe in it because it didn't make you feel warm and fuzzy, would you be a denier? Just food for thought, OK?
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Not sure why people think that a supreme being should be warm-and-fuzzy.
True enough. I think the idea of a macho god might be palatable.
I'd just prefer him to not be batshit insane. Having read the holy bible, that is pretty evident.
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First, we were supposedly made in God's image and fuck yeah I'd be warm and fuzzy. Why would I be pissed off
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Doing that for eternity is probably what hell is really about. Heaven has to be even better.
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Except you're the Supreme Being, so you can fix all the bugs in MGSV and Arkham Knight and pwn all the noobs (though I understand Michael the Archangel is internationally ranked on Splatoon).
And, you can change it up any time you want. Have the hot chicks with snacks come at 10am and answer prayers in the evening if you want. Play Xbox One instead of Playstation. Have spicy wings instead of pizza. Do whatever you
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I still don't see what God would have to be so pissed about that He feels the need to send disease and pestilence to humans who didn't ask to be created, after all.
Well the old testament is more along the lines of "worship god or he might just be a complete bastard to you (well OK he be a bastard to you anyway, but you're better off playing the odds)".
Which is at least more internally consistent than the supposed nice god.
The funny thing is that the stories about a supposed supreme being put me in mind of t
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I'd answer prayers from 10-11am every day, have some lunch and then play Playstation 4 for the rest of the day until beer-thirty
Seriously God, why all the anger?
I'd be angry too if I only got half an hour of games in.
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It's called "laissez-faire" omnipotence. A hands/tentacles/noodly-appendages-mostly-off approach to godhood.
The people in the other universe (where everything was controlled down to the subatomic level to make even the faintest trace of evil impossible) probably went crazy once they found out. Matrix got that right.
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Epicurus was about 3rd century BC.... well after the founding of Judaism.
However, the problems with it is that it presupposes a moral absolute that if God were truly good, and both willing and able to prevent evil, then He would. But is such a moral absolute justified as necessarily being true? Consider, does a parent who watches as their child struggles learning to walk instead of holding them up as they go necessarily hate their children?
Epicurus also fails to acknowledge that preventing evil thoug
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However, the problems with it is that it presupposes a moral absolute that if God were truly good, and both willing and able to prevent evil, then He would. But is such a moral absolute justified as necessarily being true? Consider, does a parent who watches as their child struggles learning to walk instead of holding them up as they go necessarily hate their children?
I don't think there's much about the Hebrew god being good, as far as I can tell he's a raging douchenozzle who's also madder than a sack of
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Bad comparison, because God does not voluntarily cause evil to happen,
Yes he does. He hardened the Pharoah's heart in order to make him do evil by not releasing the tribes of Israel. It's Exodus 9:12. That is god being a dick and making the Pharoah do evil.
it is allowed to happen because it is a consequence of man's abandonment of God
Unless god feels like forcing it as in Exodus 9:12.
and if God simply spared us from all of the repercussions of that choice,
How is hardening the Pharoah's heart sparing from r
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I don't mean any disrespect, but God sounds like kind of a prick, you know? Creates humans in His image, gives them free will, and then punish the fuck out of them for using it. What an asshole. He's basically saying, "Stop hitting yourself" wh
Evolution! (Score:2)
The process of evolution will create a more successful disease, somewhere, sometime. In a competition between a life form with a generation period of 30 years and one in the order of hours, bets should be firmly on the latter.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
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You do not revere the Ori? They ask nothing from us, only that we follow the path set out for us in Origin.
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40? Unless we're talking about something different, the blood moon is an annual occurrence.
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It makes you wonder why anyone would oppose gay marriage, doesn't it? Like that goofball from Kentucky, says God doesn't want her to do her job and fill out the form in the county clerk's office so gay people can get married, and it turns out she's been divorced three times. Fucking hell. You have to wonder about people who read about Christ in the gospels and come away thinking, "I
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Jesus also had harsh words for the religious leaders of the day. ""Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are."
He accused the money changers of thieving, not capitalism
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No difference.
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If two homosexuals were in an exclusive, monogomous relationship, they wouldn't have to worry about HIV in the first place. Now, the fact that many homosexuals engage in promiscuous sexual behavior, is a major factor in the high transmission rate of HIV among homosexuals.
Now, if you are suggesting that man made drugs allow people to continue engaging in promiscuous sexual behavior in defiance of God, then you have made a point.
While this is true, the AIDS virus has one trick that "breaks through" this type of "protection." Basically, for the behavior to work, the participants would have to have a _lifetime_ monogamy of partners. The time period between infection and sickness/death is very long with the AIDS virus. (Not always, but it can be.)
Because that period is quite long it's quite possible to get infected by one serial monogamy partner and then carry AIDS, get a different partner a decade later and then spread it.
If you
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"...have you ever met a rich gay guy?"
http://www.eltonjohn.com/ [eltonjohn.com]
Re: solid. (Score:5, Funny)
I can continue to never wear a rubber.
Yeah, virgin lifestyle is pretty much unaffected by this breakthrough.
Re: solid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, virgin lifestyle is pretty much unaffected by this breakthrough.
Like they say, don't think of it as a "virgin lifestyle," think of it as "recursive iso-monogamy."
You won't need it (Score:2)
As long as you don't leave mommy's basement.
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I can continue to never wear a rubber.
Whats the difference between herpes and true love?
Herpes lasts forever. Does Truvada do anything for true love?
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Multiple studies were cancelled because the placebo group was contracting HIV at an alarming rate.
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And the study gives 500 people the widget that is expected to repel bears, and 500 people a widget that doesn't do anything.
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Who reports back over time
My guess would be only the people with the anti-bear widget would report back. The placebo group became lunch.
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I have this rock to sell you, it repels bears.. do you see any bear around here? See it works.
Do yourself a favor. Use some other illustration if you're in Orlando.
People DO see bears around there. And occasionally get their pets eaten.
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if only 50% of the subjects gets HIV does that mean sugar pills have a 50% chance of stopping HIV?
No. It means that the other 50% of the subjects caught HIV from the sugar pill.
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Why this is news for nerds
How is science not news for nerds? Has the definition of nerd changed so much since I first joined (a clue: no).
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Look, if you're too lazy to write a decent troll couldn't you just copypasta old GNAA posts or something? Because this is pitiful enough make me feel bad for you.
Oh. Well played.