Lead Acetate

An old farm

2010-08-01T17:04:00.001-05:00

It was founded in 1632. I hear its sweet corn is legendary. The year 1632 is unimaginably distant. In 1632, Galileo was still publishing, and John Locke was born.

I was struck by the sheer age of the East Coast when I went to college in the Mid Atlantic. There were graves in the cemetery near the beach that had lain there longer than white men had been in Minnesota. What had been the capital of the state, had sunk into disrepair before the American Revolution. Old in the Midwest is a different scale than the East Coast.

Each year it has become harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture — heavily subsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn. In a system committed to the health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have been different.

This is not news to the Mid West. I'm a city girl by just about any measure, I know corn and soybeans mostly by speeding past them at seventy on the interstate. But I know how big the ADM silos on the Mississippi are, how long the trains coming in from the plains are, and how low in the water the barges sit when they are full of corn and soybeans.

I would like to think that maybe we can change this system, but it's easier for the government not to, to just let this broken system stay broken until it crashes down around us. Big agribusiness would rather things just keep humming along, and will throw money at congress to make it so. What would that "crashing down around us" look like though? The decline of the family farm? Old news twenty years ago. Undernourished overweight children in food deserts? We've got that. I would like to think that things are getting better, there is a lot more knowledge about what is healthy out there now, and a rise in a foodie culture, but what are a bunch of foodies and food nerds against agribusiness?

Sigh.

I gotta go figure out how to cook a big ole fennel, bulb and stems and leaves and all. Plus that patty pan squash should get eaten soon too.

Not Me did it.

2010-05-12T17:02:00.003-05:00

'Don't Blame Me' Is Refrain At Gulf Oil Spill Hearing

As if you hadn't been able to guess what would happen at this hearing.

Newman (CEO of Transocean) countered that there is "no reason to believe" the blowout preventer didn't work and that it might have been clogged by debris shooting up the well. Instead, he put the focus on subcontractor Halliburton, which was encasing the well pipe in cement before plugging it just hours before the deadly blast that killed 11 workers.

When I heard that Halliburton was the subcontractor used at the Deepwater Horizon, I cringed. But I've read enough about how this drilling site was unusual in a number of ways to not automatically blame this particular bad guy this time. Just because they sucked at drilling in Iraq doesn't mean they are the only ones that fracked up this time.

Salazar wants to divide the embattled Minerals Management Service into two agencies: one charged with inspecting oil rigs, investigating oil companies and enforcing safety regulations, and another to oversee leases for drilling and collection of billions of dollars in royalties.

This sounds like a very obvious idea, one which other countries have already done. It seems pretty obvious to me that the part of the agency that collects money if the oil is flowing shouldn't be the same as the part that decides if it's safe to keep the oil flowing. I'm pretty sure MSHA doesn't collect coal revenue, but I'll be rather upset if I'm wrong.

And lest we forget part of the reason MMS needs to be put back in order...

Besides Shell, the energy company employees mentioned in the report worked for Chevron, Hess and Gary-Williams Energy. The social outings detailed in the report included alcohol-, cocaine- and marijuana-filled parties where certain employees of the Minerals Management Service were nicknamed the "MMS Chicks" by the energy employees. The companies paid for federal workers to attend football and baseball games, PGA Tour events, Colorado ski trips, paintball outings and "treasure hunts," investigators found. Washington Post

"Allergies"

2010-05-11T19:46:00.001-05:00

Food Allergies Less Common Than Believed, Study Says

So I was going to post something about Kagan and the Supreme Court, but I'm not sure I really have that much to say. (Except that it's weird to have a nominee younger than my mother. Happy Mother's Day, Mom.) And I know I said I wanted to rely less on my dear NYT, but this one is about food allergies! I love/hate food allergies!

...the true incidence of food allergies is only about 8 percent for children and less than 5 percent for adults, said Dr. Marc Riedl, an author of the new paper and an allergist and immunologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet about 30 percent of the population believe they have food allergies.

Firstly, drop all those people who are "allergic" to milk. That's an intolerance to lactose sugar, not an immune response. Then there are all those people out there who subjectively feel better when they exclude some item from their diet. Don't tell me your "corn allergy" presents as lethargy and irritability; if eating a watermellon only made me sleepy and crabby, I eat all the watermelons on earth, forever. Then you have to wonder about people who may have out grown their allergies, but still avoid foods because, how are they to know? Would you eat the peanut butter and risk anaphylaxis? I wouldn't, but I gave up ambulance rides for the recession.

For their report, Dr. Riedl and his colleagues reviewed all the papers they could find on food allergies published between January 1988 and September 2009 — more than 12,000 articles. In the end, only 72 met their criteria, which included having sufficient data for analysis and using more rigorous tests for allergic responses.

When I first started having a reaction to foods, I was in college and had access to a goodly number of journals through the library. I looked up my particular syndrome, I found very little. It was interesting to see lists of "if you can't eat this, watch out for this" but I wanted more numbers, and more about the proteins that were the trigger. Yea... no.

I read what I could, even if I didn't totally understand what was being discussed, and was left with the impression that there was still a lot to be figured out. It's good to know that some one has waded into this mess and is going to make some sense of it.

Someone told me I should do this again.

2010-04-09T18:51:00.000-05:00

Time to re-evaluate.

I started this blog with the idea that it would force me to keep up on reading the news. I had just left college a few months before and college (especially a rural college like I went to) is not conducive to staying informed about the world. I spent most of my time in class, studying, sleeping, cooking, and dancing. What time was left was usually spent out doors. When I started the blog, I was looking for a job, when I got one (though not in my field) the blog waned. When I got a job in my field, and moved to a new state, the blog pretty much fell off. Now the job starts very early, 5am, and ends in the early afternoon. That does leave me time to write up a little something something should I put the effort in.

But the other thing that has changed is the way news works today. Well, I should say it is still changing. My beloved NYT might switch to a partial subscription service, betting that junkies like me will pay for quality content. I probably would, if the cost is not too great. I mean, I'm not paying for dead trees to be shipped to me, I can't be expected to pay the dead tree price.

Locally, the consensus seems to be that the Chi-Trib is, ah lets say, lacking. The website is the news from a coalition of news outlets (TV, newspaper, radio) with the Trib banner up top as opposed to the TV station's or the radio's. It doesn't help that Chicago politics are foreign and confounding to me, my knowledge of local geography is shaky at best, and out here in the 'burbs it all seems so distant. It can also be said that my heart is still back in the Twin Cities and I just can't get into Chicago period, much less care about the news.

When I started this blog I got most of my news from newspapers on the internet, with some TV on the internet thrown in. I still get most of my news from the internet (hello, blog), but I have diversified. For one, my google reader blog list has grown, leading to more blogs with original news content. Two and three have to do with the way I work. For the first four hours of my day I work by myself, so for the first two hours I listen to Morning Edition on WBEZ. It's a fairly good ratio of local and national/international news, with still-some-what-enigmatic traffic reports ("It's 34 minutes inbound on the Ike.") After my co-workers show up I have time to take a break, drink some tea, and read my Newsweek. I know that Newsweek underwent a dramatic restructuring and layout change recently and there are serious questions about the viability of print news in general, but it works for me. I like the layout with a huge opinion section, page after page of full page text. I like that I can sit, drink my tea, read one or two of those pages full of text and then get back to work.

So when I restart this blog things will be different. I think I might move away from the prescribed topics and just trust that I'll get a balance of national and international, politics and science and other. Local will probably be dropped, it might get picked up again when I move back to the Twin Cities. I might post about books I'm reading because books are awesome. IF a blog has original news content I may very well use it.

I'm still not going to blog about blogs that are blogging about blogs. You can see what blog things I have shared on google over there somewhere in the margins.

Peace,
E.M.

2008-11-24T08:48:00.001-06:00

At a New York Seminary, a Green Idea Gets Tangled in Red Tape

At one point, the seminary waited three months for the city Department of Transportation’s permission to drill into the sidewalk, Ms. Burnley said. “The conversation went like this: ‘What is the status?’ ‘It has no status.’ ‘Do you need more information?’ ‘No, we have what we need.’ ‘Then how can we get it moving?’ ‘You can’t get it moving.’

Lets get one thing clear from the start, I do not think that bureaucracy is always the problem. Most bureaucracies were put in place because there was an issue that needed to be addressed. People were putting bad wiring into houses, the electricity would short, start a fire, and burn down three houses; answer, electrical inspections. But we all know there comes a point when the bureaucracy becomes so dense it takes on a life of its own, and halts progress.

I think we might see more of this as individual groups take the Green Energy movement into their own hands. From making sure solar panels are installed on homes properly, to deciding if your neighbor gets to put up a small wind turbine, to colleges installing larger turbines and geothermal heat pumps. We need to be able to get this technology in use, but we can't give it a free pass. Look at corn-based ethanol and the damage it has done to local aquifers; we can't let the Green-ness of a thing blind us to the potential problems. But neither can we let a good idea die in the thickets of red tape.

But are there enough people like Ms. Burnley and Mr. Frawley — human drill bits — to drive through the crust of the status quo? She laughed. Not drill bits, she said, “human battering rams.”

I hope so, we badly need them.

Small nuclear reactors, Safe?

2008-11-10T09:00:00.000-06:00

Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes
I don't know how I feel about this at all.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.
....
Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.

First off, I'm pretty much opposed to nuclear power across the board. The reactors may be safe, but it's the waste that is dangerous for millennia. Then again, I'm not sure I trust the reactors either. That said, these do have a pretty strong potential to bring electrical power to many people without producing CO2 on site.

CO2 output is only part of what we need to look at when trying to make decisions about new sources of energy. We have to look at every component, and we have to look at each one from cradle to grave as it were. Where would they get the radioactive fuel? Where would it go in the end? So they're encased in concrete, what about regions that are prone to earthquakes?

'You could never have a Chernobyl-type event - there are no moving parts,' said Deal. 'You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it's too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.'

I beg to differ Mr. Deal, the whole contraption has to move to get there, as does the spent fuel and the refill fuel. Transport of spent fuel rods around the US has been opposed time and time again.

I think I would want to hear a LOT more about how this works before I let them install one in my neighborhood. But I live in a nation where we have the luxury of opposing things like this. I'm sure there are plenty of places where the need for electricity outweighs the (apparently minimal??) risks.

Obama's Speeches

2008-11-09T22:50:00.006-06:00

Some time back in the fall of 2004 I downloaded Barack Obama's keynote address from the Democratic Convention. I don't even remember how I got it. But here it is for you to enjoy. Keynote 2004.

And to have things come full circle, here is his victory speech from Tuesday. Victory 2008.

I do have the acceptance speech from this year's convention, but weighing in at 42 minutes and 39 mb, (even after I edited out him being introduced and about five minutes of "Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much.") I don't know where anyone would host it for free. If you want it (cause you're a huge nerd like me) let me know.

My day at the Polls

2008-11-06T20:42:00.005-06:00

I got up before dawn on election day and drove a half hour in the dark to a north east suburb of the Twin Cities. I was a DFL "challenger" though the DFL didn't want us challenging anyone (besides, the law says I would have to have personal knowledge that the person couldn't vote, hard to do when you don't live there). Really I was there to be the eyes and ears of the party and to report back any problems.

I sat myself down in a corner and got ready to spend the day people watching. I sat behind the same-day-registration tables and watched people register and reregister to vote. There were two major themes; the problem with the same-day-registration law, and the wonderful people that came and really really wanted to vote.

First, the problem with the current law. I'm not sure when the law was written, or when it was last updated, but there are some obvious problems. To register a voter has to bring a form of photo ID to prove that they are who they say they are, and a bill with their name and current address. Or they can get a voter registered in that precinct to vouch for them, a staff member of a group home will also work.

So the problem is that only specific bills are accepted and some things that logically should work, don't. Signed leases? Nope. Car payment? No. Medicare payment? Try again. Paystubs? Nope. There were even two different people who thought maybe an alcohol citation would work. They didn't. (Quote of the day: "I was in an accident I wasn't aware I was in.")

The other problem I saw could be addressed if a signed lease could be used; there were at least three couples that had moved on the first of the month. All they had were leases, no bills had come yet.

But here is where I start to feel better about democracy. ALL of the people that had moved came back with someone to vouch for them, or a receipt for a new drivers license. One couple was turned away twice and the second time the guy was talking like he wasn't going to come back. But they did, separately, and both voted. Even the woman who was probably 6 months pregnant. A young man that was registered with his wife earlier in the day, was brought back with a friend to vouch for him and they brought another woman with them. More than that, he realized that he lived down the hall from the couple at the other end of the table and could have vouched for them too.

But the most heart warming thing I saw was a older woman, blind and deaf, with an aid who registered and voted. It must have taken the better part of an hour for them to fingerspell the entire registration form, the entire ballot and her vote.

This woman is from my state.

2008-10-18T11:26:00.003-05:00

Bat.Shit.Crazy.

She's long been known to be rather nuts, but this takes the cake. Now, when you look at Congresswoman Bachmann's record of being a right wing nut, and the current beautiful shade of blue that the state is polling on the presidential election, you might wonder what the heck is going on. Bachmann is from the 6th district which is primarily the northern suburbs, from the Wisconsin border, up over the Twin Cities and west out past St. Cloud. A blend of rural and suburban that leans a little red. Bachmann was elected in 2006 and her reelection seemed well inside possible despite being, well, bat shit crazy. But apparently this little outpouring of McCarthyism has lead to a small surge in donations to her opponent. This might get interesting.

But there is something more here. When you look Bachmann's apparently sincere belief that Democrats and Democratic party's nominee for president might be anti-american, and put it in the same context as the vile things said about Obama at Republican rallies, there is an obvious theme. These are the equivalent of a Freudian slip. The party officials can only talk about "palling around with terrorists" for so long before their supporters make the logical connections and start saying the things the party officials could never get away with. Its one thing when supporters with only the power of the vote and their voice scream things at rallies. But you know the meme has grown bigger when an elected official, up for reelection no less!, thinks she can get away with saying this on a national cable channel.

One more thing, even the most liberal, left wing, progressive elected Democrat in the federal government believes in our democracy enough to try to change it from the inside. That faith that our government can be fixed, and is not fundamentally flawed, is proof enough for me of their pride in America and the American system of governance.

Addendum: I made that lol, what luck that Bachmann used Impact as her campaign font!

DEBATE!

2008-10-15T08:23:00.000-05:00

The last debate is tonight and McCain has been saying he will utter the name William Ayers at some point, which is probably a guarantee that he wont.

I'm not a drinker, but if McCain says "that one" again, I think we can all agree that you have to finish your drink and blame the person to your right.

This will take years

2008-10-14T07:52:00.001-05:00

Judge postpones hearings for RNC 8

The court cases stemming from the RNC protests are starting to wind their way through the courts. Many people arrested and charged with felonies at the time have had their charges reduced to misdemeanors. Which is good for them, but it hints that the original charges were more for intimidation than anything else.

There were eight people arrested on the Friday before the RNC. Because they were arrested after the close of business before a three day weekend, they were held until the last day of the convention. They had their hearings postponed today at the request of their lawyers.

Criminal complaints allege the eight are members of an anarchist group that was attempting to disrupt the convention and assault police.

Oh, gosh, anarchists are SO scary. Yeah, uh did you see what those cops were wearing?

Photo credit: Zak Forde

I don't think anyone wearing anything less than the same really stood a chance at hurting these cops. (And there were literally hundreds more just like these three.) Wanting to do something, and actually having the ability are not the same thing. I've talked about this before. Plotting to do something is different than gathering information and writing violent poetry, but there's still that part where they didn't actually disrupt the business of the RNC.

Larry Leventhal said he and other defense attorneys working on the case can't mount good defenses until they see reports from various law enforcement agencies that provided security during the RNC.

"It's important to know what the charges are based on so we can prepare a proper defense," said Leventhal. "There are reports from the FBI -- we have nothing, and they were all over the place. These are reports from other jurisdictions -- we have nothing. All we have are materials from Ramsey County."

I have no doubt that the lawyers will get what they need. If there is nothing else I have learned while working as Queen of the Copy Machines at a law firm, its that lawyers are really good at getting what they want, and being a real pain in the other side's ass when they don't.

Enzymes vs. Metal Catalysts

2008-10-13T07:49:00.001-05:00

Mushroom enzyme could strip pollutants from fuel cells

This had to come up sooner or later.

They have demonstrated that laccase, an enzyme produced by fungi that grow on rotting wood, can be used as a cheaper and more efficient catalyst. Fuel cells use chemical reactions — such as that between hydrogen and oxygen — to produce emissions-free electricity. But current technology is expensive and requires electrodes that contain rare metals such as platinum.

When we talk about sustainable technology, one of the things that often gets over looked is the metals. Especially the heavy, toxic, and rare ones. And especially the ones mined in terrible conditions in poorer nations. We really don't like to think about the way our lovely technologies are dependent upon plundering the natural resources of other nations.

Scientists and entrepreneurs have come up with ways to replace the oil used in energy and the oil used in making some plastics with other things. So this step of replacing metal catalysts with biological enzymes was bound to start happening.

Materials that can hold the enzymes, such as carbon, are cheap and plentiful. But the second problem could prove a more difficult problem to crack. "This has puzzled scientists for decades, why are enzymes so large?" said Fraser Armstrong, a professor of chemistry at Oxford University. "There are a lot of people trying to work out how to make small molecules do the same thing. If you could do that, you could put a thousand times more enzymes on a surface."

This is where it pays to try to figure out the shape of the enzyme and the way the active site works. There is probably a large portion of any given enzyme that goes towards putting it in it's proper place in the cell, and interacting with other proteins, that wouldn't be needed in a fuel cell. The key is to take away the parts you don't need, keep the parts you do and then get the cell to produce this new stripped down protein in high concentrations. That takes some serious protein analysis and genetic modification. This biotechnology is decades out. But its being thought about and worked on, that's the first step.

Hey there sweet stuff.

2008-09-26T08:21:00.001-05:00

New Salvo in Splenda Skirmish

As you might guess by the name of this blog, I am skeptical of things that taste sweet, but are not sugar. Fake sugars are a good way to trick your body, but I'm really not sure that tricking your body is a good thing. Now there is more information out on the newest artificial sweetener that you knew would be out at some point.

The latest salvo comes from Duke University researchers, who have published a study that says Splenda — the grainy white crystals in the little yellow packets — contributes to obesity, destroys “good” intestinal bacteria and prevents prescription drugs from being absorbed.

Gosh, its bad for you. Splenda looks like sugar to your tastebuds, but enzymes that use the glucose and fructose are more discerning than that. All the regular hydrogens have been stripped off and replaced with chlorine atoms.

But wait a second, there is more to this article and this study than just the bad things about Splenda.

But the Duke study was financed by the Sugar Association, the lobbying group for the natural-sugar industry and a chief competitor to and legal adversary of Splenda.
......
One of the lead researchers of the study, Dr. Mohamed B. Abou-Donia, said Monday that the Sugar Association had “no input” into the study’s findings and conclusions.

Ah, hahaha. You knew it had to be something like that.

But really, I've never seen the point of artificial sweeteners. If you're trying to cut down on your intake of sugar, suck it up and stop eating it. Eating these things that taste sweet get your body ready to deal with sugar, but when nothing resembling sugar comes, things are bound to get a little (if not a lot) off kilter. If something tastes good that usually means that its okay to eat, but that only worked before society got around to inventing things that taste good and will kill you; lead acetate for one, ethylene glycol for two. Our bodies have evolved to eat glucose and fructose, and intentionally misleading our bodies on something this fundamental to our biology, just doesn't seem like a good idea.

What happens on Wall Street doesn't stay on Wall Street

2008-09-25T08:29:00.000-05:00

Withdrawals hit Bank of East Asia

I'll admit that I don't really understand economics, and global economics even less. But I know what a run on a bank looks like.

