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Labels: history Labels: humor Labels: fake hate crimes Labels: gun rights "The patient is fine," said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. "Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication." The case was first reported in November, and the new report is the first official publication of the case in a medical journal. Hutter and a team of medical professionals performed the stem cell transplant on the patient, an American living in Germany, to treat the man's leukemia, not the HIV itself. However, the team deliberately chose a compatible donor who has a naturally occurring gene mutation that confers resistance to HIV. The mutation cripples a receptor known as CCR5, which is normally found on the surface of T cells, the type of immune system cells attacked by HIV. The mutation is known as CCR5 delta32 and is found in 1 percent to 3 percent of white populations of European descent. HIV uses the CCR5 as a co-receptor (in addition to CD4 receptors) to latch on to and ultimately destroy immune system cells. Since the virus can't gain a foothold on cells that lack CCR5, people who have the mutation have natural protection. (There are other, less common HIV strains that use different co-receptors.) People who inherit one copy of CCR5 delta32 take longer to get sick or develop AIDS if infected with HIV. People with two copies (one from each parent) may not become infected at all. The stem cell donor had two copies. Labels: medicine Labels: economics Mandy Stowe, who suddenly left the program during her sophomore year (1998-99) and later became the 2000-01 Midwestern Collegiate Conference Newcomer of the Year at Wisconsin-Green Bay, had an even worse relationship with Guevara than others that left. Unlike the other players, Stowe thought Guevara cared too much about her personal life. "She wouldn't like it if my pants were too tight, or I wore too much makeup," Stowe said. "One time I went to a tanning booth, and she said I was more committed to tanning than basketball," Stowe later added. "I really started hating basketball, going to the gym and being near the coaches." Labels: homosexuality Although several state education groups spoke in favor of the bill, the House Education Committee voted 9-8 against advancing the measure that sponsor Rep. Rich Jarvis, R-Meridian, said would keep children in school longer. The state Department of Education had estimated the proposal could cost about $11 million, based on the estimated 1,890 students who dropped out of grades nine through 12 last year and how much it would have cost to keep them. Rep. Pete Nielsen, R- Mountain Home, told the committee it is better to provide students with educational choices such as alternative schools than to force them to attend traditional classes. "Are we willing to save a few kids with compulsion?" Nielsen said. Nielsen said many Idaho schools already offer education options for students who may not be college bound, such as alternative schools, early graduation and work force training. The bill's supporters argued that a 16-year-old doesn't have the mental capacity to make such a large decision. Labels: public education When it comes to the nation’s economic issues, 67% of U.S. voters have more confidence in their own judgment than they do in the average member of Nineteen percent (19%) trust members of Congress more, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fourteen percent (14%) aren’t sure. Republicans and unaffiliated voters by double digits have more confidence in themselves than Democrats do, but even a majority of the party that controls Congress trust themselves more than the average legislator. Forty-four percent (44%) voters also think a group of people selected at random from the phone book would do a better job addressing the nation’s problems than the current Congress, but 37% disagree. Twenty percent (20%) are undecided. The new Congress fares worse on this question that the previous Congress. Last October, just 33% said a randomly selected group of Americans would do a better job than the Congress then in session. Labels: economics Several questions remained unanswered yesterday regarding the theft of Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske's gun from his parked car Dec. 26 — including why the chief was not carrying the weapon. With few exceptions, Seattle police officers are required to carry a gun at all times within the city limits. Officers sometimes will not carry a gun if it is impractical or inappropriate to do so during their free time, such as if they are at the gym, playing in a soccer game or drinking alcohol, police officials said. The stolen pistol, a 9-mm Glock semiautomatic, is Kerlikowske's personal weapon, which he carries when off duty, not the gun issued by the department. Department spokesman Sean Whitcomb said he did not know whether Kerlikowske was carrying another gun at the time of the theft or what the chief was doing while his car was parked downtown. Whitcomb said he also did not know: • How the chief secured the gun in the vehicle, except to say he had not left it in plain view. • How the car was broken into, except to say the car was locked. • Whether the chief had secured the pistol with a trigger lock or other safety device, although Whitcomb said he assumes the gun was loaded. Labels: gun rights Labels: machining Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department. Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version). The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors. But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.” Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far. New Penalties Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541) What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make. Labels: health care Labels: economics In November, an extremist Web site called on Muslims to launch a "forest jihad" in Australia, Europe, Russia and the United States. The posting, which quoted imprisoned Al Qaeda terrorist Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, said setting forest fires was legal under "eye-for-an-eye" Islamic law. "Scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels' forests when they do the same to our lands," the posting read. The author of the posting indicated that Nasar — also known as Abu Musab Al-Suri — was urging terrorists to use sulfuric acid or gasoline to start the fires. "Forest fires track well with the latest discussion trends seen in the Al Qaeda forums — easy to do, big impact, low security risk, high media coverage," said Al Qaeda expert Jarret Brachman. "We've seen these kinds of appeals for action, be it setting fire to forests in Australia, to creating oil slicks on mountain roads in Europe, to poisoning water supplies and driving buses off bridges in the United States. "The fact is that the Al Qaeda ideology is starting to branch out to more of an 'anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyhow' approach." The Australian newspaper The Age was carrying a similar story earlier, but it seems to have disappeared from their website. Labels: terrorism Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages. The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged up to $5.7 trillion more. The Senate is to vote this week on an economic-stimulus measure of at least $780 billion. It would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month. Only the stimulus bill to be approved this week, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed four months ago and $168 billion in tax cuts and rebates enacted in 2008 have been voted on by lawmakers. The remaining $8 trillion is in lending programs and guarantees, almost all under the Fed and FDIC. Recipients’ names have not been disclosed. Labels: economics Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of "climate change delusion." Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters. Such anxiety over current events is not a new phenomenon. Worries about contemporary threats, such as nuclear war or AIDS, have historically been woven into the mental illnesses of each generation. But global warming could have a broader and deeper effect on mental health, even if indirectly. "Climate change could have a real impact on our psyches," says Paul Epstein, the associate director for the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. Labels: global warming An Arizona man who has waged a 10-year campaign to stop a flood of illegal immigrants from crossing his property is being sued by 16 Mexican nationals who accuse him of conspiring to violate their civil rights when he stopped them at gunpoint on his ranch on the U.S.-Mexico border. Roger Barnett, 64, began rounding up illegal immigrants in 1998 and turning them over to the U.S. Border Patrol, he said, after they destroyed his property, killed his calves and broke into his home. His Cross Rail Ranch near Douglas, Ariz., is known by federal and county law enforcement authorities as "the avenue of choice" for immigrants seeking to enter the United States illegally. Trial continues Monday in the federal lawsuit, which seeks $32 million in actual and punitive damages for civil rights violations, the infliction of emotional distress and other crimes. Also named are Mr. Barnett's wife, Barbara, his brother, Donald, and Larry Dever, sheriff in Cochise County, Ariz., where the Barnetts live. The civil trial is expected to continue until Friday. The lawsuit is based on a March 7, 2004, incident in a dry wash on the 22,000-acre ranch, when he approached a group of illegal immigrants while carrying a gun and accompanied by a large dog. Attorneys for the immigrants - five women and 11 men who were trying to cross illegally into the United States - have accused Mr. Barnett of holding the group captive at gunpoint, threatening to turn his dog loose on them and saying he would shoot anyone who tried to escape. The immigrants are represented at trial by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), which also charged that Sheriff Dever did nothing to prevent Mr. Barnett from holding their clients at "gunpoint, yelling obscenities at them and kicking one of the women." The lawsuit said he then called his wife and two Border Patrol agents arrived at the site. It also said Mr. Barnett acknowledged that he had turned over 12,000 illegal immigrants to the Border Patrol since 1998. In March, U.S. District Judge John Roll rejected a motion by Mr. Barnett to have the