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Classic good news/bad news scenario

The Black Death, closer than you think

puffthemutantdragon has a wonderful two part article on the history of the Yersinia pestis bacteria.  This little bug is known by many names.  Bubonic plague.  The Black Death. The Plague of Justinian. The Great Plague. The Great Pestilence.  The history of Y. pestis is facinating.  Go read mutantdragon's excellent article: part I and part II.

Education and what's wrong with it

These town halls are going really well!

That is all.

This bears repeating

bored_lurking commented on a NYT article about Krugman being all that's left of the left:

"whether a Democrat or a Republican was in the White House. Since World War II, Bartels found, wealthy families in the 95th percentile in income had seen identical income growth under both parties. But for families in the 20th percentile, the difference was astonishing: Under Democratic presidents, their income grew at six times the rate it did under Republican ones."

I have seen many times people arguing that republicans and democrats are just two sides of the same coin. Amazing how two faces of the same thing could have such different effects for poor people.

Amen.

New Orleans: no limits to the law

New Statesman has a new article, No limits to the law in NoLa, which is at the same time fascinating and horrifying. For example:

Henry Glover, a 31-year-old African American, was shot by a police sniper as he picked up goods behind a shopping mall during Katrina. He was taken by his brother, a friend and a passer-by to a nearby school that police were using as a special operations centre. There a Swat team let Glover bleed to death and beat his rescuers. Another policeman took the body in the rescuer's car to the levee and torched it, putting two shots into the body (he later called that "a very bad decision"). The incinerated car with Glover's remains inside it lay a block from the police station for weeks.

Last December, three policemen were convicted for the crime: one of manslaughter, one of burning the body and one of falsifying evidence. Eleven other officers who admitted they had lied in testimony or withheld knowledge were reassigned to desk duty or suspended.

This is but a small taste of what happened during and after the disaster.  Residents were treated like they were trapped in some nightmare Nazi movie.

I know what you're thinking.  I just invoked Godwin's law.  I'm not.  How can one read passages like this and not think of the Nazi's?  It refers, ironically, to a conversation that Scahill had with a veteran of the Israeli special task forces:

He wrote in his notebook at the time: "Both say they served as professional soldiers in the Israeli military and one boasts of having par­ticipated in the invasion of Lebanon. 'We have been fighting the Palestinians all day, every day, our whole lives,' one of them tells me. 'Here in New Orleans, we are not guarding from terrorists.' Then, tapping on his machine-gun, he says, 'Most Americans, when they see these things, that's enough to scare them.' They were helicoptered in by powerful businessman James Reiss, who serves in Mayor Ray Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's regional transit authority." As Scahill told me: "Reiss was talking openly of the need to change the 'demographics' of NoLa [New Orleans, Louisiana] after the hurricane."

Think about that.  An Israeli sniper who was part of a militia that indiscriminately kills blacks, at the behest of his employer, to change the demographics of the City of New Orleans.  Sounds like systematic extermination to me.

I remember, a short time after Katrina, about these rumors of horrific treatment of the locals. Make that local Afrian-Americans.  At the time, I remember thinking the stories were just too far fetched to be true.  This was year 2005, after all.  People in authority couldn't act like animals without the acts being pushed into the light.  So, I wrote it off as lies created for some unknown purpose, perhaps no purpose at all.  Well, apparently many of the things I heard were true.  For a glimpse of the tip of the iceberg, read the article.

Apparently the DoJ has had enough, too, and will put the New Orleans police department (NOPD) under the supervision of a federal judge. The article goes on:

Paul Craig Roberts, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal and former assistant secretary to the treasury under Ronald Reagan, who wrote recently: "Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public."

The WSJ and Reagan administrations are not bastions of liberal thought.  This is undoubtedly a conservative saying this.  So, this is deadly serious.

My only personal connection to New Orleans is that my late step Mother was the victim of a hit-and-run by a commercial van while on a business trip there.  She or a bystander did write down the license plate, however the NOPD were completely uninterested in finding the driver.  This was in the 90's and my father, who is not easily dissuaded by bureaucracy, was unable to get anywhere with them.