The Bank of East Asia has denied rumours that it is in financial trouble, after thousands of customers queued to withdraw their savings.

And I can tell that this is not unrelated to the things that are happening in New York.

It also said that its total outstanding exposure to US bankrupt bank Lehman Brothers was HK$422.8m (£29m), and to US insurer AIG was HK$49.9m (£3.5m).

I'm feeling real optimistic about life right now....

Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.

2008-09-24T08:21:00.000-05:00

Study Finds Major Shift in Abortion Demographics

Abortion. THE topic for lighting any social situation on fire. Want to kill a great party? Want to drive a wedge between a new couple? Let's talk about where life starts, the role of the government in utero and watch it all burn.

But many times this is pure speculation; many people who can talk about abortion till they are blue in the face have never had one, I'd guess that fully half will never even get the chance (I'm looking at you gentlemen). So, who is having abortions?

During that period [1974-2004], the proportion of abortions obtained by women younger than 20 dropped steadily, falling from 33 percent in 1974 to 17 percent in 2004. For those younger than 18, it fell from 15 percent of all abortions in 1974 to 6 percent in 2004. At the same time, the proportion of abortions obtained by women in their 20s increased from 50 percent to 57 percent, and the share done for women age 30 and older rose from 18 percent to 27 percent.

Younger women are having fewer abortions, while older women are having more. Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, 35 years ago. The group of women that make up the 30 and older has gone from people born 30 years before Roe v. Wade, to people born right around the same time. The women that were 18 in 1973 were late Baby Boomers; women that were 18 in 2004 were, well, me and my friends.

So what hypothesis are being tossed about to explain these changes?

"A lot of policymakers are stuck 30 years back when most women getting abortions are teenagers and college students, and that isn't so much the case these days." (Rachel Jones, a senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute.)
.....
"Birth control is the best way to prevent unwanted pregnancies," said Laurie Rubiner, vice president for public policy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "Unfortunately there's a large number of uninsured people in this country, and if you are uninsured you are less likely to have access to affordable health care, including affordable birth control."
.....
Michael J. New, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama who works with the Family Research Council, attributed the drop in teenage pregnancies to a combination of factors, including increased contraceptive use, more teenagers delaying sex and state laws requiring parental consent.

"The states with the most active pro-life laws have seen the biggest abortion declines," he said.

[Remember, Family Research Council is more aptly called the Patriarchy Research Council]

While I think the first two hypothesis are much smarter than the last one, I think there might be a generational argument to be made. My parents are late Baby Boomers, and the social pressures about sex and abortion have changed drastically from when my mother was my age. I've long believed that the more society represses sex, the less healthy it becomes. The harder you push the line that sex is only for marriage the more pre- and extra-marital sex there is and the more risky it will be.

So as sex has become something its okay to talk about, the safer and healthier it has become. Safer and healthier sex leads to fewer pregnancies and fewer pregnancies lead to fewer abortions. Despite the push of the Patriarchy groups and the Bush administration for Abstinence Only Education, there is more knowledge out there about safe sex than ever before. The youngins can hop on the internet and learn more about sex than their sex-ed teachers could tell them about.

In conclusion, read Dan Savage's column. It is the best sex advice out there paired with the most hilarious kinks out there.

Register to Vote!

2008-09-23T08:29:00.001-05:00

Minn. voters nearing record registration number

Voter registration in Minnesota is on pace to hit an all-time high.

This is a very, very good thing. Getting people registered is very important. In most states, if you don't take the time to register, you can't vote on election day.

But we Minnesotans are lucky, we can also register at the polls. And let me tell you, the Republican's HATE this. The two sides can pretty much be summed up like this; Democrats don't want anyone who should vote to be turned away, Republicans don't want anyone who shouldn't be allowed to vote to do so. Democrats err on the side of more people voting, Republicans err on the side of less people voting. The people that show up and register at the polls tend to be the working class, the poor, the people that are too busy to register before election day. These people tend to vote for Democrats. Now you see why Republicans don't like this whole, register at the poles thing.

Nearly 3.13 million people are already registered to vote, just shy of the number who were on the rolls after the election in 2004. That's out of a possible 3.7 million eligible voters.

In 2004 Minnesota had 2.8 million people vote in the presidential election. That worked out to about 77% of those eligible. I hope we can get at least that many on election day this time round.

Check to make sure you're registered here.

Babies Everywhere!

2008-09-03T17:43:00.000-05:00

So by now we've all heard thatSarah Palin's daughter Bristol is pregnant. This was revealed to quash rumors that Mrs. Palin's youngest son was actually her grandson by Bristol.

The republicans have been trumpeting about how brave the senior Palin was in choosing to continue the pregnancy upon learning that the fetus had Trisomy 21, Downs syndrome. Now they're going on about how great and brave it is for underage Bristol Palin to not terminate her pregnancy.

But hey wait a minute, if Sarah Palin had her way her brave choice would never have existed. There would be no choice to make, brave or otherwise. And I wonder how much of an informed choice young Bristol was really offered.

Before being picked for the VP slot on the Republican ticket, Palin was going to talk at a lunchon here in St. Paul with Phylis Schlafly. Basically two hard working career women talking about how much women need to be at home taking care of the children. As we chanted out side the Xcel Center on Monday, "This is what hypocrisy looks like."

I'm just sunburnt

2008-09-01T20:51:00.000-05:00

I was in downtown St. Paul today, but I stayed along the official protest route and saw nothing outside the regular bored looking riot cops standing on the side walk. I didn't get maced, sprayed, detained, arrested or had sound grenades lobbed at me.

However, many of the riot cops have been busy running around after the RNC Welcoming Committee and others (Funk the War was one I heard of). There were some windows downtown were smashed. And the pepper spray, sound grenades and smoke bombs have been flung. Some journalists have been arrested along with the demonstrators.

But there are still arrests being made, on Sheppard (the road we take to work in the morning) Harriet Island (where protesters are supposed to be able to camp) and on the bridges over to said Island.

I've stopped noticing the sound of helicopters, and noticing only when there aren't helicopters overhead.

Other bloggers will cover this better than me, and if you want to keep on top of it as only the internet can let you, head over to Coldsnap Legal Collective's twitter stream. But I'll tell you what its like at work tomorrow. I already know that some of the windows I walk past every day were busted in.

101st Post!

2008-08-30T19:44:00.000-05:00

And its about the goddamn Republicans taking over my city! Yay?

I've made a map of the Controlled Zone and its access routes into and around (but not through) said Controlled Zone. Don't try to take your car or your bike through there. Be careful taking yourself into there as well, those cops are antsy and those Republicans are evil.

Map!

Welcome to the RNC

2008-08-30T09:51:00.000-05:00

Authorities raid, search protesters' hub

Cops have raided the meeting site of the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anarchist group long planning to protest the RNC and the Republican warmongers infesting my fair city.

The Pioneer Press did not see the warrant. But witnesses quoted from the warrant, which was read aloud by authorities. They said authorities were looking for "items that could be used for direct action techniques, ranging from computers, Xboxes, Xbox games, Molotov cocktails and matchstick heads."

Okay, I may be 23, but I've never been much into videogames, anybody out there in internet land want to explain to me why the cops would want Xboxes? Did they break their Wii? Has Microsoft released some special tutorials on how to bomb the Xcel center that are only available on Xbox?

In related news, Downtown St. Paul was weird yesterday during lunch. There were more people out, but it wasn't really clear how many of them were cube dwellers gawking and how many were honest to god Republicans. Except for that one woman with really blond hair, really big pearls and a portly husband in a suit jacket and a cowboy hat; they stood out like a sore thumb, looking really confused and haughty.

All the mailboxes were taken out, and the mail in the office can't be over a certain weight and we have to hand it directly to the mail carrier. How exactly sister dearest will get to her coffee slinging job an hour earlier in the heart of the control zone is still being ironed out.

Iraq and the Olympics

2008-07-24T11:53:00.002-05:00

Iraq Team Banned From Olympics

I'm not sure how this is going to play out, but it seems to me to be a damn shame.

The IOC suspended Iraq's national Olympic committee in June after Baghdad dismissed elected officials and installed its own people who are not recognized by the IOC.

.............

The IOC says the Iraqi government did not accept an invitation to come to its headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, to try to end the dispute.

Granted they were sending all of 4 people, but there is symbolism in sending people to the Olympics. It sends a message of stability (though sometimes its the stability of a dictatorship) and stability is something Iraq has been sorely lacking in. And I'm sure the athletes are very disapointed, I can't imagine what it would be like to not be able to go to the olympics because of government interference.

We've seen this before

2008-07-23T08:04:00.001-05:00

Ex-EPA Official Says White House Pulled Rank
This is the sort of thing that has become so common under this administration that I don't know if I really have anything more to say on the topic.

Yesterday, however, former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett -- who resigned last month and has since divulged key details about how President Bush and his deputies have influenced the agency's decisions on climate policy -- testified before the committee that Johnson had concluded that California's request was legally justified -- until White House officials ordered him to reverse the decision.

What's that line from that little shit Grover Norquist? Ah yes,

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” – The Nation, 10/12/2004

I'm not sure its small enough to be drowned in a bathtub, but I'm pretty sure that its starved and beaten enough that it can't do its job properly. The EPA knuckles under the White House, the FDA can't figure out where the salmonella in the salsa is coming from, and the VA won't (can't?) cover the medical bills for returning vets.

Bureaucracies get a bad rap. When they are good, they are very very good, but when they are bad, they are horrid. And you only remember the time it took 8 hours at the DMV and forget all the times things run smoothly. The EPA needs to be able to do its job without the politicos mucking things up. Sure the politicos are needed so that it can get paid, but its job requires an objective view. And you can't get an objective view with the White House breathing down your neck or choking you with the purse strings.

Thank goodness the 20th of January is approaching (I'm not too worried about the 4th of November.)

Bush administration wont read emails it knows it wont like.

2008-06-25T12:03:00.005-05:00

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

They didn't like what the E.P.A. was going to tell them about greenhouse gases, so they didn't open the email. How juvenille.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

In order to get the administration to even read their emails, the E.P.A. has to rework them so that they offer no substance, no oppinion, no scientific fact. The Bush administration wants nothing stronger than white bread reports, since anything more would upset their world view that global warming, although happening, is not the danger we scientists and concerned citizens make it out to be. The reason is the same as it has ever been; aknowledging the dire threat of global warming compels them to do something about it, and that would hurt the big corporations that support the Republican party.

Simultaneously, Mr. Waxman’s committee is weighing its response to the White House’s refusal to turn over subpoenaed documents relating to the E.P.A.’s handling of recent climate-change and air-pollution decisions. The White House, which has turned over other material to the committee, last week asserted a claim of executive privilege over the remaining documents.

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Fratto, the White House spokesman, said the committee chairmen did not understand the legal precedent underlying executive privilege. “There is a long legal history supporting the principle that the president should have the candid advice of his advisers,” Mr. Fratto said. Emphasis added.

Not that he'll actually listen to it.

Dear Public Masturbator

2008-06-15T19:52:00.007-05:00

I dunno about you Dad, but mine prefers a beer, Mom's the liquor drinker. I also don't know about your dad, but mine was a hippie skateboarder in the 70's, not a booty chasing booze hound. He still is, but now its bikes. He made pancakes in the morning, played with bikes, and went grocery shopping for the family.

Happy Father's Day.

Regards,

E.M.

The Story of Underfunded Mandates and Tomatoes

2008-06-11T08:43:00.003-05:00

F.D.A. Reports Progress in Tracing Salmonella

167 people are sick with a salmonella infection from certain types of raw tomatoes.

The agency warned consumers over the weekend to avoid certain raw red plum, red Roma and red round tomatoes and products containing them. Cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes and those sold with the vine still attached are not associated with the outbreak, officials said.

This pops up from time to time. But with food traveling farther and being spread farther, its harder to pin point things and to regulate them. Think how much more trouble Dr. Snow would have had if the water from Broad Street was being shipped, nearly unregulated throughout Europe.

But the incompetence of the current administration overwhelms even my interest in epidemiology.

In November the food and drug agency released a “food protection plan,” but the Bush administration did not ask for the money to finance parts of it until Monday night. The health and human services secretary, Michael O. Leavitt, said on Monday that he would amend the administration’s budget request by asking for an additional $275 million for next year, $125 million of which would go to food protection.

I feel I might need to kick my cynicism up a notch. Unsurprised is not enough, one must now assume that whatever part of the government was put in place to take care of whatever is falling apart now, is currently massively underfunded.

Substance and Misogyny

2008-06-08T18:24:00.003-05:00

I am hesitant to wander into this discussion because it has erupted elsewhere in great spewing volcanoes of vitriol and bile. But as someone who caucused for Hillary and was later disappointed by some of her choices, I would like to try to maybe talk about this carefully.

Misogyny alone did not kill her campaign, but it did play a role. There were substantive disagreements I, and many others, had with some of the ideas she put forward. I can't support a summer gas tax holiday, and I thought the 3AM add was a little tasteless. But I don't expect that I will always agree with a candidate or politician on all issues, and am willing to overlook somethings in the search for a viable alternative to the waning Republican stranglehold.

One thing that is markedly different between the Clinton campaign and the Obama campaign is the structure of the support. Clinton was much more involved with insiders and people who have been doing this all their lives. Obama's supporters tended to have come into their own politically much more recently. Grassroots wont always get you elected, and lord knows you can get elected without them, but this time around, grassroots was more productive and more profitable. Just how it went this time.

That said, there was plenty of misogyny that was spewed out. Its one thing to bring up that a gas tax break would not be passed on to the consumers, but eaten as profit by the oil companies. Thats a substantive critique.

"I have often said, when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs." -Tucker Carlson

That, I think we can agree, is not a substantive critique of any part of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Moreover, that specific comment is something that could be applied to any uppity bitch that scares Tucker Carlson, so really any of us. Tucker Carlson is an easy target, but many of the non substantive comments were pure misogyny. See Kristen Schaal.

What about those questions that walked that uneasy line between pundit drool and honest criticisms of her policy proposals? All those questions that wouldn't have been asked if she were a man? Those comments with pregnant pauses, meaningful tone of voice, those vocal cues that have come to be the modern wink and a nudge? That is where all this gets really nasty. When some hear a comment and think that its something that should be asked, and others think it would never even come up if there were no women in the race. We could hash every comment, try to come to a ruling of misogynist or just stupid, but I don't really want to see this at that high of a resolution. I'd really rather focus on getting a Democrat in the White House, and more in Congress.

The political world keeps on spinning.

2008-05-21T08:36:00.009-05:00

I supported Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday, and when I went to my district convention. I still think that she's a wonderful person, a superb Senator and would make a great president. But an absolute inability to admit defeat, to the point of moving the goal posts is a little much.

Neither Senator Obama nor I have won the 2210 delegates required to secure the nomination. And because this race is so close, still separated by less than 200 delegates out of more than 4,400, neither Senator Obama nor I will have reached that magic number when the voting ends on June the 3rd. Source

The talkers on MSNBC last night were saying that this is positioning, that this is a way to make sure that, come the right moment, Clinton can get something in return for bowing out. My father was talking (over the TV talkers) about how Hillary would be good for the VP slot. I'm not 100% sold on that idea, but he was making good arguments.

We are anxious for November around here. We're crunching numbers, looking at maps and graphs, talking over the cable talkers, spinning our own yarns about where this is all going to go. I can barely wait.

No Boomer, actually you don't know what its like out here.

2008-05-11T15:14:00.004-05:00

Here's a pair of articles, neither about the US, but talking about the same trend and I'm willing to bet that the same is true here.

After the boomers, meet the children dubbed 'baby losers'

'Some talk of a war between the generations, but that's a little simplistic. It is more that the system means that the haves are keeping what they have and no one is helping the have-nots,' said Chauvel. 'The big determinant in France now of success is not your educational level but the wealth of your parents, if they can support you during your twenties as you fight your way into a closed employment market.'

Young people entering workforce still earning less than parents did

Across all age groups, median salaries for full-time workers have changed little in 25 years. Workers today make, on average, a mere $53 more than they did in 1980, when adjusted for inflation, according to the census.

One could argue that this is the US, not Europe or Canada, but I seriously doubt that the demographics there are really that much different than the demographics here.

But as the boomers retire, surely jobs will open up. Maybe.

The looming retirement of the baby boom generation and the labour shortage that's expected to ensue could, however, spell good news for young folks anxious to enter the labour market or earn more cash.

Still, Morissette cautions the jobs may not materialize.

"In the face of labour shortages, some firms will make use of foreign outsourcing of services and will use labour abroad to fill up their orders," he said.

"These labour shortages might not necessarily lead to wage increases for younger workers."

Lehmann added there's also a good chance young people struggling to find well paying work today may simply be too old to take advantage by the time the market opens up.

Great.

So the boomers retire, here in the US they get on to the already stressed Social Security roster, and the people that are supposed to be earning money to refill the coffers, can't earn enough to build the stability that the middle class needs.

I'm not expecting to live beyond my means. I don't want a big house, two big cars and a huge TV, but I want to be able to buy a house in the next five to seven years. I want to be able to afford a child. I want a job that puts food on the table. I know that my grandparents gave my parents the down payment on the house I grew up in, and I'm not too proud to accept that kind of help. But I want to make it on my own, and that looks harder and harder everyday.

By the way, congrats to all the new college grads. I've been out here in the real world for a year, and let me tell you, that shock you're feeling, your parents don't actually know what its like.

The Age of Oil Must End.

2008-05-10T12:27:00.007-05:00

Clearly I've been neglecting this. I've got a steady 9 to 5 at a law firm thats been a steady 8 to 6 as The Big Case got ready to go to trial. But the case is settled into its court room and my part is pretty much over until the case ends in a few weeks. So I'll be back up to posting three or four times a week. Hopefully. Anyway, since I haven't posted in weeks I don't feel bad about not being on my usual topic schedule.

Oil Costs To Offset Stimulus Package

Since Congress and Bush unveiled an economic stimulus package Jan. 24, the price of the OPEC basket of crude oil has jumped by $32.51 a barrel, raising the cost of U.S. oil imports enough to offset the entire stimulus package over the course of the year.

Does this really surprise anyone? The stimulus package was supposed to be a shot in the arm for an economy where most people's ARMs had already exploded. The price of oil will never go down, maybe it will go down a little bit, small daily or weekly fluctuations. But like global climate change, the small day to day changes can't mask the relentless march upward.

"We're engaged in a painful experiment in discovering how high the price [of oil] has to go before it really, really hurts, before it hurts enough to slow demand globally," said Adam Sieminski, chief energy economist for Deutsche Bank.

He's dead on. Something has got to give because we can't go on like this. We've known for some time now that eventually the economics of limited resources would drive the price of oil beyond what is reasonable.

The price of oil will never come down.

No gas tax holiday, no ethanol blend, no hybrid technology, no fuel efficiency standard, no maximum purchase at the pump, no drilling offshore, in oil sands or national wildlife reserves can change that. Even if we could get the cash price down, the climate change cost is, its increasingly obvious, more than we can really afford. The heyday of petrochemicals must end. We have no choice in that. What we can choose is what kind of withdrawal from oil addiction we will have. Are we going to deny that this is killing us until we hit rock bottom, or are we going to come to terms with whats going on here and get help?

Canada moving to ban BPA

2008-04-18T07:46:00.003-05:00

Canada Likely to Label Plastic Ingredient ‘Toxic’
I've talked about this before, and I basically came up with, "Eh, we're poisoning ourselves anyway." So now the Canadian government is taking steps to ban BPA.

The public and industry will have 60 days to comment on the designation once it is released, setting into motion a two-year process that could lead to a partial or complete ban on food-related uses of plastics made using B.P.A.