charges dropped, ruling there was sufficient evidence to allow the matter to be presented to a jury. Mr. Barnett's attorney, David Hardy, had argued that illegal immigrants did not have the same rights as U.S. citizens. Mr. Barnett told The Washington Times in a 2002 interview that he began rounding up illegal immigrants after they started to vandalize his property, northeast of Douglas along Arizona Highway 80. He said the immigrants tore up water pumps, killed calves, destroyed fences and gates, stole trucks and broke into his home. Some of his cattle died from ingesting the plastic bottles left behind by the immigrants, he said, adding that he installed a faucet on an 8,000-gallon water tank so the immigrants would stop damaging the tank to get water. Mr. Barnett said some of the ranch´s established immigrant trails were littered with trash 10 inches deep, including human waste, used toilet paper, soiled diapers, cigarette packs, clothes, backpacks, empty 1-gallon water bottles, chewing-gum wrappers and aluminum foil - which supposedly is used to pack the drugs the immigrant smugglers give their "clients" to keep them running. Labels: immigration THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found. Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition. The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions. However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal. Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated. Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease. Seven of the eight people in A recently identified person with pertussis has been coughing for 10 weeks. During that time the patient saw 4 doctors and went to a hospital emergency department. That’s a pretty common story to hear from people with pertussis. Not only is pertussis a very serious and long lasting sickness, it’s also very expensive. Labels: medicine Labels: gun rights Labels: my books
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The Poster Boy For Subprime Mortgage Lending
I've seen this one mentioned before, but here is the primary source: the May 3, 2007 Hollister (Cal.) Freelance:Hollister - Despite making only $14,000 a year, strawberry picker Alberto Ramirez managed to buy his own slice of the American Dream. But his Hollister home came with a hefty price tag - $720,000.
I'm trying very, very hard to imagine how a subprime mortgage lender that wasn't completely out of his mind approved this loan.
A year and a half later, Ramirez has defaulted on his loan, and he's hoping to sell the house before it's repossessed. And according to many housing advocates and civil rights groups, Ramirez is not alone. As mortgage foreclosures rise, many minorities are suffering.
In April, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the NAACP, the National Fair Housing Alliance, the National Council of La Raza and the Center for Responsible Lenders called for a six-month moratorium on subprime home foreclosures. Those groups reported that minorities receive a disproportionate share of riskier subprime loans, and while those loans make up only 13 percent of the overall mortgage market, they account for more than 60 percent of new foreclosure filings.
...
Deidre Swesnik, director of public policy and communications at the National Fair Housing Alliance, said non-English speakers and minorities have been targeted by subprime mortgage brokers. A study by the National Council of La Raza showed that nearly all mortgage advertisements in Spanish-language newspapers were for subprime brokers, Swesnik said.
But Rafael Cebrero, whose company Rancho Grande Real Estate sold Ramirez his home and arranged his mortgage, said subprime loans are getting a bad rap. Those loans, he said, have made it easier for many people, including Latinos, to purchase a home.
So how did Ramirez, the strawberry picker with an annual income of just $14,000, purchase a $720,000 home in Hollister without any money down?
He had help, for one thing. Although Alberto Ramirez was the only one to sign the purchase agreement and the only one named on the loan documents, he actually bought the house with his wife Rosa Ramirez, as well as their friends Jesus Martinez and his wife. However, even in a good month, the Ramirezes and Martinezes together don't earn much more than a combined $6,500, and their official monthly payments were around $5,200.
Karl Skow, president of the Greater Monterey Bay Area Chapter of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers, said that as a rule of thumb, people shouldn't pay more than one-third of their income for their housing. In California, where homes are more expensive, that's a little unrealistic, Skow said, but he said most lenders still draw the line at 50 percent.
With their combined incomes, the Ramirezes and the Martinezes estimated that they could afford monthly payments of $3,000 - around 50 percent of their income. However, the Ramirezes said Rancho Grande real estate agent Maria Avila promised they could refinance their home in three to six months to an affordable rate; until then, Rosa Ramirez said, Avila said she would pay for whatever they couldn't afford.
Avila did supplement the mortgage payments on the Hollister home, paying about $2,200 per month for nine months.