It occurred to me more than once while reading the article: unless I have to for business, I will not visit the southern US, and New Orleans in particular, until problems like these are a thing of the past.

Read the article to get your daily dose of outrage.

Obama revealed: A moderate Republican

The Washington Post has a new column by Ezra Klein: Obama revealed: A moderate Republican.

I've been saying this for some time.  For me, this is the money quote:

... as Democrats moved to the right to pick up Republican votes, Republicans moved to the right to oppose Democratic proposals.

This inevitably means that Republicans will oppose ideas they previously supported or even originated.  That has become the calculus of the GOP.

I also think the tea party is a factor in their new look.  The main issue of the tea party, fiscal responsibility, was stolen from the GOP.  This has forced the GOP to double down on their old platform, so they can further differentiate themselves.  This is why you see Paul Ryan talking about spending cuts in the trillions.

I also think that Obama is moving to the right to insure his re-election, because he is worried if he doesn't he will be too big a target for the GOP in 2012.  If this is true, and he does win in 2012, it means it will likely shift to the center a little.  Only then will we see the real Obama, the Senator who condemned many of the things President Obama has done, or the President who thinks Senator Obama was an idealistic young punk.

The same old lies, but this time the stakes are high

I like this summary from Will Hutton's Guardian article:

The Republican position, set out in detail by Paul Ryan, the Republican chair of the congressional budget committee, is not really a budget plan at all. It is a map for dismantling the US state so that it would do little more than provide threadbare pensions and healthcare for the very poorest and almost nothing else, with even defence in the line of fire.

That is exactly the reaction I had a couple of weeks ago when I heard part of Ryan's speech. There is much irony in Paul Ryan's position, sure, but it is a deeply serious move to change the fabric of our political system.  His vision is the culmination of decades of GOP desires, the dismantling of government for a two reasons: reducing 1) taxes on the wealthy, and 2) regulations on business so they will be free to compete in a truly free market.  The latter is worthy of a separate blog/rant, so I will leave that one alone for now.

After Obama grew some balls and started pushing back, Ryan's reaction was hilarious.  Really, Paul?  You and your colleagues are trying to build bridges?  Perhaps you've forgotten about some of your previous statements, which appear more demolition and building to me (all comments on healthcare reform by Rep. Ryan):

• [Healthcare reform is] "a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud." ¹
  
• “The best outcome is if we stop this — then the Democrats will have a failed presidency on their hands, and then they’ll have to work with Republicans to get something done that’s bipartisan.”²
  
• "I believe that is completely antithetical to the American idea, the American project, and what America is about."³
  

Jon Stewart summed it all up best when he transformed Ryan's crazy budget graph, which showed a straw-man "Democratic" budget through 2050 literally killing us with debt: Stewart replaced Trillions in budget cuts with pre-Bush era tax rates for the wealthy, which showed the same "after" graph as Ryan.  (And, the budget as a share of GDP isn't bad at all, but Ryan doesn't want you to know that.)

Make no mistake: this is a battle over what we will become.

School is wasted on the young

When I was in school, I hated stuff like this.  Now that I'm older, I guess I like it.  I'm 50% through lecture #4.  That's 3.5 hours in!  It's a Philosophy course recorded at Harvard.  (I'm not sure when, but the references make me think it was several years ago.)  My plan is to watch all 12 parts (almost 12 hours).

angrigami

That is all.

Home, also?

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Not as sure about this one. The houses all look so different.

Some memories:

• Gravel driveway that Uncle Bobby helped pave.
• The basketball goal in the backyard.
• Mom getting stung on the nose by a wasp.
• Jeff and Nancy, the neighbors in back.
• The large family across the street.  Kilroys?
• Learning to ride a bike in the front yard.  From there, freedom.
• Getting stung by a bee and finding out I was allergic to them.

Home, again

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Some memories:

• The golf course in back.
• The airport in back.
• The stream.
• The winter days of sledding down the hills of the golf course.
• The nearby park.  Huge.  Riding my bicycle all around it.
• Doris.  Andy.
• Bert and his Manhattan dispensary.  Crazy inventor.