This is the sort of thing that takes time; there are plenty of industry groups that are going to want to talk the Canadian government's ear off. But ultimately, the health of the people and the environment will hopefully win out.

Jack Bend, a professor of pathology at the University of Western Ontario in London and one of the Canadian government’s outside scientific advisers, declined to comment on what action Health Canada would take. But he said he was concerned about the widespread use of B.P.A.

“The first thing is that it’s an endocrine disrupter, there’s no question about that,” Professor Bend said, referring to the chemical’s impact on the hormonal system. “Should people that are exposed to these low levels of this chemical be outrageously concerned? I’d err on the side of not creating panic. We simply don’t know. But we should find out.”

We seem to be quite good at letting one part of science get far ahead of other parts. We make chemicals and integrated them into our lives before we have even scratched the surface of how the chemicals will effect our bodies or other living things. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring really got us moving on looking closer at the environmental impacts of the chemicals we put out there. But the closer we look, the worse it seems to get. Dioxins in Vietnam, PCB's in polar bears, endocrine disruptors in hermaphroditic fish and on and on and on.

Maybe I'll use my liter Nalgene to hold knitting needles. Oh, and I like that the NYT used the same picture in both articles.

UPDATE: Nalgene has decided to drop BPA containing plastics from their production line. They didn't go so far as to say that BPA was dangerous, but said that consumers would prefer plastics without BPA. NYT notes that the canning industry says that there is no replacement for their use of BPA. I don't buy that for a second.

How graphs can lie to you

2008-04-12T07:43:00.003-05:00

I want to discuss graphs for a bit. When we were wee first years at college, we spent a fair amount of time talking about how to make graphs well. Anyone can make a graph in Excel, but you need some knowledge to choose the right graphs for the right sets of data. You need to know when you need error bars and how to choose the right size error bars. Scale is an important aspect as well. Have a look at these two graphs.

This screen capture was taken Friday night, little before 7 pm central time.

The two graphs set the front runner as the whole and the other candidates as portions of that whole. No matter how many people are added, Obama and McCain stay as 100% of the available graph. But the more important issue is that it makes it look like Obama and McCain have the same amount of support, and that Hillary is way behind McCain. Thats part of the reason I started making my own graphs.

This graph is linked to the data on my google spreadsheet, it will update.

This graph puts all six of the candidates that ABC/Facebook is tracking on the same scale. Its pretty clear how huge of a lead Obama has among the Facebook crowd. Its also clear that Hillary is actually ahead of McCain by about 35,000 people, but thats rather hard to see since the difference is much smaller relative to Obama's lead.

So when you see a graph, look for the scale and just because two bars look the same doesn't mean that they're the same value.

Pawlenty shows no love for St. Paul

2008-04-08T07:43:00.003-05:00

St. Paul officials: What does Pawlenty have against us?

Governor Tim Pawlenty signed the bonding bill, but not before using the line item veto to cut $208 million in projects, many of them in St. Paul. But wait, St. Paul is hosting the RNC later this summer and Pawlenty's name has been floating around as a possible veep pick. Is it really such a good idea for Pawlenty to write St. Paul out of the bonding bill, when the city is about to go on display for the national convention of Pawlenty's own party?

"What does the governor have against St. Paul? What have we done?," (Sen. Sandy) Pappas asked.

"This is just a blatant attack on St. Paul and its residents, I think, and on Alice Hausman and her constituents," added (Sen. Ellen) Anderson.

DFL Rep. Alice Hausman is the lead bonding negotiator for the House and is from St. Paul. She attended the governor's briefing, but left before it ended.

There are a few things from the back story to keep in mind; the reason we have a bonding bill that is such a big deal is because Pawlenty made a "No New Taxes" pledge, and Pawlenty had said before that it was too big earlier, so the partial veto is not unexpected. Its the way St. Paul was singled out that is surprising people. The phrase bandied about this evening was a paraphrase of the New York Daily News; "Pawlenty to St. Paul: Drop Dead"

You know, that third headline might not be that far off from the current situation...

La Nina doesn't negate climate change

2008-04-07T07:58:00.002-05:00

Global temperatures 'to decrease'
La Nina is once again going lead to cooler temperatures this year but that doesn't mean that the earth isn't warming overall.

"When you look at climate change you should not look at any particular year," he (The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud) said. "You should look at trends over a pretty long period and the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming.

"La Nina is part of what we call 'variability'. There has always been and there will always be cooler and warmer years, but what is important for climate change is that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming even if there is a temporary cooling because of La Nina."

But just you wait, the Republicans and other climate change deniers will seize on this summer's cooler temperatures to tell us again that anti-business liberals are just making this up. Michelle Bachmann will come up with something about how its all just made up by the CFL manufacturers.

Now I don't expect all of my elected officials to understand the quantum physics behind how CO2 converts infrared radiation to heat (I only just understand it), but I do expect them to be humble enough to not blow their mouths off about things they really don't understand. In my more cynical moments I'm sure that the strong ego and thick skin needed to run for national office kills off any naturally occurring humility that might be in them.

Enough of that, back to the science. La Nina and El Nino, as Jarraud says, are natural variations. Global warming and the resulting climate change are long term changes due to levels of CO2 in the atmosphere that don't seem to have occured in the past 400,000 years. (For a sense of scale, the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago.) My question is how are the El Nino and La Nina events changing as the global mean temperature rises? How the ocean temperatures will change as the air temperature changes is not clear. Will the Pacific Ocean be even warmer in El Nino and even colder in La Nina, or will the difference get smaller so that the effect gets smaller? Or will the events happen more often?

The problem we run into here is how far back our data goes. We've got air temperature readings in the US going back to the Civil War, but we've only been taking satellite readings of the temperature of the oceans for a few decades at most. We just don't know exactly whats going to happen, we have more questions than answers, and I have to admit that it scares me sometimes.

Where do your drugs come from?

2008-04-04T07:44:00.000-05:00

In our household, we take our prescriptions to a locally owned pharmacy, one of the last in the area I'm sure. But we need to look further back; a few weeks back there was a contaminant found in the popular blood thinner heparin called attention not just to drugs made in China, but to what the actual chemicals are derived from. In the case of heparin, the answer is pig intestines, and the pictures of Chines peasants cleaning pig intestines in their homes has made some people think.

Seeking Alternatives to Animal-Derived Drugs

Before we genetically modified bacteria to take over the job many drugs were made from animal products, insulin and growth hormones to name just two. But some things just don't transfer well, and heparin is actually a mixture of disaccharides and just one doesn't work the quite same as all of them together. That makes the synthetic version, with only one of the disaccharides, more expensive and less effective.

“Any time you take a tissue or an extract process from a tissue from one species and put it into a another species or even another animal, you run the risk of unwanted pathogens that you didn’t know were there; that’s been responsible for repeated problems over the course of time,” Dr. Brown said. “If you can do something without taking tissue or a product from another being, you’re ahead of the game.”

Specifically they discuss the threat of prion disease, like mad cow but from pigs. With chemicals that are extracted, you don't have to worry about rejection because, hopefully, its pure enough to not have anything that would provoke an immune response.

But the article doesn't focus on heparin, but rather on the enzymes that people with cystic fibrosis need to live and digest food properly. A pharmaceutical company is working on a process that uses microbes rather than pigs to produce the enzyme, much like insulin is now, but its not finished yet.

“You don’t ever know what’s going to happen to pigs,” said Dr. Campbell of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. “We wanted redundancy in the system and a backup. If there was a recall of these products for six months, a number of people would die.”

Thats what it really comes down to, redundancy. If there is only one source, that source could be animal, vegetable or mineral, a recall is a recall. Thats another reason pharmaceutical monopolies are bad, if one company goes under, has their plants shut down, or relies on the same tainted Chinese manufacturers, there are humans that would suffer for lack of their drug.

Just in case you weren't sure...

2008-04-02T18:16:00.002-05:00

Its true, I'm a huge nerd. This graph I made tracks support of the major candidates based upon the Facebook/ABC US Politics application. I record the data using Google documents over my lunch break, but I also have an Excel file on my computer that I update in the evening.

There are a couple things that I find interesting. The first few are in the raw numbers; Obama has a commanding lead, Paul has a strong contingent, and McCain only broke one hundred thousand supporters last week. The next few interesting things are in the change in support from one day to the next. McCain gains more people per day than Clinton. The day after Gravel announced he would seek the Libertarian Party's nomination, he started gaining supporters. For awhile there, the net gain of people for all three Republican candidates was less than McCain's because Huckabee was loosing so many supporters. The next interesting thing is on sheet two, each candidate's daily gain of support as a percentage of the net gain. Obama's daily gain is consistently sixty to seventy five percent of the daily gain. He is gaining more people than everyone else combined every day.

Now the graph of Change in Support will, I think, be more interesting as the sample size increases. But for now I think it just shows that less happens on Sundays.

The thing to keep in mind is that this is far from a representative sample of Americans, and probably not even a great sample of young Americans. Facebook started as a site for college students with a valid .edu email address. While it has become an open site, I don't think it would be unfair to guess that it still skews toward the college student. Plus, the people who have this application and have used it to show support for a particular candidate probably care about national politics a bit more than the general population.

So if this isn't a representative sample, is it really that interesting? I think so and not just because I made it. It does show that there are at least a million people who have gone out of their way (but not terribly far) to show their support for a candidate for president. Will this translate into votes? Votes by young people? I don't think you can tell that from this data. Especially since there really isn't anything like it to compare it to.

How the Youth of Today get their news

2008-03-27T09:05:00.004-05:00

Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On
Not surprisingly, this article about how the young share news online was emailed to me by a good friend. The general issue of the article isn't new to me, but maybe it is to the journalists. Rather than sitting down and watching the nightly news, or reading the entire paper, the young read articles online, especially ones recommended by friends, and then pass links on to others. There are some interesting lines that really capture the idea.

Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

College students don't have the time to sit down and read the NYT or watch the 5 o'clock news. The news has to get to them, and that comes as emails, link shares on Facebook and instant messenger. But even if its delivered straight to our inbox, most people I know are more likely to read something that has been recommended by someone they know. When you use your friends as a filter, you know what kind of a filter you are getting; George likes stories about China and other Asian countries, Ann only sends stories about abortion and birth control, and Crazy Joe sends stories about Ron Paul with mocking comments. Plus, you automatically have someone you can discuss the piece of news with.

In the days after Mr. Obama’s speech on race last week, for example, links to the transcript and the video were the most popular items posted on Facebook. On The New York Times’s Web site, the transcript of the speech ranked consistently higher on the most e-mailed list than the articles written about the speech.

I think the reason is pretty clear; we are aware that punditry is not real information. "Political analyst" is a term thrown about with so little care and tossed on to so many talking heads on the churning 24 hour news that many don't trust that the "analysis" we're getting. We have seen why we need to go to the source document, and its not because the dust of history has clouded meaning, but because the slime and mud of the pundits has obscured the truth of each action and word.

Maybe we should worry that the "real" news isn't getting through, that people of like minds will filter the news so that we only hear things that confirm what we already believe. Will the college student that only cares about football only get news from other friends that care about football? Maybe, but is that really any worse than the local news that feeds us soft stories from the national feed about rescued puppies rather than the violence is Darfur, Burma and Nepal?

I'm a young adult, and my friends are people I respect and like, and what they find interesting in the news is probably interesting to me too. My friends consistently care about what is going on in the wider world. I can't say the same for some media outlets that report international news with the sigh of a child cleaning her room.

What happens if you don't vaccinate.

2008-03-21T16:32:00.001-05:00

Public Health Risk Seen as Parents Reject Vaccines

One of my favorite bloggers, Orac over at Respectful Insolence, blogs a fair bit about the "Autism is caused by vaccines" crowd. He's been noticing that for many its not just about the unproven link to autism, its really just straight up anti-vaccination silliness. And as public health officials have been warning for ages now, if you don't get your children vaccinated, you risk an outbreak. Well, its happened, and the anti-vaccine folk seem to be unapologetic.

“I refuse to sacrifice my children for the greater good,” said Sybil Carlson, whose 6-year-old son goes to school with several of the children hit by the measles outbreak here. The boy is immunized against some diseases but not measles, Ms. Carlson said, while his 3-year-old brother has had just one shot, protecting him against meningitis.

“When I began to read about vaccines and how they work,” she said, “I saw medical studies, not given to use by the mainstream media, connecting them with neurological disorders, asthma and immunology.”

Ms. Carlson said she understood what was at stake. “I cannot deny that my child can put someone else at risk,” she said.

Vaccinating your children is not sacrificing them. To acknowledge that you are putting other children at risk of potentially deadly disease, and yet do nothing, thats selfish. The article latter says that some see the anti-vaccine parents as a parasites benefiting from the protection of the vaccinated majority. Parasite is a little strong, but the analogy is apt.

Alexandra Stewart, director of the Epidemiology of U.S. Immunization Law project at George Washington University, said many of these parents are influenced by misinformation obtained from Web sites that oppose vaccination.

“The autism debate has convinced these parents to refuse vaccines to the detriment of their own children as well as the community,” Ms. Stewart said.

Whats that line about a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing? This is one of those times when the inability to tell the difference between real science and quackery is dangerous. Usually its benign, or it will con you out of some money. Some more dangerous quackery will lead people to delay or refuse treatment. But this is dangerous to more than just the poor schmuck that gets taken in. This is dangerous to the rest of us.

There is substantial evidence that communities with pools of unvaccinated clusters risk infecting a broad community that includes people who have been inoculated.

For instance, in a 2006 mumps outbreak in Iowa that infected 219 people, the majority of those sickened had been vaccinated. In a 2005 measles outbreak in Indiana, there were 34 cases, including six people who had been vaccinated.

The disease can use the unvaccinated as a petri dish, changing its genome and then jumping over to the vaccinated. Now different enough from the vaccine to spread among the vaccinated, the outbreak really gets going.

So get your children vaccinated, not just for their health, but for all of ours. The risks are small, the benefits huge. Its like paying your taxes or not breaking the sewer system. Its just the good thing to do.

The key is subtlety

2008-03-19T13:52:00.001-05:00

Justices Overturn Louisiana Death Sentence
Yes, there is still racism in this country, and no its not just private citizens being idiots. There is still racism entrenched in our justice system, and not just in the drug laws, or the racial profiling by the cops.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the conviction and death sentence of a Louisiana man who killed his estranged wife in a jealous rage, finding that the trial judge “committed clear error” in excluding black jurors from the trial.

A black man was convicted and sentenced to die by an all white jury in the south. In 1996. Were talking about stupidity that belongs back in 1954, not in my short lifetime.

Sure the prosecution had some excuse for not seating black jurors, but those excuses hardly hold up in the light of day.

Justice Alito wrote that the prosecutor’s explanation for dismissing Mr. Brooks — that he was worried that Mr. Brooks’s nervousness over his studies would incline him to vote against a death sentence to avoid long deliberations — was not believable.

“The implausibility of this explanation is reinforced by the prosecutor’s acceptance of white jurors who disclosed conflicting obligations that appear to have been at least as serious as Mr. Brooks’s,” Justice Alito wrote, noting that a white juror who had expressed concerns over his wife’s illness and the conduct of his independent contracting business had been seated.

This is the sort of racism whose subtlety has allowed its practitioners to hide behind a shrug of the shoulders and a claim of ignorance. (There is a sexism, closely related, that does the same.) But just because this bigotry doesn't scream on the streets, doesn't mean its any less hurtful, any less ignorant or any more acceptable. So much of the racism and sexism in this country is like neutrinos that pass through every barrier and stream through all of us all day. But unlike neutrinos, these bigoted ideas hurt, cut and kill.

I'm glad that the Court was able to see this for what it is and send a message to all the lower Courts that this is not acceptable. You cannot pack the jury then shrug your shoulders and say "What? That's just coincidence!" Maybe we really can have a legitimate discussion about race in this country. As John Stewart said last night about the coincedentally timed speech by Sen. Obama, "So at 11am on a Tuesday a Politician talked to Americans about race as if they were adults."

Lets talk about this like the adults we are.

More lead from China and Reebok's money

2008-03-18T12:52:00.001-05:00

Reebok's deadly lead charm draws $1 million federal fine

Two years after a Minneapolis boy swallowed part of a charm bracelet given away with a pair of athletic shoes and died of lead poisoning, the shoes' maker, Reebok, has agreed to pay the government $1 million to settle allegations that it violated the Federal Hazardous Substances Act.

One million isn't that much for a company like Reebok, but it is more than the government usually fines. But this is not a case where the facts were really in question. The charm the little boy swallowed was 99% lead and there is no question that it directly lead to his death.

Reebok International representatives could not be reached for comment Monday night. But Heuer (the family's attorny) said company executives and lawyers were "compassionate and professional" about the recall. They issued a quick public apology and did not force Jarnell's family into extensive litigation, he said. "Most corporations, when something like this happens, get up and deny, deny, deny," he said.

Sometimes even the big corporations, with legions of lawyers, have to admit that they made a huge mistake. Thankfully no one else died and the recall went smoothly.

The question remains, however, when Reebok designed this little charm and contracted out the job, how did they end up with a product that was nearly pure lead? I'm sure that they didn't ask for a lead charm, but when they contracted it out, did they check the reputation of the manufacturer, or did they just look at the price?

I'm starting to think that "Made in China" should be treated as a type of warning label in and of itself.

Unionizing in the AG's office

2008-03-11T17:17:00.005-05:00

Union battle heats up in A.G. Swanson's office

Since there is a lawyer in my family, I've been hearing rumblings for a while. The allegation of union busting isn't new, but some of the attorneys have gone public about what they've seen.

Lawler said she was on the job just a week when an attorney, who introduced himself as the head of the office social committee, took her out for coffee and delivered a strong anti-union message.
...
Lawler said the same attorney later approached her and other employees, asking them to sign what she described as a loyalty petition.

"The second paragraph is all about how great Lori Swanson is, how she's the first attorney general to graduate at the top of her class, how she's the first attorney general with such extensive public and private experience, how she never brings politics into the office, how she's all around a great leader," Lawler said. "And then the last paragraph is about how we decry the union's tactics, we don't want them representing us and they don't speak for us."

While union busting tactics have been around for as long as there have been unions to bust, but Lori Swanson ran for the AG seat as a Democrat with an endorsement from the DFL. If we had known that she was going to actively suppress unionizing, she wouldn't have gotten the DFL endorsement and that would have seriously hurt her chances at getting the job.

But this isn't over yet. Lawler was interviewed on MPR and in that interview she brought up some ethical issues she had encountered on the job along with the aforementioned issues of union busting. For bringing up her concerns in public, rather than through the proper channels at the AG's office, Lawler has been suspended.

AG's office defends suspension of attorney

During an interview, Lawler also described wrestling with ethical issues in her job. She said one issue came up when Swanson directed her to quickly file lawsuits against mortgage foreclosure consultants even though the attorney general had no defendants in mind.

"And that was kind of the case across the board," she said. "She's just have an idea about a lawsuit, and she'd want it filed as quickly as possible. The biggest was she wanted people who'd be willing to appear at press conferences."

Those ethical issues, which Lawler also shared with other reporters, were specifically referenced in the letter from Deputy Attorney General Karen Olson notifying her of the administrative leave.

Interesting timing don't you think?

Back in the first article they make it clear that this isn't just about having a union or not having a union. Its about having the State Attorney General's office staffed with good lawyers who want to be there.

Jody Wahl left the attorney general's office in January after 25 years. Wahl said she saw more than 50 professionals leave the office in the past year, but it appeared to her that Swanson wasn't interested in the reasons.

She said the attorney general never recognized the union discussion as a management issue.

"There wasn't an understanding that this was truly an internal, staff-driven effort to have conversations with their colleagues about whether obtaining union representation would work to benefit the work of the attorney general's office," Wahl said. "Instead, it appears there was a sense that this was driven by outside forces, by former political rivals or former staff members, or whatever. And that isn't the case."