But the refinance never happened, and Martinez said Avila stopped helping with the payments at the end of 2006. A notice of default has been filed on the home, but no foreclosure date has been set, and the Ramirezes and the Martinezes are hoping they can sell the house before they lose it in a repossession.
And what was the real estate agent thinking, agreeing to subsidize the loan payments for that long? That's $19,800 that she kicked in--almost half of the entire 6.5% typical commission on the sale of a $720,000 house.
I'm not thrilled that the buyers did something this stupid--but I am having a hard time seeing them as eyes open, fully aware consumers. Even a fair number of college graduates don't fully understand mortgages, interest rates, and the like. And this guy picks strawberries for a living, and needs an interpreter to talk to a reporter.
This Rafael Cebrero, who thought that he was doing someone a favor by helping them in over their head on a mortgage, of course, phrases it in terms of helping Latinos get their first house. And helping them get their first really, really bad item on their credit report: a foreclosure.
For Those Who Believe In Cultural Relativism
This will certainly encourage you to feel comfortable with that position. From the February 11, 2009 Daily Mail:A Saudi judge has ordered a woman should be jailed for a year and receive 100 lashes after she was gang-raped, it was claimed last night.
I expect to see cultural relativists linking to my whining and saying, "Well, gang rape happens in America too! There's no real difference!" The difference is that we don't send the victim to prison.
The 23-year-old woman, who became pregnant after her ordeal, was reportedly assaulted after accepting a lift from a man.
He took her to a house to the east of the city of Jeddah where she was attacked by him and four of his friends throughout the night.
She later discovered she was pregnant and made a desperate attempt to get an abortion at the King Fahd Hospital for Armed Forces.
According to the Saudi Gazette, she eventually 'confessed' to having 'forced intercourse' with her attackers and was brought before a judge at the District Court in Jeddah.
He ruled she had committed adultery - despite not even being married - and handed down a year's prison sentence, which she will serve in a prison just outside the city.
She is still pregnant and will be flogged once she has had the child.
There are real cultural differences--and some cultures are inferior to others.
Some Patterns Just Keep Repeating
I'm reading Kenneth O. Morgan, ed., The Oxford History of Britain at the moment. The first essay, about Roman Britain, by Peter Salway, has some eerie similarities to other periods and places:Fourth-century legislation repeatedly tried to prevent members of the class that now had the hereditary obligation to serve from moving their main residences away from the towns, while those in higher social classes were exempt from municipal obligations. The new element in society was the vastly-expanded bureaucracy, and it in their direction that we should probably be looking. Five governors, their staffs, households, companies of guards, and the many others connected with them needed housing; and there were numerous other officials with inflated establishments and life-styles supported by substantial allowances. At each level in the hierarchies, expectations existed which in the end filtered down from the lavish grandeur of the Late Roman court. Large areas of fourth-century capitals such as Trier or Arles, once normal municipalities, were given over to palaces and other associated official buildings. [pp. 53-54]
Fortunately, that could never happen here.
By the way, is Nancy Pelosi flying to Rome in that fancy 200 seat airplane that she uses to go back and forth to San Francisco with her staff?
The Golem
Many of you are familiar with the medieval Yiddish tales of the golem--a creature made of clay, and of magic. In some ways, golem tales are predecessors of the Frankenstein story, and a reminder that what we create may soon not take our orders. Worth reading in full is "The Golem Will Turn"
:The Golem will turn.
Yes, about $800 billion worth.
There was a time when we, the people, needed big things done for our country. We needed something to keep us safe, to do our heavy lifting, and to manage the things we hadn't time to manage.
We created for ourselves a Government.
We created for ourselves a Golem.
A Golem with more power than any one of us, to do our bidding, and work when we couldn't work, and protect us as we slept.
For a time, it was good.
The Golem mindlessly followed our orders. We voted, and it counted our votes the way we wanted it to, and executed the orders by the process we agreed upon. It kept us safe, and made decisions based solely on our wills and our votes.
It was our most trusted, most loyal servant.