Home, once upon a time

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Some memories:

• A flood in the middle of our block that turned the street into a swimming pool.
• A giant, collaborative snowman put up in the yard next door.  From my perspective as a 4 yr old (approximately), it was 10ft high.
• The barn in the back yard that was off limits.  It was filled with rusting farm equipment and spider webs.  And a dead opossum.  Did I mention the spiders?
• The open spaces.
• The family across the street, the Bottom's, who had several Great Danes that were scary as hell.  And the family that was well over 6ft tall, each of them.  Well, that's what it seemed like to me.
• My brother getting his ear almost bitten off by a dog down the street.
• The main house on the property on which we lived.  I would sometimes walk the rent check up with her.  The old lady was ancient and the house was huge and dark.
• I thought the elementary school I went to was only a block away, but I see on the map it was two.  Did they put a new cross street in since I was there?

Birther madness

So, The Donald is the latest person to fan the flames of the birther movement.  It's just weird, though.  Read Gail Collins op ed on it.  Then, read The Donald's reply.  Then, read Collins' reply to his reply.  Fascinating, for sure.  I especially love the created drama over Obama's grandmother's statement, truncated to make it more plausible.  And, to get a neutral (as you can get) analysis of this entire mess, you can read PolitiFact's Final Chapter on the subject.

I do think this means The Donald doesn't have a chance in hell of winning in 2012, though.  I believe this issue is a litmus test for crazy and that crazy can't be elected to the presidency.  Let's hope I'm correct.

When will voters get it: we live in a Corporatocracy!

My blood boiled just a little bit when I read about the idea of a $1.2T tax holiday on foreign earnings.  In other words, big multinational companies will reap all of the benefits of this.  Small and medium size businesses will be screwed.  At a time when unemployment is pretty high, the state governments are in dire straights, this is what they come up with?

I liked this reddit comment:

Man I can't wait for all that money to trickle down to the middle class, it's going to be SO GREAT!

Exactly.  Reagan would be proud.

UPDATE 3/25/11: an now the news the largest US corporation GE will pay no taxes this year.  In fact, they have a $3.2B tax credit.

John Stossel is an idiot

From time to time, I run into people on the intertubes using John Stossel pieces as argument fodder.  It's really hard to argue with these people.  While I agree, a broken clock is right twice a day, and I'll agree that Stossel can accidentally be on the correct side of an argument, I really just can't take anything he says seriously.  Ever.  Here's an example:

"Why is there a Bureau of Indian Affairs?" he said. "There is no Bureau of Puerto Rican Affairs or Black Affairs or Irish Affairs. And no group in America has been more helped by the government than the American Indians, because we have the treaties, we stole their land. But 200 years later, no group does worse."

And there you have it, the stunning stupidity of John Stossel.  Indians and Blacks and the Irish have equivalent histories in America.  Of course, there could be another reason instead of stupidity, that Stossel took this position: he could just be an asshole.  I actually tend to believe he's more asshole than idiot.  And, by asshole I mean this: he's taking a position he knows to be false merely to push his (and Fox News') agenda, in order to whip his viewers into an anti-Obama frenzy.

By the way, the context of this comment was this question: which group has the U.S. government helped out the most?  I think this tips the scales very much to the side of asshole.

Pop quiz on net neutrality

Scenario: Comcast decides that Netflix doesn't deserve the same treatment on their network (which services your house) and decides to slow down their traffic, so that movies are unwatchable.  You either must get the DVD from Netflix or watch it on Comcast's video on demand service.

True or false: net neutrality will allow Comcast to legally do the above.

If you said "true", then you watch FauxNews or have been listening to the GOP or their operatives.

If you said "false", then you've been paying attention and good for you.

Is Democracy destined to become this?

I don't know about you, but the last 11 years have done a lot of damage to my feelings about the US.  I'm not saying the political climate before 2000 was perfect or even good, but what has happened in the last 11 years sometimes boggles the mind.  Now, there's this new GOP movement to cull $100B (that's a B for Billion) from the Federal budget.  Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett has written it would “mean abolishing just about every government function outside of entitlements, interest, and defense.”  This does, of course, mean it will not happen.  The small fringe group in the House that wants to do this will not get their way.