I have a feeling this is going to get worse before it gets better.

Slow float to England.

2008-02-28T08:13:00.007-06:00

Cocaine galore! £7m of Colombia's finest washes up on Cornish beaches

A while back a shipment of rubber bath toys fell into the ocean and washed up all along the western coast of North America. It was an interesting story of modern shipping and sea currents. Another example has come to light, but the the objects washing up are not rubber ducks, turtles and beavers.

The origin does not take much detective work; some of the packages are marked "Colombia" in faded writing. But how they ended up in the sea remains a puzzle.

The age of the packages, and the presence of warm water-loving barnacles suggests they may be floating all the way across the Atlantic from the Caribbean. One theory is that smugglers dumped the cocaine overboard as they were pursued by American or British anti-drug patrols.

Huge bundles of uncut Columbian cocain are washing up on the shores of England and the English are a little worried about it. Firstly, because each bundle is a huge amount of cocaine and secondly because of its purity. Because it hasn't passed through the usuall layers of dealers, this stuff is dangerous.

Sure the, cocaine is dangerous and finding it on a beach would be an adventure, but the fact that it floated all the way from the Caribean on the Gulf Stream? Thats the really cool part.

Oil companies and Clarence Thomas

2008-02-27T08:03:00.001-06:00

Supreme Court Weighs Exxon Valdez Damages

The federal government indicted Exxon on five criminal charges, with potential penalties totaling $5 billion. The company soon agreed to plead guilty to three counts with a fine of $25 million, or less than 1 percent of the total potential criminal fine, plus $900 million in civil fines to be paid over a 10-year period. In addition, the company paid $2.1 billion in cleanup costs, and several hundred million dollars more to fishermen for their lost summer catch. In all, the company would pay $3.4 billion.

But the money that Exxon doesn't want to pay is the punitive damages. The punitive damages are the fines that the court assigns to the defendant in punish them for being stupid and breaking law. Its supposed to discourage the defendant and its peers from doing it again. You can't put a company in jail, but you can fine them lots of money.

And boy, they sure don't want to pay it. Exxon has taken this all the way to the Supreme Court.

But Exxon contends that because this accident occurred at sea and is governed by maritime law, which is the sole province of the federal courts, there should be no punitive damages at all.

Part of me wishes I could know more about the law here, but then I remember that I don't really want to be a lawyer and thats probably what it would take to really understand this.

But I do know one thing about what will happen at the Supreme Court today; Clarence Thomas wont be asking any questions.

Bridges and Vetos

2008-02-26T07:53:00.000-06:00

House and Senate override governor's veto

A $6.6 billion transportation bill is now law after both the Minnesota House and Senate voted for the first time to override a veto from Gov. Tim Pawlenty. The House voted 91-41 to override the governor's veto, and the Minnesota Senate followed shortly after by a vote of 47-20.

The Minnesota State House and Senate passed a ¢5 per gallon increase in the gas tax to pay for an increase in the transportation budget. But Pawlenty took a "No New Taxes" pledge before he was elected and, while he has increased "fees" on tobacco, he stood by his tax pledge and vetoed the bill. But everyone with any memory voted to over ride the veto, because we had an effin bridge fall into the river and people DIED!

If I seem a tad bit worked up over this, thats because I am.

I honestly don't understand why Pawlenty did this. The bridge collapsed, and he vetoed a bill to help pay for the replacement, upkeep and maintainence of other bridges in the state. Plus other road repairs and some public transit. For ¢5 more per gallon. ¢5.

He must really want to be the most anti-tax governor out there to veto this. I can't think of an analogy that fully conveys the stupidity of vetoing a small tax to pay for something with such emotional appeal. (And how often is there an emotional appeal to infrastructure?) He should just eat some puppies and get it over with.

Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Delano, questioned some of the first-term Democrats on the floor about whether they campaigned for a tax increase last election.

"You folks, again did not campaign a couple summers ago on the mantra that you were going to raise taxes. That was Minnesotans' biggest fear about turning the reins of this government over to your party," said Emmer. "Same question to you, Rep. Madore. Are you going to vote to raise the taxes the hard-working families of your district in this family?"

Yes I am and I'm going to tell you why," responded Rep. Shelley Madore, DFL-Apple Valley. "The bridge went down on Aug. 1, and a gentlemen from my district died. He left four children and I went to his funeral. I stood there with his family and I looked at them in the face. And when you're asking me, 'Is his life worth a nickel a gallon?' I'm telling you it is"

The Republicans claim that the gas tax and the bridge are separate issues. They are separate issues in so much as we can never know if the bridge would have stayed up if the transportation budget had been increased earlier. But the gas tax is going to the transportation budget, and while that is not paying for the replacement 35W bridge, it is going to (at least try to) prevent another bridge from falling down.

Lots of people voted this past week.

2008-02-24T20:07:00.005-06:00

Wisconsin Primary results
Obama 646,007
Clinton 452,795
Others 12,483
Total 465,278

McCain 224,226
Huckabee 151,201
Others 31,832
Total 407,259

Whats interesting is that the combined total for McCain and Huckabee is less than Clinton alone got. While the Republicans had only about 58 thousand less people, they had more people voting for someone other than the top two candidates. This has been a running trend, when both parties have their primaries on the same day the Democrats have a larger turnout than the Republicans. There could be many reasons for this. Maybe the Democratic race is inspiring more people to come out, but the Republican race is just as tight. I think its pretty clear that the middle of the political spectrum is not happy with the way the country has been run for the past seven years. And the result is more people showing up for the primaries in general and the Democratic primaries in specific.

But this was hardly the most exciting election that took place in the past week. Pakistan had an election and Musharraf's ruling party was soundly defeated. I can't find a reference right now, but I saw in the paper that the party received about 15% of the vote. Whats amazing to me is that the party has admitted defeat. But as I told my mother the other day, I'll really believe democracy has come to when someone else comes to power. Thats not to downplay what has finally happened in Pakistan, but rather to say that I don't trust Musharraf to not act like so many dictators that have come before and make some bid to hold on to power. I am cautiously optimistic about the democracy in Pakistan.

NYT as a classroom with McCain as the example

2008-02-23T13:22:00.005-06:00

The McCain Article
Not precisely DC drama, but rather a discussion about a story about DC drama.

The article included reporting on Mr. McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee led by Mr. McCain. Since publication of the article, The Times has received more than 2,000 comments, many of them criticizing the handling of the article. More than 4,000 questions were sent via e-mail to The Times on Thursday night and Friday. Editors and reporters who worked on the article answered some of the questions on Friday.

The journalists who worked on the article go on to tackle some of the questions that people raised. As they do that, they talk a bit about how a news paper is run and how journalists report on a story. When asked about the irony of the editorial page endorsing McCain while the news side was working on this story, their reply was this.

A. The short answer is that the news department of The Times and the editorial page are totally separate operations that do not consult or coordinate when it comes to news coverage and endorsements or other expressions of editorial opinion. We in the newsroom did not speak to anyone at the editorial page about the story we were working on about Senator McCain. They did not consult us about their deliberations over endorsements of the presidential candidates. I’m the political editor, and the first I knew of the McCain endorsement (and of the endorsement of Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side) was when I read them in the newspaper. In all of our internal discussions about the news story subsequent to the endorsement, I do not recall anyone bringing it up.

The fact that I already knew this isn't the interesting part. What interests me is that the paper took the time to sit down and explain this to the public. It felt like I was reading a journalism instructor patiently explaining things to a class. Answering these questions fully and carefully makes me respect the paper more than I already did.

On the internet, any wanker can pound out a bitchy letter about whatever is getting their panties in a twist. And more often than not, that bitchy letter is full of mistakes, in both logic and often grammar, and a fundamental misunderstanding of whatever it is thats pissing them off. Going through and addressing each problem is usually an exercise in futility, because even if you convince one person that they're wrong, there are hundreds more to take their place. So for the NYT to do this, and do it so well and so thoroughly is really classy. Sometimes I feel kind of bad for using the NYT for so many of the stories I comment on, but then they go and do something like this. This is why I read the NYT and this is why I don't feel bad about it.

Tomorrow I'll put up summaries of all the things I wanted to write about this week, but was too tired and busy to sit down and write. There were elections in Wisconsin and Pakistan, and how often do those things coincide?

A bus full of secrets and hydrazine.

2008-02-18T12:46:00.004-06:00

Missile Defense Future May Turn on Success of Mission to Destroy Satellite

I know this satellite thats coming down on our heads has been blogged about a lot but thats because it so darn interesting. I mean its the size of a bus, its full of secret spy stuff and deadly gas, and it might fall on our heads unless the military can blast it out of the sky. Life rarely sounds this much like a movie.

Often compared to hitting a bullet with a bullet, the shooting down of ballistic missiles with an interceptor rocket is difficult, as an adversary’s warheads would be launched unexpectedly on relatively short arcs — and most likely more than one at a time.

So it should be easier for the Standard Missile 3, a Navy weapon launched from an Aegis cruiser in the northern Pacific, to find and strike a satellite almost the size of a school bus making orbits almost as regular as bus routes around the globe, 16 times a day.

Even if they manage to hit this one, its not exactly something they can point to and say "Look we can do it, we need 80 gazillion dollars to make us safe from the terrorists with ballistic missiles!" But watch, they'll try. And they probably will get the money. We don't seem to be able to say no to the military and its demands for money.

But what really interests me in all this is the fuel, hydrazine, that if it were to break only upon landing and not before, would be really bad. Hydrazine is N₂H₄ and its corrosive and noxious as a liquid. If it crashed much of it would vaporize and that would lead to a cloud of hydrazine gas. CNN reports Gen. James Cartwright saying that the cloud would be the size of two football fields.

So shooting it down is probably a good idea. I wonder if we'll be able to see an explosion? The hydrazine is on there as fuel and while the reaction isn't an oxidation reaction its still highly exothermic. Its also taking place while in orbit and outside of the atmosphere so that probably would effect any exothermic reactions that would take place. I don't know enough about explosions to speculate more than that. I hope we get to hear more about the physics of it.

Illegality of ideas

2008-02-14T10:36:00.000-06:00

Appeal judges clear Muslims of terror charges

Britain's overzealous terror laws have been in the news again. Unlike last time people are getting out of jail rather than being put in.

Five young Muslim men yesterday had their terrorism convictions quashed after judges concluded that reading Islamist material was not illegal unless there was "direct" proof it was to be used to inspire violent extremism.
....
They were prosecuted under section 57 of the Terrorism act 2000, which makes it an offence to have books or items useful for a terrorist. Striking down the convictions, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips said: "[Section 57] must be interpreted in a way that requires a direct connection between the object possessed and the act of terrorism."

This position is closer to what I was talking about when I discussed the case of Samina Malik. The ideas, the information, is not what should be illegal; it is the action that should be illegal. What is strange is what one of the defendant's lawyers said.

Malik's solicitor, Saghir Hussein, said: "The judgment means there must be a direct connection between possession [of material] and acts of terrorism. A book about how to make bombs would come under section 57, not a book that contains ideological material. It's just like reading Mein Kampf does not make you a Nazi."

A book with bomb directions would be illegal? A bomb isn't hard, its all about making pressure in a confined space that breaks when the pressure reaches a certain point. The concept isn't hard, but successful construction without premature explosion or arrest is the hard part. Making it is the hard part, as it should be.

Maybe there is something in British culture that I'm missing. There is probably something about there experience with terrorism as practiced by the IRA that is coloring this. There may be a larger percentage of the population that could be described as radical Islamicist. I'm not sure, but I know that I don't like the idea that possesion of knowledge is a punishable offence.

Polar Bears and Caucuses

2008-02-06T20:40:00.000-06:00

A Cool Dip for a Warming Planet

This is my alma mater and last year I took part in the first polar bear splash. That time it was a cold rainy February day and we never got a fire started. Looks like the weather was a bit better this year. I still know many of the people in the slide show.

In other news, my precinct had a turn out of 178 people where it usually has between 12 and 25. The presidential break down was 98 Obama, 74 Clinton, and 6 others. The school we met at had three other precincts as well and the line to find out which room to go to was out the door. So I grabbed a one of the maps someone had printed out and helped.

Everyone I've talked to said that the turn out at their caucus was amazing too. Even the one person I know who went to the Republican caucus said that they had twice as many people as they had been expecting. An interesting night to say the least. Back to the regular schedule tomorrow.

Forget Mardi Gras, It's Super Tuesday!

2008-02-05T08:04:00.000-06:00

Today is Super Tuesday. Here in Minnesota, we democrats are part of the DFL, the Democratic Farmer Labor party. (I've been told that in alley cat races it stands for dead fucking last, but I assure you, the DFL here is not dfl.) And the DFL has a caucus system that has been explained to me a number of times and that I've been part of only once before. I'm pretty excited about the whole thing and I figured nows as good a time as any to editorialize a little more directly.

I'm caucusing for Hillary. Come November I'll vote for the Democrat. I'm caucusing for Hillary not because I don't like Obama, or because I like the way she dresses. In reality, both candidates are equally far from my actual position. I'm much further left than most of the elected Democrats. So on the issues, each candidates strengths and weaknesses pretty much even out. And choosing between potentially the first woman president or the first black president seems to me like trying to choose between cake or ice cream, homemade pancakes or homemade French toast, a nice long soak in a tub or a full massage. You get the point.

So then why Hillary, and not Obama who appeals to a more hopeful view? My peers seem to like him, at least according to Facebook. But my more conservative peers on Facebook seem to think Ron Paul is a great guy.

So I'm taking that with a grain or two of salt.

I'm caucusing for Hillary because I want to see a woman in the White House really running things. This country needs to get back on track, and all the great talk about where were going means shit if the train is still off the rails. I've been talking this over with my mother and with a close friend. My friend and I came to the conclusion that we like how Hillary handled all the Monica shit. She decided to stay, and we think its because she saw more in the relationship than just a promise of monogamy. We think that that shows an ability to see the complexity and depth of a relationship.

Plus Hillary has come out in support of reinstating the Office of Technology Assessment, which is like turning to all the scientists out there and giving them a big thumbs up.

WaPo picks up PIN

2008-02-04T12:13:00.000-06:00

Inhaling Pig Brains May Be Cause of New Illness

Fittingly, the first person to detect a faint signal in all the noise was the interpreter.

The 33-year-old woman who worked for eight years working with Spanish-speaking patients at a medical clinic in southern Minnesota noticed something familiar as she translated the story of a young meatpacker last September.

Earlier last summer, she had heard a version of it from two other workers at the same slaughterhouse, and had told it to their doctors, who were different from her current patient's. When the consultation was over, she pointed this out.

Nothing new in this Washington Post write up on PIN, but its nice to see a bigger paper pick this story up.

Pig Brain Mist and PIN

2008-02-02T17:46:00.000-06:00

There are two write ups on this one; the secondary source is "Austin pork plant investigation zeroes in on pig brains" and the primary source is "Investigation of Progressive Inflammatory Neuropathy Among Swine Slaughterhouse Workers".

The Minnesota Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control have given an update on the disease down in Austin, Minnesota. The Star Tribune nails down the idea that has been floating in my head since I first heard about this.

Pigs and humans are such biologically similar mammals that researchers are trying to find ways to use pig organs to replace diseased human organs. So it's not surprising that if the immune system creates cells to attack proteins from pig neural tissue, those immune cells might also attack human neural tissue as well, experts said.

If the body is attacking an influx of nervous tissue from pig brains, it isn't much of a leap for that same attack to be wrongly redirected to the body's own nervous tissue. Our bodies are very good at attacking invading infections, but unfortunately when that system turns back on the body things go badly. See lupus, MS and Chrohn's.

I don't think that we evolved to be able to deal with liquefied and aerosolized brains. Touch them, eat them yes; inhale them, no. So it doesn't surprise me that things might go wrong. I wonder who came up with the idea of using air to remove the brain anyhow? Bet they feel pretty bad right now.

The experts have decided upon a name for the cluster of symptoms, progressive inflammatory neuropathy or PIN for short. They looked at other large slaughter plants in the US and found two more that were using pressurized air to blow the brains out.

To date, no cases of PIN have been identified in association with workers at the Nebraska plant. However, several workers at the Indiana plant have been preliminarily identified with neurologic illnesses and similar histories of exposure to head-processing activities at that slaughterhouse. Further assessments of these patients, and additional measures to identify other workers with illness, are being conducted in Indiana. As a result of this investigation, all three plants have stopped using compressed air to extract brain material.

The health officials are also looking to talk to anyone who has worked at the Austin plant since the air pressure system was installed a decade ago. The problem is that the job has a high turn over rate, with many of the workers being immigrants. In December of 2006 a different meat packing plant in another small Minnesota town was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and took away hundreds of workers. So finding everyone that worked at the Austin plant over the past decade is impossible from the start. Which means there is a chance that there is someone out there who might never figure out why their limbs stop working and go weak.

Revere over at Effect Measure has a post about this too. Revere is a public health scientist and credits the medical specialist who was seeing several of the patients. A very good post from a blogger I really like.

When things go wrong in the drug trade

2008-02-01T08:35:00.000-06:00

Tainted Drugs Linked to Maker of Abortion Pill

For all the crap I've given our FDA, its still doing a better job than the Chinese version. There are two things going on here; the cancer drug that is tainted and the mifepristone (RU-486) made by the same company in a different factory that is exported to the US.

The story started with a number of cancer patients becoming paralyzed, some still can't walk.

In September, health and drug officials announced that they had found that the two drugs were contaminated with vincristine sulfate, a third cancer drug, during production. After issuing a nationwide alert, the government announced a wider recall, and Shanghai’s drug agency sealed manufacturing units at the plant.

Its unclear how many people are suffering from this, the Chinese government isn't known for its transparency. But that doesn't mean the don't take drastic measures when the time comes. Just last summer, the former head of the Chinese FDA was executed after being found guilt of taking bribes. It seems to me that they are trying, in there own way, to clean up their act. But it seems to be for the sake of export more than the safety of the Chinese people. I am, however, very much on the outside of this one, maybe it is about the Chinese people, and I only hear the stories when they have to do with how they might directly effect me.

I say that because the article doesn't start with the back story about the paralysis of cancer patients in Beijing. Rather it mentions the bare bones of the problem and the third paragraph starts in about how the company is the only supplier of mifepristone to the US. The article then tells us that this isn't the first time the company has had a run in with one or the other FDA.

On at least two occasions in 2002, Shanghai Hualian had shipments of drugs stopped at the United States border, F.D.A. records show. One shipment was an unapproved antibiotic and the other a diuretic that had “false or misleading labeling.” Records also show that another unit of Shanghai Pharmaceutical Group has filed papers declaring its intention to sell at least five active pharmaceutical ingredients to manufacturers for sale in the United States.

We might see the Chinese crack down on some of the issues we've been seeing in the news; the tainted food, drugs, toothpaste, toys. But I don't think that the results will be for the Chinese people, but rather for the export market. China is very worried about its image right now, more than its worried about doing right by its people.

An Independent Judiciary

2008-01-31T09:24:00.000-06:00

Pakistani Justice Breaks Silence

The deposed chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, has sent a letter to a number of foreign leaders reminding them that, despite his recent travels, Musharraf is not a good man.

Throughout the letter, Mr. Chaudhry referred to the president as General Musharraf, underlining the constitutional questions surrounding the legality of his leadership. Mr. Musharraf was army chief when he took power in a bloodless coup in 1999 and was elected president in 2002 and again last October by national and provincial assemblies. Legal challenges remain related to his dual military-civilian role, as well as to whether he had already served the constitutionally allowed number of terms.

Musharraf is a dictator, and he's trying to play up that that he was (nominally) elected. He tries to down play the harsher things he does. And apparently, while on his travels, he talked trash about the judiciary he has dissolved.