As time wore on, the times got harder. We asked more of our Golem than it could deliver. It needed to become larger to protect us from bigger threats. It needed a longer reach to affect the spread of the country. It needed more faculties to process the requests of the increasing number of masters it had.
It needed more clay.
The Golem helped make our country a superpower. A strength in the world unlike any other. But with this strength, came more responsibilities. The Golem had to be smarter than ever. It needed to weigh the complex requests and requirements of a world with the will of its masters.
It needed more clay.
Tragedy, as a group strikes at our very hearts. Worse, it targets us from within our own ranks. There have been criminals within our borders since the country began, but this was different. It was something we had never faced. Once again, we asked that the Golem be made larger, be given more reach, and granted more power to process information. But for the first time, we asked the Golem to turn its gaze upon us, its masters.
It needed more clay.
Uniforms For Congressmen?
"Members of Congress should be compelled to wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers, so we can identify their corporate sponsors."
Many of them, however, would need outlandishly large uniforms to carry all the patches.
UPDATE: A reader points me to this 1998 The Onion "news story":SPRINGFIELD, IL—A local teenager was in stable condition Monday after nearly being crushed to death by the 263 corporate logos he recklessly wore at one time. "The patient was admitted to our emergency room unable to breathe," St. Joseph's Hospital chief of surgery Dr. Lyle Wilson-Scheidt said. "His chest was collapsed under the weight of nearly 150 pounds of company and product logos, including Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie & Fitch, Pepsi, Nike, Adidas, Fubu, Taco Bell, Nintendo, MTV, Budweiser, the Chicago Bulls, the NBA and, for some reason, Aetna Life Insurance." Hospital workers used a jaws-of-life device to extract the 14-year-old from the deadly crush of insignias. The AMA strongly warns individuals against wearing more than one logo for every five pounds of body weight.
We could only hope that it worked that way for Congresscritters.
Fake Hate Crimes
This AP account appeared in the February 13, 2009 Idaho Statesman:ZURICH — The Brazilian woman who claimed to lose her unborn twins in a skinhead attack was not pregnant and probably carved the initials of Switzerland's main right-wing party into her own skin, investigators said Friday.
Hmmm. So she lied about having been pregnant. And we're supposed to believe her about everything else? If you click on the "fake hate crimes" label, you will see that we've had a bunch of these fakes in America, too.
Police said in a statement that 26-year-old Paula Oliveira was not three months pregnant Monday, when she claimed that an attack by three skinheads, one with a Nazi symbol tattooed on the back of his head, caused her to miscarry twins.
Zurich University forensic medicine chief Walter Baer said "any experienced forensic doctor would not hesitate to assume that this was a case of self-infliction."
...
The woman's father has blamed Swiss police for dragging their feet on a potentially embarrassing investigation and criticized those who suggested his daughter had lied.
"They're trying to transform the victim into a criminal. This is the tactic of a Nazi militia," Paulo Oliveira told the O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper.
This Smells Like Paranoia
I cringe a bit when I see gun owners get carried away with paranoia--but when I see something like this, I start to wonder who the paranoids are. Shooting Wire reports:A report making the rounds in Canada that says officials have it on "good authority" that our State Department may be on the verge of cutting off all imports of certain calibers of ammunition.
Now, if there were proposals to restrict handgun ammunition, you could imagine that it was some sort of idiotic proposal to reduce gun crime--which is overwhelmingly committed with handguns. But the calibers at the top of the list are all rifle calibers--and military rifle calibers at that. These calibers are probably not even 2% of U.S. murders, if that. Restricting these calibers is what you might do if you were terrified of a revolution. Certainly, with the enormous level of support that the stimulus bill enjoys, how could that happen?
Ammos listed for this rumored ban include the .50BMG, 7.62x39mm Soviet, 7.62x51mm NATO, .308 Winchester, 5.56 NATO and .223 Remington. Additionally, we're hearing that an expansion of this proposed ban might be broadened to include the 6.8mm SPC, 9mm Parabellum, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP- among others.