What is disturbing, though, is the mere fact there are a number of people in Congress who want to do this.  There have been other people than just little ol' me who have said this would destroy our country.  This is not hyperbole.  It would literally remake the US into something completely different than it is now.  We could debate what that would be, but there is no debate that it would happen.  Entitlements are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  Interest is what we pay to service our debt.  Defense is the military.  That's it.

Everything else that the Federal government does, including funding of State governments, would be terminated.  States like California would be better off, since it gets only $0.78 for every $1.00 paid by Californians in Federal taxes.  This isn't true of many states, though.  Ironically, many are Red states receiving more in Federal funding than they pay in Federal taxes.  So, if you ignore the issue of what the Federal government does, the idea proposed will at a minimum push many states already on the edge over it.

Think of all those three letter agencies which keep you safe.  FDA and EPA come to mind.  What would businesses do without either of those?  Do you think they are some liberal plot to depress profits?  The EPA was created by Nixon.

There has been a war on the EPA for 15+ years.  I never understood this one.  I've been party to discussions on various websites where the anger toward the EPA was so far out of proportion I just couldn't understand it.  Do not Conservatives also drink tap water or breath the same air as everyone else?  Here's a good example: extraction of natural gas might pose quite a health risk.

The FDA has already been gutted.  Drugs are pushed through with minimal testing, and smaller and smaller trial sizes.  What is left is a shadow of the former agency.

I do agree with those that say the Federal government is too big and too inefficient.  There are many things it has no business funding.  This current attack, though, isn't a fix for that, it's a desire to bring down the government as we know it.  It's a push to remake our country into something else.

The positive health benefits of Antioxidants? A myth, likely.

This has been bugging me for a long time. I read somewhere a few years ago (no link, sorry) that the whole antioxidants-are-good-for-you meme was completely made up a few decades ago and we just all assumed it was true. Now, articles like this about the positive benefits to eating chocolate appear (don't get me started on the pseudo-science perpetrated by the HuffPo), which perpetuate the myth.  The article I read a few years ago said the author had done an extensive search of the medical literature to find studies that proved a link and found no studies, much less ones that found a positive link.  I just ran across this article, which appears to be the same as a New Scientist article that is behind a paywall.  This is the kicker for me (emphasis mine):

Green plants are full of antioxidants for good reason. They are especially vulnerable to oxidative stress since they produce pure oxygen during photosynthesis. To protect themselves they manufacture an assortment of potent antioxidants.

And so a hypothesis was born: dietary antioxidants are free-radical sponges that can stave off the diseases of old age. It was a great idea. "Putting two and two together, scientists assumed that these antioxidants were protective, and that taking them as supplements or in fortified foods should decrease oxidative damage and diminish disease," says Halliwell, who pioneered research into free radicals and disease. "It was simple: we said free radicals are bad, antioxidants are good."

Damn that is annoying! And even more annoying that humans will hear something and repeat it as fact. Not to mention the huge industry surrounding this crap science.

Terrorist killed by mobile provider

A Russian suicide bomber blows up by accident.
The suicide bomber, who had the device all rigged to blow via mobile text message, got a text message from her mobile phone provider, causing the connected explosive device to detonate.

No word if this person is a Darwin Award nominee.

Orwell is spinning a little faster now

This is why I give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Newly Released Documents Detail FBI’s Plan to Expand Federal Surveillance Laws.

Ueli Steck speed solo Eiger record

It's incomprehensible to mind what this guy has done. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up while watching the last snow face ascent. Amazing!

Single Malt Orphan Tears

This is a fantastic episode of The Colbert Report. Starts off with some discussion of Clarence Thomas and conflict of interest. Yeah, it's comedy, but it's pointed commentary on how screwed up our Supreme Court is.

Krumpin': what will the kids think of next?