Chaudhry is under house arrest, of course they don't call it that, just like we don't call them prisoners of war. But there are people with guns outside the house that don't let anyone in to talk to him and don't let him out. His daughter snuck the letter out.

Mr. Chaudhry insisted that he would continue his struggle for the independence of the judiciary. “There can be no democracy without an independent judiciary, and there can be no independent judge in Pakistan until the action of Nov. 3 is reversed,” the letter read. “Whatever the will of some desperate men, the struggle of the valiant lawyers and civil society of Pakistan will bear fruit. They are not giving up.”

Despite all the things that have gone wrong in Pakistan, there are still people who are willing to say things like this, to talk about democracy with such hope. People who don't see the will of the people as something that can be bought, sold, ignored, or twisted beyond recognition. There are people who see democracy as an idea that could really work for them.

I suppose thats part of the reason I keep coming back to Pakistan on Thursdays, I want our democracy to work, to really reflect our will. But Pakistan is just approaching democracy, where as we are in an older democracy and we've become so desensitized to it that we can't see the cracks.

The Last Stump Speech

2008-01-30T20:28:00.000-06:00

Edwards Drops Out of Democratic Race

As you probably already know, John Edwards has dropped out. I was at his last stump speech last night at the Carpenters Union Hall here in St. Paul. The wind chill was hovering around -40 F, but the room was packed and overflowing into the hall. I'm sure now that he knew that it was his last night on the campaign trail. So I wish I could tell you that he told us something, gave us a hint or threw in something new. But I don't think he did.

That isn't to say that it was a bad or boring speech, it was a good speech and he knew the crowd. He mentioned Paul Wellstone, talked about universal health care, and getting out of Iraq. The one thing he mentioned that caught my attention was a line about wanting to change the pay-day-loan laws. Thats the sort of thing that speaks to his populism. Pay-day-loans are one of those things that keeps people poor and indebted. Its one of those things keeps sucking people down down down and breaking that cycle could really help people.

There were some people in the crowd that would call out "Shame!" as he talked about the money that the HMO CEO's make while so many people are underinsured. That was an interesting response I've never heard from my usually taciturn fellow Minnesotans. But it caught a bit. People booed and hissed at the right points too. Thats another thing I've not heard much of. My father will hiss at speakers and talking heads, but to hear a whole room hiss, its kinda creepy.

I don't think I'll be able to see Obama when he comes, from what I've read the lines have been absurd. I will try to see Hillary when (if?) she comes.

When you get down to it, common sense has left the capitol.

2008-01-26T17:00:00.000-06:00

Fighting for Safety

There are times when a issue gets weighed down with so many interest groups that the obvious answers get lost. Take this example, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (which has as many issues as the FDA) is trying to stop people's couches from catching fire when people fall asleep smoking.

For years, there has been an obvious way to address accidental fires: requiring tobacco companies to make cigarettes, which are the leading cause of fatal fires, self-extinguishing. But tobacco was exempted from CPSC jurisdiction when the agency was created in 1972, and a 1994 attempt to give the agency authority over cigarettes failed.
...
The alternative was to focus on the furniture that was catching fire. And the tobacco industry, which wanted to avoid further regulation of cigarettes, did its best to steer the CPSC in that direction.

You can stop the fire either at the origin or by controlling the fuel. (Technically you could control the oxygen, but that doesn't really work in this scenario.) That sets up the two main interested groups, the tobacco companies and the furniture makers. But then you look at how to make the furniture less flammable and you see that the most common way is to use brominated compounds. So that adds in the chemical companies that produce these brominated flame retardants (BFRs) have a stake in the game. But that pulls in the scientists that are worried about the effects the BFRs could have on the biochemistry of both humans and the environment. The scientists have some reason to be worried; before BFRs, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) were used as fire retardants and those have some serious heath issues.

Whew. The tobacco companies have historically been quite good at lobing the various branches of government to look past the obvious problems with their product. This is no different.

Increased awareness of the health risks of fire retardants, meanwhile, confronted the CPSC with a dilemma: how to strike a balance between the need to prevent fatal fires and the risk of exposing millions of consumers to potentially harmful chemicals. It was enough of a conundrum to drive away consumer groups, which in recent years have chosen to sit out of the upholstered furniture debate.

The answer is obvious to me. Add the risk of setting yourself on fire to the list of risks you take when you take up smoking. There isn't a good way out of this problem other than making the population less stupid. Getting the tobacco companies to do things takes too long and the chemical option is not safe. The only way out is education and coming to terms with the fact that there are some things that the government can't do.

Besides shouldn't the CPSC be focusing their energy on all the questionable products that are coming over from China? The ones with melamine and lead and who knows what else? I think that might be a better use of their time and our taxes.

Walls fall.

2008-01-24T15:01:00.000-06:00

Palestinians Topple Gaza Wall and Cross to Egypt

Yesterday, Hamas blew open the wall between the Gaza strip and Egypt. Palestinians are streaming across to buy building supplies, food, satellites for TV, sheep and more. With the boarders into Israel still shut, the holes in the wall at Rafah are the best route for goods.

Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, refused in an interview to take direct responsibility for ordering the Egyptian border opened, but said: “We are creating facts. We have to try to change the situation, and now we await the results.”

What an interesting way to put it, we are creating facts. It could be a quirk of translation, but it has a very "I'm taking control of my destiny" ring to it.

“I told them: ‘Let them come in to eat and buy food, then they go back, as long as they are not carrying weapons,’ ” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt told reporters at a book fair in Cairo. This came after his forces had pushed back protesting women from the Rafah crossing on Tuesday.

For their part, Israeli officials said that, if controlled, the border opening to Egypt might allow Israel to lock the door to a Hamas-run Gaza and let the Egyptians handle the poverty and problems of the 1.5 million people there.

How much is this going to change the situation there? The Gaza strip is controlled by Hamas and now has an open boarder with Egypt, while the West Bank is controlled by Fatah and still has boarders open with Israel. I don't know enough about the politics of the region to guess.

By the way, the slide show of pictures is very neat. Seeing people stand on rubble that used to be walls is always compelling. There is something about the idea of these sturdy things falling and not holding anyone back anymore.

Ever seen a pipe burst?

2008-01-22T19:40:00.000-06:00

Water main break closes North Side streets

Hmmm... infrastructure again.

A 36-inch water main burst on Chicago's North Side overnight, collapsing a major street, partially submerging parked cars and rerouting CTA service. For a while, a virtual river ran through a popular neighborhood.

The 80-year-old cast-iron main burst about 1:30 a.m. near Montrose Avenue and Wolcott Street, forcing police to close an area of several square blocks. The CTA briefly shut its Brown Line Montrose station and rerouted two buses.

I have no idea if 80 is old for a cast iron pipe, or if this was just one of those one in a million deffects that wasn't tested for in the 1920's.

"It wouldn't be surprising to see that that the weather played a role," LaPorte said. "It went from very cold over the weekend to warmer temperatures that can cause weakness in the pipe."

I wonder how much variation in temperature there is in the ground under the streets in Chicago.

Rachel Maddow is on Countdown right now, talking about how infrastructure investments can work as an economic stimulus package. That sounds like a great idea, employ people and fix our bridges at the same time. It worked for FDR, I would think that it would work for the next president. Build bridges, community centers, clean up land, plant trees, and on and on. Give the local governments some money earmarked for infrastructure and community projects.

I'm just thinking out loud on this one.

Small town turns down Nobel laureate

2008-01-21T08:10:00.000-06:00

Climate Talk’s Cancellation Splits a Town

When you don't know who you're dealing with, its much easier to make a fool of yourself.

But when some residents complained that his presentation here would be one-sided because no opposing view would be offered, the superintendent of Choteau School District No. 1, Kevin St. John, canceled it.
.....
Those who complained misunderstood the content of the talk, Mr. St. John said, but there was no time to explain to all of them that Dr. Running was a leading scientist rather than an agenda-driven ideologue.

A portion of the community seemed to think they were turning down someone crazy tree hugger. But this isn't about laughing at the people of the town for acting like back water hicks; this is about the fact that the superintendent caved into the pressure and treated the scientific consensus as a merely one opinion that would need another to balance it out. Truth is not determine by a vote.

Some students however are smart enough to recognize when their elders are not as wise as they claim.

The controversy here intensified when a local student’s article criticizing school officials was published Monday on the student-created “Class Act Page” of The Great Falls Tribune, a statewide daily.

“I was insulted as a high school student prepared to enter the world I need to hear both sides of the story,” the student, Kip Barhaugh, 17, said in an interview Tuesday. “I don’t feel there is another side. Global warming is not a controversial issue, it’s a fact. We need to be prepared to deal with it.”

Hearing this makes me slightly more optimistic. Just because the other generations are still fighting a pointless "debate" about global warming, doesn't mean we can't see the truth of the situation. We've already figured that part out and are moving on to the real questions; how are we going to take care of this problem?

That sound you here is an entire generation sighing and rolling their eyes as their parents argue about whats happening and why, when they've already started changing the light bulbs and researching how to switch the truck to veggie oil.

Huckabee's Theocratic Tendencies

2008-01-16T08:32:00.000-06:00

I've been manning the copy machines at my mother's office for the past few days, hence the lack of posts. But there was a comment made by Mike Huckabee recently that everyone should find disturbing.

While Huckabee's people are trying to say that Huckabee was talking only about a marriage amendment and calling a fetus a person. Not that I agree with any of that, but it sounds like so much more than that. He's saying that the laws of this country should change in order to be in line with the laws prescribed in the Bible.

Spin as they might, what Huckabee said is out.

"...and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."

Whats that line in the Bible about serving two masters? When the choice in Huckabee's mind is between the ever changing (dare I say evolving?) laws of man and the immutable laws of his god, it should come as no surprise that the reverend chooses his god. While its all well and good for him to chose his god's laws so long as they don't run counter to our laws, our laws say that he can't make that choice for the rest of us. But thats what he's saying he would do if given the power; he would chose the laws of his god for all of us.

I shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong with that.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...

Classy, Bush, real classy

2008-01-10T13:06:00.000-06:00

Bush calls on Israel to end occupation of Palestinian land

Can you tell me when its over?

The US president, George Bush, today called on Israel to end its 41-year occupation of Palestinian land and predicted a peace treaty would be signed by the time he leaves office.

I like to add to that prediction and say that humans will walk on Mars and I'll speak ancient Hindi fluently by the time Bush leaves office. Well, okay thats not really fair. There is a chance that something will be signed, but its going to be about as strong as poorly set jello.

This president has started wars. Thats what the Bush Doctrine is all about, attacking nations before they attack you. And now he's talking about peace? In the Middle East? I think that Jesus guy he prays to said something about this, I think it was something about having a beam in your eye.

So he talks a bit about how he understands how difficult peace will be, and how nice and peace loving all the leaders are, and how we all want peace. He says that a fractured Palestinian state isn't viable, but says it in strangest possible way.

"Swiss cheese isn't going to work."

Yeah, thats a stellar comparison for the leader of our country to be making. Very insightful.

Then he talks about how he understands the frustration of the Palestinian people who have to pass through the check points everyday.

Turning to Israeli checkpoints, he said: "I understand why Palestinians are frustrated driving through checkpoints. I can also understand why the Israelis want a state of security."

He went on to joke that "my motorcade of a mere 45 cars made it through without being stopped."

I'm sure that line is really going to endear him to the Palestinian people.

The Weather in Wisconsin is strange

2008-01-08T12:59:00.000-06:00

January Tornados and Pile ups in the fog.

"I have never seen damage like this in the summertime when we have potential for tornadoes," Sheriff David Beth said. "To see something like this in January is mind-boggling to me. This is just unimaginable to me."
....
The only other tornado to hit Wisconsin in January since 1844 was in 1967, according to the National Weather Service.

I've never been in a tornado, but you can't live in the Midwest and not have spent some time in the basement, hearing the air raid sirens and hoping not to hear that freight train sound. But thats June, July and August. January is supposed to be lots of cold dry air, without any warm moist air coming up. But the weather in Wisconsin hasn't been normal the past few days.

On Sunday there were several pile ups in thick fog and two big ones.

The preliminary investigation shows that some motorists were traveling at least 70 mph above the 65 mph speed limit, said Wisconsin State Patrol Lt. Laurie Steeber said. Steeber said with the conditions, people should have slowed down.

"When there's snow, there's ice, there's fog. The speed limit is too fast,'' Steeber said.

I had a friend call me from the road outside Madison heading south and east. We stayed on the phone almost till she hit the state line. These pile ups were only a few minutes behind her. I checked the weather for her at the time, and visibility in Madison was 0.13 miles. She's a little shaken, but fine.

And while I don't want to blame every little weather quirk on global climate change, there is a larger overall trend of strange weather. And thats what we will see in our weather. You might not experience a net warming, but you will see a change. Warm when it should be cold, dry when it should be raining, floods in parts that are supposed to be dry. How exactly things will change is hard, if not impossible to guess at.

My mother told me a few months ago that she knows something is up because plants that are supposed to die off over a Minnesota winter, haven't been. Things will really be obvious when the insects start moving north. Oh wait, that has already started.

Another genotype susceptible to vCJD

2008-01-07T14:19:00.000-06:00

Brain disease death raises fear of link to BSE meat of 90s

A woman who has died of vCJD, varient Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease aka mad cow disease, did not have the same type of the protein/prion that most victims have.

Her brain was examined by researchers at the Institute of Neurology, at University College London, who found it had an unusual pattern of disease and carried out a genetic analysis. This showed that her version of the prion protein was different from all other previous victims of the infection. In vCJD it is the patients' own prion protein that is subverted by the infection; it alters shape, forming clumps that fatally clog up the brain. About 40% of the population carry the so-called MM variant, found in all victims so far identified, but her VV type is shared by around 10% of the population.

I don't know what exactly is the difference between the VV and MM genotypes or how that changes the resulting structure of the prion protein. But if another genotype can contract vCJD from having eaten contaminated, there maybe a few more people that will suffer. It also means that whatever makes MM different from VV is not enough to stop a prion from changing the original protein to another prion.

There is a precedent for prion diseases affecting people with MM and VV prion-types differently. Kuru, a brain-wasting disease similar to BSE which struck a cannibalistic tribe in Papua New Guinea, had different incubation times according to people's genes. The word kuru means "trembling with fear".

Now that is interesting. It could be that people with different genotypes will suffer differently. A different time scale could be one way that it could manifest. A slightly different change in the brain tissue could be another part of that.

Its sad that people have to suffer because we turned herbivorous cattle into cannibals. At the same time it has spurred research into what otherwise may have languished in the annals of biochemistry as another strange way proteins act. Creutzfeldt-Jakob and scrapies are rather rare, as are other prion diseases such as Fatal Familial Insomnia, and while curious, they probably wouldn't have lead to the funding that this outbreak in the UK has lead to. Squeaky wheels getting oil and stories that bleed, lead.

Bush and Pepfar

2008-01-05T16:03:00.000-06:00

In Global Battle on AIDS, Bush Creates Legacy

Nearly five years later, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — Pepfar, for short — may be the most lasting bipartisan accomplishment of the Bush presidency.

I don't know about that. This god damn war in Iraq had more support from congressional Democrats than any of them are willing to admit. Lets say that it may be the most lasting peaceful accomplishment of the Bush presidency. But even the peaceful things that this president has managed to do have not been unmarred by his illogical ideological roots.

Critics, including Mr. Kerry, are particularly incensed by the requirement that one-third of the prevention funds be spent teaching abstinence, despite a lack of scientific consensus that such programs reduce the spread of H.I.V.

When a Ugandan AIDS activist, Beatrice Were, denounced the abstinence-only approach at an international AIDS conference last year, she received a standing ovation. Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, an advocacy group here in Washington, says the Bush program has been hamstrung by “ideologically driven policies.”

Think about how much could have been done with that third that had to be spent on abstinence. The abstinence funding is only in there because the Christian right, like so many other fundamentalist groups, is anti-sex. And that Christian right is the base of Bush's popular support. There is no proof that abstinence education helps decrease premarital or extramarital sex, not here in the US among teens or else where to stop the spread of AIDS.

I will, grudgingly give Bush some props for sending money to help AIDS patients around the world. Some money, even money tied to the stupid abstinence programs, is better than none.

It wont make up for the god damn war though. And it wont make up for torture, trashing civil liberties, putting conservative judges on the SCOTUS, letting New Orleans drown and all the other shit he's pulled. Wont even come close.

Obama and Huckabee

2008-01-04T12:37:00.001-06:00

Another story I shouldn't have to provide a link for; Obama and Huckabee win their respective primaries in Iowa. I'll do some health stuff tomorrow.

I have to admit that I didn't really have a preference among the top three Democrats. Clinton, Edwards and Obama all seemed like good choices. Sure there were differences, but in my mind those different strengths and weaknesses seemed to equal out. The results in Iowa are terribly close between Edwards and Clinton, with 744 and 737 state delegates respectively. As for the number of delegates that will be chosen to go on to Denver, Obama gets 16, Edwards gets 14 and Clinton gets 15. Every where I see is reporting that, but I don't see an explanation for the 14 v 15 numbers.

Huckabee's win is a bit more interesting. The demographics of the win show that much of his support was evangelicals. So the obvious question is how well is that going to work for him in New Hampshire? I don't really know, but the lack of passion for any of their candidates that the Republican voters are showing is probably not a bad thing for the Dems. Besides, Huckabee is kinda nuts. Its like going to the other party's primary and voting for the crazy you know your party can beat, except they did it themselves.

But keeping in mind the post earlier this week questioning how representative the Iowa caucuses and straw poll are, we have to remind ourselves that this is Iowa. While the people there take very seriously their role in the election cycle, it really isn't a very representative sample. No one state can be.

Sit tight, this is just getting good.

PS: I'm still giggling at Wonkette's Merry Fifth Place to Ron Paul.

Pakistan after Bhutto

2008-01-03T12:08:00.000-06:00

Musharraf Says Bhutto Took Risks With Own Safety
As expected, Musharraf is trying to deflect any blame for Benazir Bhutto's assassination that might come his way.

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan engaged his international critics for the first time on Thursday, denying accusations of government involvement in the assassination last week of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and instead publicly criticizing Ms. Bhutto for being reckless with her own safety.

Clearly Ms. Bhutto knew that her return to Pakistan and her continuing public campaigning was putting her life at risk. Just because the assassination was not a surprise doesn't excuse legitimate questions about the role or lack there of that the government played.

The elections that were scheduled for the 8th have been reset.

The Election Commission set Feb. 18 as the date for the elections, citing the time needed to recover from the violence that followed Ms. Bhutto’s death last week. Nearly 60 people were killed, election offices were damaged and parts of Ms. Bhutto’s home province, Sindh, were paralyzed.

I hate to say this, but I'll believe it when I see it. I understand the need to set the elections back after Bhutto's death, but the elections need to happen. Pakistan, as a nuclear power, needs more stability. And while a dictatorship is stable while the dictator lives, a democracy has a different sort of stability.

What strikes me as interesting is that Musharraf has asked for international help with the investigation. He is bringing in Scotland Yard. The British, the old colonial overlords. Of course he can't bring in the US, that would be absurd, so he goes for the Brits. He's wagering that a report from the Brits will be accepted as objective, despite the Brits history with Pakistan. Hmm.

Oh, Iowa

2008-01-02T10:36:00.000-06:00

Caucuses Empower Only Some Iowans

This story is fitting, since I am probably going down to Iowa tonight to volunteer.

Because the caucuses, held in the early evening, do not allow absentee voting, they tend to leave out nearly entire categories of voters: the infirm, soldiers on active duty, medical personnel who cannot leave their patients, parents who do not have baby sitters, restaurant employees on the dinner shift, and many others who work in retail, at gas stations and in other jobs that require evening duty.