In other words, State Department officials may be floating a trial balloon to see if there are howls of protest, or whimpers of compliance. Canadian elected officials who have directed this information to me say the move seems to be motivated by "emboldened" anti-gun officials who think they have a kindred spirit in President Obama.
Thanks to Snowflakes in Hell for the pointer.
Spectator Article About The Crisis
I haven't read it all, but there is one paragraph here that those who remember Monty Python's famous skit will just groan over:Crucially, although the recession is now global, the collapse of banks is not. Spain and Canada also had a housing boom, yet neither has a single collapsed bank. Indeed, Spanish banks have been hoovering ours up: Abbey, Alliance & Leicester, Bradford & Bingley, Cahoot and Carter Allen are all now divisions of Grupo Santander. It will not do to shrug and say that no one expects the Spanish acquisition.
UPDATE: What was I thinking? Monty Python, not Mel Brooks.
Cool Newspaper Front Page Map
Maps of all the continents. For every newspaper that is online, mouse over the dot--and the front page appears!
And Why Is California In Financial Trouble?
Uh, maybe $196,000 for a art on a bridge project that shows dogs...hmmm, how shall we put this... making more dogs (among other natural functions of dogs).
Stem Cells At Work
And apparently not embryonic stem cells, either. From February 11, 2009 CNN:A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The report goes to explain that the risks involved are huge, and it was primarily because of the leukemia that this procedure made sense--and it would not make so much sense for someone who only had AIDS. In addition, not all strains of AIDS are apparently suited to this treatment, even if it were low risk. But it is a reminder that:
1. Adult stem cells are proving themselves useful for actual cures--without the ethical concerns of using embryonic stem cells.
2. There is a lot to be done in basic biochemical research.
I've mentioned CCR delta 32 before here--although the original evidence that its gene frequency is high among white Europeans because it also protects against bubonic plague--is now not persuasive. Still, it does seem to do something useful for AIDS, and it might be that some useful therapy can come out of this.
Slaughtering Cattle To Make The Sun Rise
I've revised the item below into a form that is suitable for op-ed pages. I've contacted all the newspapers here in Idaho already; you might send it to your local newspaper. It isn't just opinion; it's proof that Congressional Democrats pushing this stimulus package know that it isn't necessary to make the economy recover, and that the spending beyond the end of the recession is just to pay off their friends.
----
Slaughtering Cattle to Make the Sun Rise
Many “primitive” religions confuse cause and effect. The priest tells you to sacrifice an animal (or sometimes a human being) to make sure that the rains come, so that there will be a bountiful harvest. Would the rains come anyway? Who knows? Why take chances?
President Obama and most Democratic members of Congress insist that a crisis will become a catastrophe if we don’t pass this pork-laden stimulus package right now. But imagine my surprise when I recently read the Congressional Budget Office’s January 8, 2009 projection for the next ten years (available at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9958/01-08-Outlook_Testimony.pdf). The report explicitly says on page 1 that they assume “that current laws and policies regarding federal spending and taxation remain the same...” And their prediction on page 2? “CBO anticipates that the current recession, which started in December 2007, will last until the second half of 2009, making it the longest recession since World War II. (The longest such recessions otherwise, the 1973–1974 and 1981–1982 recessions, both lasted 16 months. If the current recession were to continue beyond midyear, it would last at least 19 months.)”
This is not surprising. Boom and bust cycles are a natural part of a capitalist economy. The 2003-2007 boom was spectacular, and even if there were no subprime mortgage madness going on, this would have been quite a bust. But notice that CBO was, only a month ago (when this stimulus package was being written), still expecting the recession to end in the second half of this year, even without the stimulus package—-and Congress’s own economists told this to Congress. Congress knew this, while insisting that “something has to be done now.”
Much (perhaps even most) of the enormous debt burden that this stimulus bill will handcuff onto the next generation will be for spending that will not start until after the Congressional Budget Office believes the recession will be over. So why was there this unseemly rush to get this bill passed?