Krumpin' ain't for grandpa. And, these kids are 8 years old. Check it:

A good example of the law of unintended consequences

On one of our recent walks, I was trying to explain the law of unintended consequences to my 10 year old.  I don't remember what example I came up with, but I wish I had just read Dr. Harris's blog entry Acetaminophen and the War on Drugs, because it's a perfect example.

I recommend you read it, but the short of it is:

The drug schedules put in place by Nixon are about restricting drugs that people want to abuse (to get high) and not about drug safety (otherwise, chemotherapy drugs would be on the schedule).  Companies, because they want to sell more drugs, have an incentive to move a drug from class IV to class III, because the latter class is less restricted and easier to prescribe.  In other words, you can make more money from a class III than a class IV drug.

Vicodin is, well, let's let the good Dr. tell us:

which is the brand name combination of hydrocodone and acetaminophen. Hydrocodone is an opiate analgesic and acetaminophen is the generic name for tylenol. There was not (as still is not) a version of hydrocodone all by itself - you can only get the two in combination.

I'll give you the punchline now:  acetaminophen is added to hydrocodone to make it toxic, and less useful to people that want to get high, because abusing it will damage your liver. In fact, this contributes to the 40,000 ER visits per year related to acute liver injury.

I've said it before and I'll say it now: the war on drugs is just stupid.

Lie to Me theme song

Lie to Me is one of my favorite shows.  Tim Roth is so much fun to watch.  The theme song is pretty damn good, too.  Shazam identified it for me as Brand New Day by Ryan Star.  Take a listen:

TV tip: Misfits (UK)

My friend Andreas turned me on to the BBC series Misfits (not availble on DVD yet, unfortunately).  A better Heroes, as it were.  If you torrent, then you can probably find it that way.  Otherwise, keep an eye out for the DVD. Btw, it's definitely R-rated.

One of the early episodes featured a song by James Blunt, You're Beautiful, from his Back To Bedlam [Explicit] album.  Very nice.  Btw, the song was discovered with the Android app Shazam.

The Milky Way [video]

UT 3, 4 & The Milky Way [video], originally uploaded by josefrancisco.salgado.

A beautiful look at The Milky Way. A time-lapsed video from Paranal Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile.

Song of the week: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Top Gear (UK) has excellent music. I often hear cool clips of songs while watching. Normally, this is a problem, but not in this case. There's a forum where people identify all music used on Top Gear, and it's an incredible resource.

Case in point: at 29:07 in episode 1 (of season 16), a compelling song was playing in the background while Jeremy reviewed the Skoda Yeti. I just had to know what that song was. So, I jotted down the time on a postit. Later, I went to the forum post for this episode and found it was Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Barry Adamson, from his Oedipus Schmoedipus album. Listen for yourself to the right.

Sublime.

Great song find of the week: Vehicle

A recent episode of the great (yes, I did just call it great) Men of a Certain Age TV show featured the song "Vehicle" by The Ides of March. For me, this was one of those songs that I'd heard before but didn't really know anything about. I Googled the lyrics and found it. I was a little disappointed I didn't get to use Shazam on my Droid, which finds a song by holding your phone up to an audio source.

ResellerRatings.com removes store reviews at the request of merchants?

I've always thought ResellerRatings was a good place to see fair ratings of stores. I guess I was wrong. The first negative review I put up, regarding Maingear.com, was removed after a few days. Someone from Maingear contacted me on a Saturday night about the review. The guy was upset that I spoiled his near 10.0 rating. He wasn't disputing the what I said in the review, he was just upset that he might lose business over it. The review was from an order a couple of years before. After talking with the Maingear guy, I amended the review to make this very clear.

I noticed that a couple of days after my conversation, the review disappeared. I emailed ResellerRatings twice over the next week, but I never got a response.

I'm guessing Maingear pressured ResellerRatings to remove the review. Well, now I know not to check ResellerRatings anymore, because I know what's there is whitewashed.

Anyone have a good store/merchant review site they like?

Dunk Octopus wants to fight you

via Boingboing

Evening walk with Adrian

Top of the hill.  What wonderful winter weather we've had.