I've caucused in my home state of Minnesota before and I went plenty of times as a child with my parents. Its an interesting process if you're old enough to understand whats going on. If you're not, its really fun to run wild in the halls of whatever school its being held in with all the other children. Plus you get stickers.

But its not fun if you're the parent of said child running wild. Thats if you get to go at all. People have long known that the people that vote in the primaries are the people that really care about this sort of thing. That goes double for something as intense and time consuming as a caucus.

As in years past, voters must present themselves in person, at a specified hour, and stay for as long as two. And if these caucuses are anything like prior ones, only a tiny percentage of Iowans will participate.

Its not a quick process and its not something that I think I could explain to any of you in a post. There is a lot of running around talking to the people near you and getting them to support your group of people on an issue or a politician. There is a certain number of people that need to get together in order to send a person to the next level and then the next level meets to decide who will go to the next level and what they will support. If I'm not explaining it well I wouldn't be the first or the last.

“There is no incentive for Iowa to change this at all,” said Mr. Issacharoff, of N.Y.U. “It corresponds to what Iowa wants, which is candidates spending time and resources in Iowa,” in order to win supporters dedicated enough to conquer the obstacles to voting.

This could be said about any of the early primary states. Its not in the people's own self interest that the state wait to vote. The earlier they vote the more their voice counts for. Its not fair to the other states and ideas about changing the entire primary system have been floating around for awhile. But I think it would take someone from the outside, promoting something truly equal for everyone to change the primary system.

If I don't post tomorrow, it means my friends and I decided to go and I'll post on Friday.

Bishops' Molestation Documents Not Ordered Out

2008-01-01T12:40:00.000-06:00

Judge dismisses lawsuit against Catholic diocese in Wis.
The story of this case is a long and twisted one. In 2002, a funeral director and an intern were shot. In late 2004, the police were zeroing in on a Catholic priest who hung himself before the police could get to him.

St. Croix County District Attorney Eric Johnson has said evidence suggested O'Connell learned the priest was sexually abusing someone, was providing alcohol to minors, or both.

Because Rev. Erickson died before he could be questioned, there is no way for us to know if this was true. But the family of the funeral director, the O'Connells, sued the Catholic Diocese of Superior to see if they could get information regarding Rev. Erickson. But that wasn't all, they wanted the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to release all their documents regarding the molestation of minors by priests.

But the case has been dismissed. The reasons are understandable given the facts of the case. The judge ruled that it had no basis in Wisconsin law, and that there is no proof that Rev. Erickson's accused pedophilia made him more likely to kill someone.

But Thomas O'Connell told KSTP-TV in St. Paul that he was disappointed with the ruling.

"Where does church and state, the First Amendment, protect a molester?" he asked.

This is also true. I can see why this specific case couldn't crack open the USCCB's filing cabinets, but I can sort of see the outline of a case that could. If someone could show that they need to see those papers in order to protect children right now, or that the USCCB is protecting someone who has broken the law, then maybe the papers that the O'Connell's were after would have to be given to the court.

The issues that the Catholic Church is dealing with in all this are problems that see boggling to many of us. The way many religions repress the sexuality of their followers, it seems to me obvious that those sexual urges are going to get pushed out in twisted, wrong ways. You can push people's urges down, but the vessel that holds them wont always be able to hold that pressure, and the seems fail and the pressure is released in all the wrong ways. Its just so sad that so many people and children get hurt when the pressure finally gets out.

Rock Snot, I'm not kidding. Rock Snot.

2007-12-31T11:53:00.000-06:00

Rock Snot Hitches Ride on Fishing Gear
I've never heard of this diatom before but its really slimy and has a really literal name. Rock Snot. Wow.

"You try to reel it back in, and you end up with a giant gooey cottony wad (on your hook)," he said. "There is nothing like that that I have experienced. It makes streams essentially unfishable."

I think its interesting that many hunters, fishers and farmers are no longer automatically opposed to the environmentalists. They see how human impact has changed the land that they live with. In this case the fishers, the environmentalists and the scientists are all worried about this (totally weird) invasive species.

As a native Minnesotan, I've been hearing for years about how you need to clean your boat and other toys in order to try to stop the spread of Zebra mussels and Eurasian watermilfoil. This mostly involved spraying down the boat and trailer, and not spreading ballast water. At the same time, I wonder if there is some fisher in Virgina thinking back to his fishing trip in Colorado and going "Awe, shi...." To this hypothetical fishers credit, diatoms are really tiny and a small amount can do a lot of damage and would be rather hard to see.

"Something changed the diatoms in ways that made them more aggressive," said researcher Andrea Kirkwood of the University of Calgary. She says the change may have taken place when a European version of the rock snot diatom was accidentally brought to Canada. Kirkwood says it's also possible that the native version of this algae evolved in ways that created much more massive and more frequent blooms.

This is where science now can see things that no one could fifteen or twenty years ago. We could take samples from the most distant bloom in Virgina, the European version and maybe we could find an isolated Western sample that is different from the Virgina bloom.

The scientific name for rock snot is the much more dignified sounding Didymosphenia geminata. Its a diatom, a group of single celled organisms with a unique cell wall made of silica, the same chemical glass and sand are made of. For single celled organisms some of them are quite large, up to two millimeters, which means they can be seen under relatively cheap microscopes. They look quite pretty.

And this is the diatom.

Lead Acetate

2007-12-30T15:21:00.000-06:00

This blog is named after a chemical that was once called "sugar of lead" and is sweet tasting but ultimately deadly. It is made up of one atom of lead with an charge of +2 and two acetate groups.

When this is hydrated with water, it forms a white crystal. With this form and its sweet taste its easy to see how this would be called sugar of lead. As with any lead compound, its poisionous to most every living thing since the lead atom will displace the metal ions that are normally used in enzymes. Solid pure lead is not as dangerous as lead compounds since the compounds are more soluble. This is true for lead and for mercury; pure mercury can lead to acute poisoning, but organic mercury compounds such as dimethyl mercury are insanely deadly. While mercury is more toxic in lower doses, the paralells are true.

In a comparison of the bioactivity of different lead compounds, lead acetate and lead oxide lead to higher lead levels in the bones of rats. Comparison of lead bioavailability....

Lead acetate was made by the Romans when they boiled wine in vessels that were either lined with lead or had lead in the bronze. This would cause the acetic acid in the wine to react with the metallic lead, this would sweeten the resulting defrutum. This probably also contributed to the relatively high intake of lead that the Romans had.

As I mentioned earlier this week, lead acetate is still around. Its found in some hair dyes. Useless Information tells us here how the small concentration lead acetate reacts with sulfur also in the dye to create a black pigment. The lead will still be present in the hair even after the dye is no longer used. Our government has decided that the level of lead acetate in these hair dyes is low enough to not pose a risk. How much using this lead acetate product would add to your overall life time lead exposure is unclear. I for one wouldn't want to actively add more lead to my life.

Why did my name my science leaning current events blog after a strange lead compound? To be honest I just thought the story about the Roman's sweet boiled wine was neat. One could make an analogy about something being sweet but deadly or tasty in the short term but poisonous and debilitating in the longterm, but I'll leave that to those better at such things.

References: Wikipedia and Molecule of the Day were both very useful.

Rare diseases bringing parents together

2007-12-28T13:54:00.000-06:00

Searching for Similar Diagnosis Through DNA(New York Times)
How to save your own child(CNN)

While these articles have different focuses, they are talking about the same movement. The NYT article focuses on children with rare, newly specified genetic disorders that have previously been enveloped under umbrella terms such as autism and mental retardation. The CNN article is focusing on the parents of children with rare disorders banning together to raise money so that research can be funded.

The common thread is that people with children suffering from rare disorders and diseases are finding each other. They are making a community that can support its members in a very specific way.

But the two families are not related, and would never have met save for an unusual bond: a few months earlier, a newly available DNA test revealed that Samantha and Taygen share an identical nick in the short arm of their 16th chromosomes.

The NYT article starts with two girls that look enough alike to be sisters, but that is due to the same genetic quirk. The article is full of stories about groups of families of children with the same genetic change. Some of the mutations have as few as 11 known examples. The families have come together to support one another through the problems. Families with older children are able to give those with younger children a heads up about what might happen in the next few years.

The parents in the CNN article are doing more than supporting each other, they are raising money to try to fund research into the diseases their children have developed. Rare juvenile diseases, such as the brain tumor called Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma that is mentioned in the article, are much less likely to be the focus of the pharmaceutical companies' money. They would rather come up with drugs to help all the aging seniors be able to hold it in till they can get to a bathroom, since that is a vastly larger customer base.

Sometimes Witt gets frustrated that parents have to sell cookies, or hold golf tournaments, to fund medical research. "It's totally sad. It's ridiculous. It makes me mad," she says. "But I can't get wrapped up in that or I won't get anywhere."

The CNN article comes down to money and the way those who save our health are repaid for it. How we pay doctors, how we pay researchers, how we pay for the manufacture of the medicine we need; sometimes it feel manipulative since not getting the health care we need is often an unthinkable option.

Benazir Bhutto is dead.

2007-12-27T12:52:00.000-06:00

I don't really think I need to give you a link to this one. Its the top of Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR and everybody else. Precisely what happened is unclear; there may have been shooting, there was a suicide bomber, at least 20 people and the former prime minister died.

What Musharraf does next is going to speak volumes. He has already declared a three day mourning period, but that is at best a holding pattern. There are elections scheduled on 8 January, but those are up in the air. The funeral is set for tomorrow and that will be followed by a 40 day mourning period. The next most well known opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, has, according to the NPR news coming out of my radio, called for Musharraf to step down and that his party will boycott the elections. The wide spread boycott of the election means that the results will not actually represent the will of the people.

Well I am going to share this link with you, photos of Benazir. It seems to be an old set, none of the photos are newer than October. But there are lots of older photos.

As many have been saying, its not as if she didn't know the risk. She knew that she was risking he life, she said that it was something that she had to do for her country.

Peter Galbraith is on the radio is sounding very pessimistic, saying that the Bhutto family was arguably the only national institution, that the nation is very fractured, no one is really in charge of all of the government, and all in all its very sad.

Texas kills more people than every other state combined.

2007-12-26T15:11:00.000-06:00

At 60% of Total, Texas is Bucking Execution Trend

Of the 42 executions in the last year, 26 were in Texas. The remaining 16 were spread across nine other states, none of which executed more than three people. Many legal experts say the trend will probably continue.

Now, one could argue that Texas is a big state and its murder rate is slightly higher than the national average. But 61.9% of all executions in the nation? There has been a de facto moratorium on executions since the Supreme Court decided to hear Baze v Rees which will decide if the most commonly used cocktail of drugs used for lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. That has lead to a lower total this year than would have been expected otherwise.

There is reason to think that the number of death sentences in the state will fall farther, given the introduction of life without the possibility of parole as a sentencing option in capital cases in Texas in 2005. While a substantial majority of the public supports the death penalty, that support drops significantly when life without parole is included as an alternative.

You mean it wasn't before? Before 2005 in Texas, capital cases could either be life with a chance of parole or death? Jebus. I would think that life without parole as an option would be obvious. But then I'm not from that end of I-35. I'm from the end where the death penalty was made illegal 96 years ago and the Governor's talk about reinstating it was dead in the water three years ago.

Killing people as punishment for killing people is stupid and hypocritical. Gandhi summed it up better than I can; "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." Vengeance is not the business of the state. People can be removed from society because of their misdeeds, but that need not mean that they have to die.

Domestic polution

2007-12-24T13:51:00.000-06:00

Everyday Items, Complex Chemistry

Scientists are starting to raise questions about the safety of the chemical that are used to make the objects around us. I've talked about this before, there are tons of chemicals around us and many of them were never in significant levels, or at all, before the twentieth century.

“The bottom line is that there isn’t widespread evidence that exposure to consumer products is causing public health problems,” said Mike Walls, director of government affairs at the American Chemistry Council.

This is misleading. There isn't widespread evidence because there are so many new chemicals. The studies that we do have discuss acute exposure, one exposure to a high level of one chemical. The real situation that we are living is constant, low level exposure to thousands of chemicals. Like I said in Choose your Poison, there are so many chemicals we are exposed to, that choosing one to personally obsess about it futile. What is needed is a change at a national and international level to try to limit many of these.

There is a precedent for this. The Montreal Protocol banned chloro flouro carbons and is the best example of international cooperation working to save our planet from the poisons we have made. But because this appears less pressing, less obvious than a hole in the ozone layer, it is less likely to be acted upon.

An interesting addition to this article is the interactive picture that comes with. It mentions BPA (which I've already talked about), phthalates, brominated diphenyl ethers, formaldehyde, perflourinated compounds and lead acetate. I haven't talked about the chemical that is the name for this blog yet, but since I get a lot of references from google for lead acetate, I've decided that on Sunday I'm going to do another special post and talk about it in detail.

Learning from this administration

2007-12-23T10:06:00.000-06:00

I got an email earlier this week from Thomas J Hanson from Open Education asking me to comment about this post. In it Hanson talks about the numerous ethical lapses of this Bush administration. I am reminded of Keith Olbermann's new segment "Bushed" in which he reminds you of three Bush administration scandals that have been buried by newer scandals. Its tiring, aggravating, disheartening and very important to be reminded.

My first response to Hanson's post was rather knee jerk. I talked about why my 20-something peer's don't vote. I ranted a bit about how the way Clinton was treated, the 2000 election and this administration has tinted (tainted?) how people my age see politics.

But when I went back and read more carefully both the post and Hanson's email to me, I realized I had missed the critical point. Open Education is an education blog, and the post was asking "How do we tell children and teens about these failures in the government without appearing political?"

For teachers, the behavior and decision-making within the current White House makes it very challenging to fairly discuss politics with the next generation of voters. Walking the political line of fairness in a high school social studies class has likely never been more difficult than it is today. That is because the close examination of these ethical transgressions would be seen as nothing more than bashing our president.

However, our democratic process is supposed to lead our great nation in a direction that puts the proper people in the position to further the very ideals our country was founded upon. If we adults are thoroughly confused and shaken by what we are witnessing, imagine how difficult it must be for our children.

I'm not sure you can. Its not possible to say for sure if a Democratic president, under the same external pressures would do the same, but the fact remains that this is a Republican that did these things. You can say that Bush and his administration did these things, and yes they are Republicans, and no not all Republicans agreed or approved of all these bad things. Even some Democrats went along for some, even many, of these things. But you can't ignore the fact that he it is a Republican that did these things.

Its a correlation, not necessarily a causation. Maybe that would work. These bad things did not necessarily flow from the fact that he is a Republican, but how intertwined the two things are is open to interpretation. Leave that for the child to ponder with or without an adult of their choosing.

I'm also going to take this in another direction. High school science teachers have been under intense pressure to not talk about evolution in a way that would offend those who prefer a specific religion's view on how the world came to be. The teachers have been pressured not to talk about the truth that science knows for political reasons.

What then happens to the civics or history teacher who wants to talk about the facts of the Nixon or Reagan administration? What about those who want to talk about Vietnam when there are parents at home who have a different view about that war? What happens when there are people who want to impress upon their children a world view that ignores certain facts? Those are much bigger questions that swirl around what it means to grow up and think independently.

The FEC is in Limbo

2007-12-22T16:37:00.000-06:00

As Primaries Begin, the FEC Will Shut Down

So the gist of it is that there are supposed to be six people on the FEC's panel, with a vote of four to get anything done. When the year ends, three recess appointments will run out and the board will be left with only two people. There are supposed to be three from each party, but things are held up.

The potential for an FEC shutdown has been looming for weeks, as a handful of Democratic senators voiced opposition to one of Bush's nominees to the commission, Hans A. von Spakovsky. Their concern stemmed not from von Spakovsky's work on the FEC but from his tenure in the Justice Department's civil rights division.

His critics contend that von Spakovsky advocated a controversial Texas redistricting plan and fought to institute a requirement in Georgia that voters show photo identification before being permitted to cast ballots.

In return the Republicans are holding up the Democrats two nominees.

I wish I could get impassioned about this. The FEC is an important body that keeps track of the money that the campaigns get and spend. I understand the opposition to von Spakovsky; I come from a state with same day registration and I think that should be the way to do things, so this guy seems downright backwards.

But it all seems so many layers removed from hunger, homelessness, our civil liberties and international diplomacy that its hard to get worked up about it.

Bureaucracy is like an opiate. It dulls my response and makes me sleepy. And this sort of bickering makes me roll my eyes. Part of me wishes it didn't; the devil is in the details and there is so much detail at this level. At the same time I know if I cared too much I would burn out. You can only maintain that level of focus for so long.

Pointless pill popping

2007-12-21T13:43:00.000-06:00

Hilary Swank swallows 45 food supplements every day ...

"This is my Aloe C," she began (Aloe C, as the name suggests, is a combination of Aloe Vera and vitamin C). "Here's my flax. This one's for my immune system. And this one is my BrainWave." BrainWave is designed to enhance mental function through a balance of "smart nutrients". It hasn't been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration in the US, but Swank is already convinced. "It's great, like if I have a lot of lines to memorise." Or a lot of pills to memorise, since she continues to rattle off a list of the 45 supplements she takes every day. "I just took my most important ones," she concluded, "which are my Oz Garcia Longevity Pak."

My god. There is no reason for this. Most people in the developed world get all the nutrients they need from their diet. Vitamins are usually excess and they simply get excreted. Any claim that a vitamin regiment will make you smarter, improve your memory or keep you from getting a cold is frail at best.

I take a multivitamin about three times a month, or one a day for about two days before I give blood to make sure my iron is high enough. I don't think it actually does much for me, just a little boost for anything I might be low on and nothing more.

There is evidence to suggest that nutrients in their natural state are more effective. "We know that fruit and vegetables can help protect against cancer," says Baic. "But remove the antioxidant ingredients from the food and just take them as supplements and they appear to have no benefits. The supplements we can buy are only the ones that have been identified as necessary - there are probably others [in food] we don't know about."

This goes back to the fact that we know about most vitamins because we know what happens when one is lacking from someone's diet. For all we know about biochemistry and nutrition in humans, its the subtle stuff we know less about. The subtle stuff might be the role of some chemical we don't know much about, or the way our bodies treat things differently if there is fiber as well as the vitamin.

So eat your vegetables before you worry about your vitamins.

Ask me anything!

2007-12-20T13:15:00.000-06:00

Al-Qaida chief launches 'any questions' session on web

"Individuals, agencies and all information media outlets" have been told they can question Egyptian-born Zawahiri in what is described as "an open meeting" and get answers from mid-January. Zawahiri is assumed to be in hiding on the borders of Afghanistan or Pakistan.

This is an interesting move. Obviously he wont answer any questions he doesn't want to, but just the appearance of being that approachable is something any politician would want. Sort of like the YouTube debates. Here you are, some shmuck off the street and your question is chosen and answered by a powerful public figure. But some how I don't think that anyone will be asking Zawahiri about global warming.

Its interesting how the internet has changed not just the way people interact with each other, but also with those above them in the power structure. Think about how much more it will continue to change as more people get access to this technology.

Zawahiri's latest message, on Sunday, emphasised the importance of "jihadi information media", saying they were "waging an extremely critical battle against the Crusader-Zionist enemy". Information "used to be the exclusive domain of ... the official government media, and the ... media which claim to be free and non-governmental".

Zawahiri taunted Britain for its handover of Basra and warned tribal leaders in Iraq who are cooperating with the US military that they would lose "both their religion and their life" when the US left the country.

This shows how its not going to change somethings. Just because they're using the internet hasn't lead to a change in the message. And you can see that with any fundamentalist group. The information is slicker and easier to get, but the ideas in it are still the same.

I hate to assume the worst, but...