The sun is going to rise shortly. The priest is insisting that we need to slaughter that bull right now or the sun won’t rise. But here’s the difference between that primitive priest and the Congressional majority that just passed the stimulus bill: the majority knows that the sun is about to rise—-and they are terrified that if we wait much longer, we’ll figure out that the sun was going to rise anyway, and this enormous burden of debt to pay off special interests wasn’t necessary.
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Clayton E. Cramer lives in Horseshoe Bend, Idaho. His most recent book, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie was published by Nelson Current in 2006.
And The Reason For The Porkulus Bill Was What?
Over at Maggie's Farm I found this link to the Congressional Budget Office's predictions of January 8, 2009 assuming "that current laws and policies regarding federal spending and taxation remain the same..."CBO anticipates that the current recession, which started in December 2007, will last until the second half of 2009, making it the longest recession since World War II. (The longest such recessions otherwise, the 1973–1974 and 1981–1982 recessions, both lasted 16 months. If the current recession were to continue beyond midyear, it would last at least 19 months.) It could also be the deepest recession during the postwar period: By CBO’s estimates, economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 percent below its potential—that is, the level of output that would be produced if the economy’s resources were fully employed (see Figure 1).
So by the time the vast majority of the pork has been spent--the recession will already be over. Which means that the stimulus package according to even the Congressional Budget Office won't accomplish anything. And according to this January 23, 2009 New York Times table of previous recessions and stimulus packages passed by Congress in the post-World War II period, it is rare for a package that "fixes" the economy to get passed before the recession ends.
This is not surprising; the natural boom and bust cycle of a free market economy means that the busts usually come to an end after 1 1/2 years (unless Congress does something really stupid, like Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act)--and it takes almost that long for Congress to stop whoring and boozing long enough to figure out to do something useless.
In short, Obama and the Democrats know that the sun is going to rise shortly--they want to get that chicken sacrificed now so that they can claim that they caused the sun to rise. I can see bits and pieces of good news in the number of local software engineering jobs being advertised (even though none of them seem to fit me).
I'm glad that I didn't fiddle with my investments; three years from now, the stock market will probably have gotten back to where it was at start of 2008, and I will be only infuriated at the amount of debt that the Democrats (and three uselessly stupid Republicans) signed us up for to make the sun rise.
A Fascinating 1929 Snowmobile Concept
A really curious and apparently quite effective use of the screw for snowmobiling. This was apparently a silent film promoting the concept made in 1929. I'm curious to know why someone hasn't built ATVs using this concept. It looks like it would work well for ice, snow, dirt, and pavement.
Nasty Bigots, Discriminating Based on Sexual Orientation
But not the way that you might think. Actually, I don't know what the truth of this one is. Perhaps the coach is telling the truth. Perhaps the player is telling the truth. If this wasn't a public institution, it wouldn't be a fit subject for governmental action. From February 11, 2009 WOOD-TV:MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. (AP) - Central Michigan and its women's basketball coach are being sued by a former player, who claims her heterosexuality was a factor in losing a scholarship after two seasons.
I really don't know which to believe. I know that when I lived in California, Napa College settled out of court with a psychology professor who said that he was discriminated against in employment because he was heterosexual. The only overt discrimination in sexual orientation that I have ever seen was in an ad in the Sonoma State University student newspaper--where a gay resort out on the Russian River specifically requested, "gay or bi preferred" for a copywriter. And considering the nature of the employer, and the need to connect to a particular customer base, I can't say that there was anything particularly absurd about that requirement.
Brooke Heike said she fell out of favor with Sue Guevara immediately after the coach was hired in 2007.
Heike said Guevara told her she wore too much makeup and was not the coach's "type." That meant she wasn't a lesbian, according to a lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Bay City.
The former Romeo High School star lost her scholarship after the 2007-08 season.
"I didn't feel that she did anything to improve herself after being told over and over what she needed to do," Guevara told an appeals committee last June.
Heike's lawsuit claims the appeals panel "simply rubber-stamped defendant Guevara's bad-faith decision to deprive plaintiff of her scholarship and dismiss her from the team" for reasons unrelated to basketball.