2007-12-19T14:17:00.000-06:00

Bush Lawyers Discussed Fate of C.I.A. Tapes
Of course they did. I mean, did we really think that the CIA would do this without talking to someone in the White House first? We see the crap coming out of Washington and we are schooled enough in the vileness of this administration to recognize their particular style of crap when we see it. Whenever its got something to do with the torture of people who may or may not have anything to do with terrorism, its a damn safe bet that the White House was in there somewhere.

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

Guess who is on that list; Harriet Miers, John Bellinger, Alberto Gonzales and David Addington. Some of those names ring a bell, don't you agree?

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes. Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal.

I'm picturing lots of winking and nodding and knowing looks and in the end there very probably wont be anything solid other than the distinct impression that they all knew damn well what they were up to.

Ms. Perino’s statement said that other than President Bush’s comment that he had not known about the tapes, White House officials have declined to discuss the matter because of pending investigations by the Department of Justice and the C.I.A. inspector general.

Dur. Of course Bush didn't know about it, he doesn't seem to know about anything. This is like seeing a friend with a set of lock picks, seven cans of spray paint and a face mask and saying to yourself "I really don't want to have to lie about this later, so I'm just not going to ask."

Except in this case people were tortured. Thats a much bigger sin than tagging up some billboards.

Lets build some bridges

2007-12-18T09:49:00.001-06:00

Federal budget includes $195 million for 35W bridge

Minnesota would receive $195 million to help replace the fallen I-35W bridge, as well as $50 million in security money for next year's Republican National Convention, under a year-end budget bill passed by the House of Representatives late Monday.

About friggin time. I mean, the bridge fell over four months ago. I know that infrastructure isn't exciting, but thirteen people died. But I suppose I shouldn't be moaning too much. Look at New Orleans. The whole place flooded, the levies broke and the place is still under martial law.

But there are more bridges that need work around here. A one time shot of money from the Feds can't help with all of them; the Lafayette bridge takes Highway 52 over the Mississippi near downtown St. Paul, the I-35 E bridge over Cuyahoga Street in St. Paul, the Highway 61 bridge over the Mississippi at Hastings. Infrastructure is not an exciting topic, but it is a necessary one. And not just on a state level.

There are probably thousands of bridges around the country that are in similar condition. There were a lot of bridges built after WWII that are getting older. I'm willing to bet that many of them have the same feature of the 35W bridge where one part fails and the whole thing goes, no redundancy in the structure. While many bridges don't get the same heat-cold-road-salt assault that those here in Minnesota do, they probably have their own problems. Still, not a riveting discussion, despite all of the discussion of rivets.

But war! thats exciting and usually unnecessary. Maybe the deficiencies of one can compensate for the other.

On Monday, Bush said he was hopeful he could sign the bill, but only after Democrats agree to accept funding for U.S. troops in Iraq.

Great. Bush is tying up the money we need to pay for the bridge (and security for the RNC) with the funding for his god damned war.

Democracy in Pakistan?

2007-12-13T21:47:00.000-06:00

Most Want Musharraf to Quit, Poll Shows

The first comprehensive public opinion poll conducted in Pakistan since President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency last month has found that 67 percent of Pakistanis want him to resign immediately and that 70 percent say his government does not deserve re-election.

The poll suggests that Mr. Musharraf will have to engage in substantial vote rigging to have the government of his choice win national elections on Jan. 8.

This is going to be an interesting couple of weeks in Pakistan. This will be a real test of Musharraf's declared aim of a real democracy.

An American-backed proposal that Mr. Musharraf form a government with Ms. Bhutto also appears to be deeply unpopular. Sixty percent of Pakistanis polled opposed such a deal, which American officials had hoped would bolster support for Mr. Musharraf.

What I'm wondering about is how much of this has anything to do with the fact that Musharraf is supported by the US? How much of this is an anti-American thing, how much is pro-democracy, how much of this is a combination of the two?

A small step in the right direction

2007-12-12T12:14:00.000-06:00

Retroactively, Panel Reduces Drug Sentences

The agency that sets guidelines for federal prison sentences voted unanimously on Tuesday to lighten punishments retroactively for some crimes related to crack cocaine, a decision that could eventually affect about 19,500 inmates and mean freedom for some within months.

In 1986, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act enacted some absurdly harsh mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. The most famous was the fact that 5 grams of crack cocaine had the same mandatory minimum as half a kilo (500 grams) of powdered cocaine. Given that crack was a ghetto drug used more by African Americans, and powdered cocaine was more of a white man's drug, the racism is pretty obvious.

“No one has come before us to justify the 100-to-1 ratio,” Judge Castillo said, referring to a provision of federal law that imposes the same 10-year minimum sentence for possessing 50 grams of crack and for possessing 5,000 grams of powder cocaine.

Thats because there is no justification for it. It is out and out racism. And it should have been addressed long before now. Its disgusting that this law is still on the books. There have been attempts to fix it, but fairness is too often spun as being "soft on drugs." Man, that's sadness.

The mandatory minimums have also lead to an increase in the number of women going to jail. The ACLU report Caught in the Net tells that the number of women in the prison system for drug crimes increased 888% in the the twenty years since the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.

Better late than never, but thats a very optimistic view of a very bad situation.

Maybe not CIDP, but still bad

2007-12-12T11:23:00.000-06:00

Pork-plant ailment a mystery again

The Department of Health has backed off from the initial diagnosis of CIDP. That said they do have another case, bringing the total up to 12 people.

Key to differentiating the condition from CIDP is a characteristic of CIDP involving an interruption or blockage of the electrical signaling in and between nerves, Lachance said. Tests now show that none of the 11 workers has that problem, he said.

They do have damage to the nerve system caused by their immune systems, he said. But at this point it can be categorized generically only as an inflammatory response that is damaging the nerve sheaths, he said.

What I said before about the myelin sheath and Schwann cells being the target of the immune reaction is still true. My speculation about a connection to the Guillain-Barre syndrome and the 1976 swine flu vaccine is out the window though.

There is no doubt in my mind that this still has something to do with the fact that they were literally blowing the pigs brains out. What I would call aerosolized biological tissue, Norwegianity is calling "Brain Mist."

When solids are aerosolized they are able to get into places they normally wouldn't, such as the lungs. From there they can get into the blood stream and then strange things can happen.

Scratchtasia

Not exactly accurate, but good at getting one point across; some things should not be aerosolized.

Choose your poison

2007-12-10T11:42:00.000-06:00

Canadian Retailer Bans Some Plastic Bottles

The retailer said that it would not restock the bottles, which are made by Nalge Nunc International in Rochester, a unit of Thermo Fisher Scientific, until Health Canada completed a review of bisphenol-a, or B.P.A., a chemical used to make hard, transparent plastics as well as liners for food cans.

This is bisphenol-a.

The rings with the -OH on the end are the phenol groups.

The chemical in question is an endocrine disruptor. Specifically, its an estrogen receptor antagonist. The biochemistry of receptors and antagonists has become more complicated in recent years and I would need to read up on this to explain it fully, but the end effect is similar to increased levels of estrogen. The physiological effect this has is complicated by age and gender. The effect of any chemical on the young is more pronounced not only because of their smaller size, but also because their bodies are actively growing and chemistry we don't see in adults is going on. In adults it is possibly carcinogenic.

While there is little dispute about that, the plastics industry, supported by several studies from government agencies in Japan, North America and Europe, contends that polycarbonate bottles contain very little of the chemical and release only insignificant amounts of B.P.A. into the bodies of users.

At the same time that BPA is not terribly good for you, it seems that it only leaches from the bottle at high temperatures, or when acidic chemicals are used. So what does this all mean, together?

What it really means is that we are slowly poisoning ourselves. But thats not new and its not just from plastic bottles. There are all sorts of anthropogenic (man made) chemicals in our lives, that we humans put there, that are killing us slowly. To pick out one source over another is an exercise in futility. Sure, you can limit your exposure to certain chemicals, but you can't let that be all consuming. I feel bad for the people who eat organic food just because they're afraid of pesticides.

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in one pretty and well preserved piece, but to skid across the line broadside, thoroughly used up, worn out, leaking oil, shouting GERONIMO!” ~Bill McKenna, professional motorcycle racer, Cycle magazine Feb. 1982

I'll keep using my nalgene for water and I'll wash it by hand in the sink from time to time, but I'm not going get freaked out.

Congress is suddenly so curious

2007-12-08T09:17:00.000-06:00

Democrats Call for Inquiry in Destruction of Tapes by C.I.A.
Review of Iran Intelligence to Be Sought
But they are curious about very different things.

Angry Democratic lawmakers called for investigations today into the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction in 2005 of at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two [al] Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody.

On the other hand...

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources.

Democrats want to know why tapes interrogations of high level al Qaeda, interrogations that were probably quite harsh, were destroyed in the middle of questions about how interrogations are done. Needless to say, people are very suspicious of why this was done. Of the two topics, this is the one that needs more investigation.

In the mean time, Republicans are calling into question the National Intelligence Estimate that has effectively halted the Bush administration's war mongering with Iran. And while asking questions about the intelligence is good, this isn't about wanting to understand, this is about questioning the objectivity of the 16 intelligence agencies.

"Iran is one of the greatest threats in the world today. Getting the intelligence right is absolutely critical, not only on Iran's capability but its intent. So now there is a huge question raised, and instead of politicizing that report, let's have a fresh set of eyes -- objective, yes -- look at it," [Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.)] said in an interview.

What the hell is that? Really? He's really questioning the objectivity of these career intelligence officers?

The "jungle telegraph" is transmitting the message that "intelligence career seniors were lined up to go to jail if necessary" to get this NIE out to the public.

So on one hand we have the Democrats asking the CIA where the tapes went and the Republicans are questioning the objectivity of all 16 agencies. On top of that, they got taken for a ride regarding the Iraq intelligence back in 2003. Its got to be tense over there.

These are the children we need to think about

2007-12-07T13:10:00.000-06:00

Many Children Struggling After ’05 Storms
Not all the children displaced by Katrina and Rita are hurt by exploding bags of chemicals like Isiah Polk. Most are hurt simply by the fact of their displacement and the continuing lack of stability.

At least 46,600 children along the Gulf Coast are still struggling with mental health problems and other serious aftereffects of 2005 hurricanes, according to a new study by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the Children’s Health Fund.

There are more estimated numbers; 163,000 children displaced, 81,000 to 95,000 have returned to Mississippi and Louisiana, and 11,200 are still living in FEMA trailecs. These children are suffering from depression, anxiety and behavior problems. In places that lack doctors and for families that lack health insurance, I can't imagine that getting the needed psychiatric help is going to be easy.

What happens to the children when their lives are disrupted like this? What happens to children after wars? Or the Boxing Day Tsunami? Can we, as a first world country, do more for our children than a war torn nation?

I would like to say that we can, but given the response to Katrina thus far, I'm not holding my breath. This is an issue of public health that will have repercussions for years. Well adjusted children make healthy productive citizens; children plagued with behavior problems and anxiety have a much harder time getting to that same place. But thats taking a longer view than most conservatives seem able to. The idea that we the people, the tax payers have an obligation to see that the next generation is happy, productive and comfortable. Many conservatives seem to think of that as a "personal problem" that has no effect on them. They're wrong though.

At some point I saw, as I spun through the channels, a man stand up at some city council meeting. He wanted to know why he, a childless bachelor, had to pay for other people's children to go to school. Some elected official told him that he had to pay for their education because either they would be paying for his social security when he retired or he would have to pay for their jail cells with the taxes from the pay checks he would keep having to work for into his eighties. Snarky, yes, but true.

Potential versus kinetic ideas

2007-12-06T11:50:00.000-06:00

'Lyrical terrorist' sentenced over extremist poetry
I first talked about the Lyrical Terrorist about a month ago in this post. She has been given a nine month suspended sentence.

"Samina Malik was being prosecuted in effect for a thought crime because she had downloaded some material from the internet which anyone could download." Mr Bunglawala said the case demonstrated how ill-conceived and "incredibly broad-ranging" the law is under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act. "Teenagers download some quite nihilistic material every day and they are not prosecuted," he said.

"The fact that this case went to court sends a very worrying signal that if you are Muslim and you are downloading from the Internet you may be judged to a quite different standard from others. Fortunately the judge has been sensible about this. The wider Muslim community must be relieved that she hasn't got a custodial sentence."

I agree with Mr. Bunglawasa, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, on this issue. As I said before, Malik did not actually hurt anyone. She collected information, speeches, rants and wrote poetry. It was disturbing, but it wasn't actually a crime that hurt someone.

The fact that this new law has been used against a Muslim woman more than hints at a bias. While I would hate to see it, I wonder if they would apply this law to militant anti-vivisectionists. Who else are they having trouble with in the UK?

In a statement, the Crown Prosecution Service said: "Samina Malik was not prosecuted for writing poetry. Ms Malik was convicted of collecting information, without reasonable excuse, of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism."

Potentially useful? Heck, I've got chemistry books that are potentially useful for all sorts of things. And spray paint, thats potentially graffiti. I know plenty of people with some potentially useful Recipes for Disaster.

Plotting and conspiring is one thing, its like kinetic energy. The movement has started, things are becoming active. Simply having the potential is something else entirely. Actions are crimes, ideas are not. No matter how inflammatory, disgusting, disturbing or dangerous.

More on the CIPD in Austin

2007-12-05T12:49:00.000-06:00

I read most of this from the Dead Tree Edition of the Star Tribune, but it has been reposted by the fine folks at MSNBC so we don't have to run into the subscription problem.The question at Austin pork plant: Why?

There isn't much here that I didn't already know or figure out on my own but there were a few bits that caught my attention.

CIDP is the chronic form of another disease, Guillain-Barré; syndrome, which develops much more rapidly and has a number of known triggers. It first received public attention in 1976 when linked to the swine flu vaccine.

That seems interesting to me. Could there be a connection between the swine flu and what happened here?

Symptoms first emerged around the same time the plant began using the high-powered air system. Some health experts think exposure to blood and pulverized tissue might have caused the autoimmune response.

But the compressed-air system almost certainly is not the problem, said mechanical engineer Frank Moskowitz, a compressed-air expert based in Phoenix. "Compressed air itself absolutely cannot introduce anything bad," he said. He said pressurization kills any living organism in the air.

Well that maybe true, but I doubt anyone was actually thinking that this was do to physical pressure from blasts of air. But the fact that the compressed air system and the disease are temporally linked means to me that there was something about blowing biological tissue into the air that is the key here.

Meth in the FEMA trailer park

2007-12-05T11:19:00.000-06:00

Caught Up in a Storm, With His Eyes Wide Open

On that hot July afternoon, Isaiah and two friends hunted for tiny crabs, threw dirt bombs and visited the cemetery across the creek where his grandfather, who used to give him firecrackers, is buried. They also found treasure: a mysterious black duffel bag that came with them on their return climb over the wobbly fence separating the forbidden from the forgotten.

The bag was jostled, kicked, and finally opened to reveal strange things, including a pair of pliers, some tubing, nail clippers and a two-liter plastic bottle filled with a milky liquid. Isaiah waved a younger boy away from the bag, then bent over to zip it up. He heard a hiss and then BAM!

The boys had found a bag full of chemicals from a methamphetamine lab. He was terribly burnt. The chemicals got on his face and in his eyes. But he appears to be making an amazing recovery. The story has called attention to the fact that there are still people living in FEMA trailers they were given after Katrina two years ago. Its also made people think again about the meth cookers.

When I was a child, one of our neighbors was dealing meth. I don't remember all of it clearly, but I remember the mean rottweilers, the hungry little kids and all the cars that would drive by. I was out of state when it happened, but as recently as high school a neighbor's garage burnt and there is still speculation that there may have been meth cooking in there. Besides the horrendous things meth use will do to you, meth production is very dangerous. Its some serious organic chemistry being done with equipment not made to handle it by people who may not even have a high school education. The laws that limit sale of pseudoephedrine have helped curb production, but obviously there are places where its still a problem.

More than that, my family is not a poor black family in the deep south living in a two year old trailer from the government because a hurricane destroyed our house. Thankfully the community has come forward to help, as much as it can considering the circumstances.

One way the community responded was down at the Wal-Mart, where the receiving manager, Patsy Poole, set up a fund-raising booth near Register 1 that displayed photos of Isaiah’s transformed face. More than $2,000 in four hours; more than $5,000 in a few days.

“Twenties!” Ms. Poole says. “They was just throwing in the money.”

Another way was by inundating the Narcotics Task Force of Jackson County, still working out of a poststorm trailer, with tips about dozens of meth labs and dumpsites. Sgt. Curtis Spiers, its commander, said many calls came from local meth users, whose arms and hands often carry telltale burn scars of their own accidents. They hadn’t informed in years, but what happened to this boy was too much.

People can stand to see their own lives fall apart, but there is the idea that the innocent shouldn't suffer for the sins of others. Thats something at least.

Gross job leads to rare disease

2007-12-04T10:03:00.000-06:00

Pork plant employees contract neurological illness

Between December last year and July of this year 11 workers at a pork processing plant in Austin, MN have been victims of a strange set of symptoms. Numbness and tingling in their hands. At first I'm sure they thought it was some repetitive stress, but the Health Department is saying that it is Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy.

Department investigators have been poring over the cases since then. So far they say they have determined that the workers experienced an inflammatory response to some kind of trigger. But they haven't identified the trigger yet. It could be an infectious agent within the plant, or even a chemical exposure.

Well, lets look at what CIDP is. Whats happening is that something, the Health Department doesn't know what, is triggering an immune response that is targeting the myelin sheath that is wrapped around the dendrite of the nerve cell.

The Schwann cells make up the myelin sheath, the gaps between them are nodes of Ranvier. This set up allows the electrochemical impulse to travel down the axon more efficiently than an unmyelinated axon. Human neurons need this myelination, when those Schwann cells are damaged, the message from the nerve cell doesn't travel as it should, leading to the weakness, numbness and tingling. See Wikipedia.

So the next question is what would make the immune system target the Schwan cells that create the myelin sheath? The Health Department doesn't know right now. Since all the workers suffering were using compressed air to remove the brain from the pig heads, most people are going to think of a prion disease. But this is not much like prion diseases that tend to attack the central nervous system rather that the peripheral. Plus, there are not any known prion diseases in pigs. That isn't to say it isn't possible that there is a mad pig disease, just that we have no documentation of anything that would fit that description.

I'm going to reference the Star Tribune now, since its physical newspaper thats in front of me, but I don't like to use their online stuff since they require registration after a few clicks.

Anyway, the paper says that the workers are different ages, ethnicities, and genders. This means that it really is something at work and probably not the water. Add to that the fact that no one not working with the brains has come down with this. So there is something about either the brains or the way they were removing the brains.

"We've already given some of our employees a face mask, and discontinued some operations that could be potential. Again, we have no idea of the cause," said Wadding. "But we do want to take every precautionary step that the Department of Health recommends, and that we see that could possibly contribute to this."

The Strib dead tree edition also says the company is no longer using compressed air, and is now giving out safety goggles, disposable sleeves and towels for showers. You mean that the workers were using compressed air, shooting brain matter all over, and they didn't have goggles, face masks, or sleeves? Besides the immediate eeww factor, I don't think its a good idea to be aerosolizing raw biological tissue at all, much less without eye protection.

However, there is still a chance that the root cause of this CIDP is chemical rather than biological. I don't know enough about how one cleans a pork slaughtering plant to speculate on the cleaning agents. Might they have used a different chemical for cleaning the debraining room? Might the compressed air lines have been cleaned by some nasty chemical?

On top of all this, the plant has a strange history. The plant was spun off from Hormell in 1989. According to my father, whom I don't think counts as a scholarly reference, this lead to a strike because the spin off meant it was suddenly a non-union shop. Anyone who wasn't four at the time, as I was, want to confirm that? Maybe its my pro-union bias, but I worry about safe working conditions at non-union companies.

I hope the workers get better.

EDIT: It seems that CIPD has been ruled out, see more here.

Algal Oil

2007-12-03T11:24:00.000-06:00

Algae Emerges as a Potential Fuel Source
Another possible energy source. I really like reading about these, there is such creativity and possibility in them.

Some algae is as much as 50 percent oil that can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel. The biggest challenge is cutting the cost of production, which by one Defense Department estimate is running more than $20 a gallon.

I can honestly say that I didn't know the chemical composition of algae. I wonder what specific oil they produce and what kind of processing is needed. What chemicals are needed, what catalysts? This is the point at which corn ethanol production becomes so inefficient. Those steps between the thing that grows and that which ends up in the gas tank are the most important part, and sometimes it gets only mentioned vaguely as processing.

If the price of production can be reduced, the advantages of algae include the fact that it grows much faster and in less space than conventional energy crops. An acre of corn can produce about 20 gallons of oil per year, Dr. Ruan said, compared with a possible 15,000 gallons of oil per acre of algae.

That is impressive. All of these alternative energy processes require that we look at whats needed as input and how much those are going to cost. Land use, water use, chemicals as fertilizer or in the processing, energy input for production and transport, and so on. I don't think one can honestly look at an alternative energy without looking at all of it. If a process requires several kilograms of a metal that has its ore mined in Africa and a ton of ore produces a few grams of metal, you can't honestly call it a viable alternative energy. If a process requires so many gallons of water that it dries up huge aquifers, the I don't think that can be called viable.

This seems like a good one though. Easy to grow, doesn't require pure water, and no fertilizer. So I really want to hear about the steps between green thing in a tank and diesel in my car tank.

The other part of this that I find interesting is that the funding is coming from oil companies and the Pentagon. There was a time not long ago that when an alternative energy process started making noise, the oil companies would buy the patents just to make it go away. But with the Pentagon, they really are looking at other sources for fuel. Say what you will about the Pentagon, some one there seems to have figured out that the remaining fossil oil is under countries that we don't always get along with.

One more reason not to binge drink

2007-11-30T11:42:00.000-06:00

If you thought a hangover was bad ...

When doctors warn of the dangers of binge drinking, exploding bladders may not immediately spring to mind. However, last week a report in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) made alarming reading. In the report, the medics discuss the unprecedented appearance in emergency wards of women who have suffered alcohol-induced "bladder rupture": their bladders have quite literally torn apart under pressure of a big night out.

Oh god. As if a night of binge drinking didn't sound unappealing enough. What the hell is up with those Brits? The biology of in is pretty simple, as the article explains.

The mechanics of this gruesome problem are relatively straightforward. Alcohol is diuretic - it makes you urinate more - hence the sight of drunk people urinating in the streets on a Saturday night. Alcohol is also an anaesthetic: it dulls the urge to go. The combination of large volumes of urine, and a dimmed, possibly non-existent urge to pee can result in a seriously over-full bladder.

When they tell you that alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, they really mean it. When you're so pissed that your body can't tell you that you need to piss, my god. So after the bladder bursts, urine is is the abdominal cavity and this is a very bad thing. Urine is all the stuff that your body has decided it doesn't want; mostly urea, but also by products of different metabolic processes. When urine is in the abdominal cavity, the urea is going to be reabsorbed into the blood stream and you're going to feel really crappy.

I don't drink, but I did go to college and party with people who do and I sort of understand the social reasons for heavy drinking. But from what I've read the Brits seem to approach freshman-in-college level drinking as a weekly hobby well into their thirties. Thats... interesting.

Democracy in Pakistan

2007-11-29T13:18:00.000-06:00

Musharraf Says Emergency Rule Will End on Dec. 16
To be honest, I'm not sure if I believe him. Having taken power in a coup d'état, suspended the constitution and dismissed the Supreme Court when he knew they were going to rule against him, I don't exactly trust that he will end martial law.

But he said parliamentary elections would now go ahead as scheduled on Jan. 8 without the need for continued emergency rule, and he called on the opposition leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif to participate fully.
....
Mr. Musharraf took the oath of office as a civilian president here in the capital a day after relinquishing his role as the country’s military chief.

At the official ceremony, he warned assembled foreign diplomats not to force democracy and human rights on developing countries, but to let them evolve in their own time. Many of them had been highly critical of his recent actions.

To sum up, he was sworn into a second term that was probably not exactly legal. But he did finally take off his uniform. He says that there will be a return of the constitutional rule and there will be an election for parliament in January, both of which are very good things. But, like I said, I'll pleased when those things actually happen.

One thing that has to be kept in mind, whatever Musharraf's real opinion on the matter, the region is destabilized. Most of Afghanistan is run by warlords and the boarder is hardly secure. With its immediate neighbor so fragmented, any leader of Pakistan would be in an unenviable position. We can hope that Pakistan will make democratic reforms, but with a leader prone to dictatorial means, an unstable neighbor to the north and lets not forget its long running dispute with India, I hope Pakistan can do this.

Its interesting to read that since the dissolution of the Supreme Court, lawyers have been in the streets protesting. Here, lawyers are pretty low key people and the thought of a huge group of lawyers taking the streets sounds like something out of the Onion. Then again, if the rule of law was being suspended, I would like to think that at least some lawyers would come to the defense of their profession.

The really interesting thing Musharraf says is this:

“There is an unrealistic or even impractical obsession with your form of democracy, human rights and civil liberties, which you have taken centuries to acquire and which you expect us to adopt in a few years, in a few months,” he said, addressing the diplomats.

“We want democracy; I am for democracy. We want human rights, we want civil liberties, but we will do it our way, as we understand our society, our environment, better than anyone in the West,” he said.

While I disagree that an obsession with democracy and civil rights is a bad thing, I can see how one could argue that you can't force democracy. I system that requires the population to be active participants cannot be built overnight. That said, we look back at the lawyers in the street and see that Pakistanis do want to participate in their government. I hope that their desire to participate is strong enough and that Musharraf is able to recognize when that the time has come.

Bush appointees do science badly

2007-11-28T10:21:00.000-06:00

7 Decisions on Species Revised

In the course of those reviews, for example, Mitch King, then the agency's Region 6 director, said in a June memo to headquarters that while the field and regional office's scientific review concluded there is "substantial" evidence that the white-tailed prairie dog faces a risk of extinction, "the change to 'not substantial' only occurred at Ms. MacDonald's suggestion."

A Bush appointee rewriting the recommendations from scientists in the field? This should be shocking, unheard of and we should all be appalled that a political appointee would dare do such a thing. But of course we aren't. Because this has happened before in this administration, notably with global warming.

What does it mean to the animals that they were probably improperly sorted as not endangered? Well it means that the land they live on might have been given away to some human habitation. The water that they live in might have been siphoned off to water some farm or flush some toilets. What does it mean to you when you have to wait another day to see a doctor? Sucks doesn't it? That extra day can make a big difference to you.

I guess it comes down to the fact that I'm disgusted that politics gets to dictate science. Its happened here, it happened at NASA about global warming. It started with the dissolution of the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995 by Newt Gingrich and all the Republicans that came into office after the 1994 election. Since I was all of nine years old at the time of that election, I don't really remember what life was like when science was taken seriously and the conclusions of scientists were not met with purely political opposition.

Changing the data or changing the conclusions drawn from the data to fit a predetermined goal is not science. Thats why Young Earth Creationism isn't science, thats why Intelligent Design isn't science, and thats what this administration has been doing. Ignoring the science about species extinction and global warming means that big businesses get to do what they want. "Drill for oil in ANWR? Sure! Hold Detroit to emission standards? Whatever for?"

Another reason I want to like Hillary, she says she'll work to reestablish the OTA.

Wont someone PLEASE think of the children?

2007-11-27T12:09:00.000-06:00

Indiana's Legal High: Teens Turned On To Powerful Drug
Here it is again, the horrible, terror inducing, the thing that strikes fear into every parent; the legal high.

The plant provides a quick high that some have compared to LSD, and it's readily accessible to anyone.

This sentence is totally misleading. Firstly "high" is usually reserved for marijuana. Think of the "round the table" scenes in "That '70s Show." LSD is not generally described as a "high" but rather as a "trip" as are many other hallucinogens. This quibbling about words is not without a point. The media's portrayal of this powerful drug is barely more than a scare story. They don't bother to try to understand what this drug is doing or why people find it attractive. Instead they throw around loaded words that are bound to get a rise out of people.

Drug counselors said they are worried salvia is a gateway drug to other harmful substances.

Ah yes, the slippery slope argument. While its true that for many drugs, users can build up a tolerance that sends them looking for another high, the idea that one chemical leads to another is usually pretty silly. The gateway aspect comes from the social atmosphere; the illegality, the sneaking around, the discovery that this chemical they authorities don't want you to use is actually kind of fun.

"You do have to keep in it check. It's something that you do need to use responsibly," Sidler said.

There is any number of low activity psychoactive substances that he could be talking about. Hell, I'm pretty sure I've heard people saying that about alcohol, even late night caffeine use.

Considering the intensity of the short trip, and the fact that this society likes its acceptable psychoactive substances to be low concentration/high dilution, I think that there will be laws passed making this illegal. The active substance is Salvinorin A and its potency starts at 200 micrograms. It acts on an opioid receptor, unlike LSD and other hallucinogens which act on seritonin receptors. Marijuana acts on cannabinoid receptors. So this drug, while highly active, is not acting in the same manner as LSD or marijuana as many of the news stories claim.

So is this really a post about regional news? Not really, but the biochemistry part of me just takes over at some point and I can't resist.

The Japanese go Whaling

2007-11-26T18:05:00.000-06:00

Japan Hunts the Humpback. Now Comes the Backlash.

Vessels from the groups Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace tail and harass the whaling fleet, while strong protests are lodged by environmental groups, many marine biologists, and officials from the United States, Australia and other countries. But this year those complaints have intensified, largely because Japan has added a new animal to its planned harvest of more than 1,400 whales from seven species — the humpback, Megaptera novaeangliae.

Usually I can understand both sides of a debate and at least appreciate where those I disagree with are coming from. I can usually understand that reasonable people can disagree. I can usually accept that people coming from different cultural backgrounds can look at the same thing and see different things.

Usually I don't feel like I need to dress in black and hurl Molotov cocktails.

On this point I feel the need to do spectacular physical damage, I feel the need to send these people to Sea World followed by a long stint in a small cell.

There is no reason for the Japanese to continue to hunt any whales. Their appeal that they are doing real scientific is totally undermined by the fact that most of the whales end up on the market as food.

The interesting comment comes near the end of the article.

The Japan Whaling Association, a private group representing the whaling operations, has described complaints as cultural imperialism on its Web site, whaling.jp:

“Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture,” the association says, “would compare to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chips.”

Whaling was part of American culture once too. At some point we got over that. Yeah, it hurt, whole communities were upset and people were put out of work. And while thats horrible, society moves on and culture adapts. Besides, how much of Japanese culture is still dependent upon this whaling culture? Falling back on the idea of respect for other cultures to defend this horrible act is a pretty ridiculous.

There is no reason for Japan to be whaling and the rest of the world needs to call them on it. In fact you should go over to Green Peace and send a letter to Condoleezza Rice urging her to put pressure on Japan. I am doubtful that Condoleezza is going to actually do much, but something is better than nothing.

Scandal as a tease and a ghost.

2007-11-24T14:07:00.000-06:00

Publisher: McClellan doesn't believe Bush lied

Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Books, which is publishing McClellan's book in April, tells NBC from his Connecticut home that McCLellan, "Did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him."

Hrmm. When things aren't totally clear, its best to go back to the original source document.

What Happened Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself.

The key word here seems to me to be "involved" in the last sentences. How could Bush be involved in "unknowingly passing on false information" and not be lying? Was Bush passing false information to the press secretary because he was told false information? Someone in that group of five people must have known the information was false.

There is another side to this. McClellan "Did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him." Maybe not, but the publisher knew damned well the stir that those three short paragraphs would cause. A little bit of scandal helps hustle dead trees, everyone knows that. And that is the real reason for all this. The idea that McClellan might know who gave Valerie Plame's name to those reporters is a tease. A tease as surely as a flash of lace at the top of a stocking.

The scandals that haunt this administration do little more than haunt. They players get shuffled on and off the stage, get rearranged a bit, cause a little panic each time a new one shows up. But nothing substantial seems to have really happened. We still have no time table for withdrawal. We still have detainees being tortured I'm sure. None of these scandals seems to be able to solidify into anything that can throw the White House off track. All the ghosts of all the dead in Iraq don't even seem able to scare away the saber rattling with Iran. Maybe they've got some killer ghost traps over there.

The rights of the unpopular.

2007-11-21T12:53:00.000-06:00

Victor Rabinowitz, 96, Leftist Lawyer, Dies
Sometimes you only hear about really neat people when they die. I had never heard of Victor Rabinowitz until I read this obituary.

Victor Rabinowitz, a leftist lawyer whose causes and clients over nearly three-quarters of a century ranged from labor unions to Black Panthers to Cuba to Dashiell Hammett to Dr. Benjamin Spock to his own daughter, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.

Thats pretty damn interesting. I have a lot of respect for people who are willing to help the people the public despises. Defending Cuba's right to its land that had been held by US corporations? Sheesh, that couldn't have been popular at all. Its that idea about doing whats right versus doing whats popular. And this reminded me of a blog post I read a few days ago at Emeriblog. Kim, the writer, posted a letter from an annonymous Army Nurse.

Somewhere in the midst of the War on Terrorism, there are nurses that have been called to duty to care for, none-other-than, the very people that are being accused of attacking, plotting against, funding attacks on, and killing the very same forces that these nurses work along side of.

Didn’t we all take some oath when we became nurses? Something along the lines of caring for all humans regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or situation? I can’’t recall, I think I have become jaded. None-the-less, somewhere detainee nurses are putting to test that oath everyday as they struggle to cope with their actions

Lawyers defending the rights of spies, hated foreign governments, radicals and murderers; doctors and nurses treating the enemy, the terrorist and the detainee; these are people that we should all be proud of. Anyone willing to stand up for people who are already down is to be applauded. Its not just about defending the innocent from system, but also the guilty from unfair punishment by that system.

The idea that the guilty still have rights by the simple virtue of being human is hard to act on.

When the misdeed is a nicked candy bar, thats no big deal. But the idea that Slobodan Milosevic deserved medical attention? It's not like I've ever really had to deal with anything that weighty, but I would like to think I'd be able to do what needed to be done.

Security costs money, money we don't have right now.

2007-11-20T11:16:00.000-06:00

Security Funds For Conventions Tied In Stalemate

A stalemate in Washington is holding up money for security during next year's GOP and Democratic conventions and could force Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver to front tens of millions of dollars, lawmakers warned Monday.

This could also go under DC Drama, but since I am currently in the Twin Cities this is pretty local. St. Paul's downtown is tiny and Minneapolis is bigger, but its really not that big. Minneapolis, St. Paul and Denver don't have enough money right now to get the security contracts signed. I don't know about Denver, but St. Paul is trying to plan but running up against a lack of information. If you have enough time you can get planned enough for most things. You can even plan enough to be flexible for any strange things that might happen. But with no information and no money to get the ball rolling, you end up planning at the last minute. And thats fine for picnics and potlucks, but national political conventions for the two major parties should not be planned like a pot luck.

The bill that is being held up would give $25 million each to the Twin Cities and Denver. That is not a small bit of money. What happens if the cities don't get the money? I'm really not sure how things like this work. I guess the security contracts need to get signed. Where would the money come from? I could speculate, but I'd rather not. I'd rather see the feds or the respective parties cough up the money.

But lets not get too downhearted about all this. The mayors St. Paul and Minneapolis don't want this to be a riot, and there are promises that there wont be "pens" for the protesters. And some of the proof can be found at The Uptake. Good stuff.

There is no reason for this...

2007-11-19T20:22:00.000-06:00

Other than the fact that I want to brag.

This is probably partially due to the fact that make liberal use of block quotes. Lets see if I can keep this up. The key seems to be big words. Maybe I can add footnotes.

Homeopathy, dilution is not the solution

2007-11-19T12:14:00.000-06:00

Since I did science on Friday, I'm going to do some health today to make up for it. These two articles appeared in the Guardian only a few days apart. Homeopathy is "Western Medicine" in that it was invented by an Englishman, but it is not modern nor is it scientifically supported. Its a much bigger deal in England than it is here in the US. The first article is by Jeanette Winterson and is appropriately titled In defence of homeopathy. She starts, as many do, with an anecdote.

Picture this. I am staying in a remote cottage in Cornwall without a car. I have a temperature of 102, spots on my throat, delirium, and a book to finish writing. My desperate publisher suggests I call Hilary Fairclough, a homeopath who has practices in London and Penzance. She sends round a remedy called Lachesis, made from snake venom. Four hours later I have no symptoms whatsoever.

Interesting sure, but as the quote says "The plural of anecdote is not data." So lets get down to where Winterson starts talking about the real criticisms of homeopathy, mainly its use of absurdly diluted substances to treat illness.

Objections to homeopathy begin with what are viewed as the impossible dilutions of the remedies, so that only nano amounts of the original active substance remain, and in some cases are only an imprint, or memory. Yet our recent discoveries in the world of the very small point to a whole new set of rules for the behaviour of nano-quantities. Thundering around in our Gulliver world, we were first shocked to find that splitting the atom allowed inconceivable amounts of energy to be released. Now, we are discovering that the properties of materials change as their size reaches the nano-scale. Bulk material should have constant physical properties, regardless of its size, but at the nano-scale this is not the case. In a solvent, such as water, nano particles can remain suspended, neither floating nor sinking, but permeating the solution. Such particles are also able to pass through cell walls, and they can cause biochemical change.

The argument that water somehow remembers the chemical activity of a substance that was is absurd. If water remembered and acted like all the chemicals it had come into contact with you could be bathing in water that is going to act like Queen Victoria's stomach acid. I don't even know what the argument for their pills is. Winterson's use of the "nano" is an appeal to the authority of buzzwords that most people don't understand.

So, three days later Ben Goldacre asks if its A kind of magic? He discusses the placebo effect and regression to the mean as the real reasons that the anecdotes support homeopathy. He goes on to talk about how supporters of homeopathy react to this type of criticisms.

With alternative therapists, when you point out a problem with the evidence, people don't engage with you about it, or read and reference your work. They get into a huff. They refuse to answer calls or email queries. They wave their hands and mutter sciencey words such as "quantum" and "nano". They accuse you of being a paid plant from some big pharma conspiracy. They threaten to sue you. They shout, "What about thalidomide, science boy?", they cry, they call you names, they hold lectures at their trade fairs about how you are a dangerous doctor, they contact and harass your employer, they try to dig up dirt from your personal life, or they actually threaten you with violence (this has all happened to me, and I'm compiling a great collection of stories for a nice documentary, so do keep it coming).

They don't take it well. People don't tend to act rationally when defending something that isn't rational. Thats the nature of the beast, so I'm not surprised to find that he has been threatened. But the irrationality of the homeopaths is not the main point of his essay. The point is that homeopaths, like AIDS/HIV, evolution and global warming denialists, hurt science understanding of the general population.

By pushing their product relentlessly with this scientific flim-flam, homeopaths undermine the public understanding of what it means to have an evidence base for a treatment. Worst of all, they do this at the very time when academics are working harder than ever to engage the public in a genuine collective ownership and understanding of clinical research, and when most good doctors are trying to educate and involve their patients in the selection of difficult treatment options. This is not a nerdy point. This is vital.

There are many points on which I am willing to concede that science doesn't or can't know everything. But this is not one of them. A logical look at the dilutions says that homeopathy doesn't work the way it claims. Yet the idea persists. Part of me can understand the need to believe that something simple can cure us, but the logical part of me balks. And I can't ignore that no matter how I try.