What consenting adults do in private should not be the government's business--and it doesn't matter if it is sodomy or employment.
UPDATE: Read through the hundreds of comments. Many of them report either personally being pushed off a women's college athletic team for being straight, or of family members having this happen. Even better, someone found a news story from several years back where the coach made remarks that match up with what the plaintiff is alleging. From the March 17, 2003 Michigan Daily (which seems to be a student paper):
Imagine if a male employer made remarks like that about what a female employee did away from work--and the female employee alleged sexual harassment. Would anyone not see these remarks as showing an inappropriate level of interest?
There Are Two Ways To Read This Story
1. Americans are scared witless of a big tax increase on ammunition.
2. Americans are really, really upset about what those crooked morons in Washington are doing, and worried that they are going to need to use that ammunition.
From the February 10, 2009 Orlando Sentinel:Selling bullets may be the most secure job in Florida as long as supplies last.
There has been a very noticeable increase in "time for pitchforks and torch" rhetoric out there--and I get the impression that much of the militia movement of the 1990s is starting to return. I'll be posting about that another day when I have more time--but Washington should stop its bender with other people's money long enough to notice the level of disgust and rage that is beginning to build up.
After months of heavy buying, gun dealers across the state are experiencing shortages.
Some say it began with the election of President Barack Obama. Others say it's about the economic downturn or fear of crime. Whatever the reasons, ammunition has been selling like plywood and bottled water in the days before a hurricane.
"The survivalist in all of us comes out," said John Ritz, manager of East Orange Shooting Sports in Winter Park. "It's more about protecting what you have."
Demand for bullets is so strong that suppliers are restricting deliveries.
"Where we used to get 20 to 30 cases [in a shipment], we may get two to three cases now," said Vic Grechniw of Florida Ammo Traders in Tampa. "The supply just isn't there. . . . Everybody is pretty much rushing out to get their hands on whatever they can."
Most in demand is handgun ammunition, including 9 mm and .45-caliber for semiautomatic pistols and .38-caliber for revolvers. Clerks at local Walmart stores, including Apopka and Kissimmee, say those sizes, along with .22-caliber, are on back order at the chain's warehouses.
When the economy was doing okay, a lot of people weren't paying enough attention to the lying, crooked, dishonest empty suits in Congress. But when people are losing their jobs, it wonderfully concentrates their attention.
If Only Americans Could Be More Like Europeans
At least, that's what liberals like to say. Why if so, we could just blame this economic crisis on the JEWS! This is a sobering poll reported by the February 10, 2009 Jerusalem Post:The Anti-Defamation League said Tuesday that a survey it commissioned found nearly a third of Europeans polled blame Jews for the global economic meltdown and that a greater number think Jews have too much power in the business world.
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The poll included interviews with 3,500 people - 500 each in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain. It says that in Spain, 74 percent of those asked say they feel it is "probably true" that Jews hold too much sway over the global financial markets. That is the highest percentage in the survey.
Idaho Dropout Age
An Idaho legislative committee narrowly defeated a bill to raise the dropout age to 18 today, largely because of the costs involved. It sounds like even those who voted against it did so with mixed feelings. From the February 11, 2009 Idaho Statesman:
I understand Rep. Nielsen's concerns on this. (He is one of my two representatives in the lower house.) But I agree with those who think that 16 is a bit young to making a decision like that.
Still, let's not get carried away with the likely consequences if this bill had passed. Idaho's dropout rate is actually better than I would have guessed. One of the commenters at the article linked above pointed to this data which shows that Idaho has the 13th highest graduation rate in the U.S. And we are doing way better than California--which has 18 as the dropout age. Idaho's 2006 high school graduation rate was 78.7%; California's was 65.8%.
I can remember being in high school, and seeing a teacher's add/drop list, and seeing the rather chilling explanation for several drops as "turned 18." These were students who decided that finishing the last few months of senior high school and getting a diploma just wasn't worth the time required.
Raise the dropout age to 18, if necessary. But let's start to work on the real issues that are why kids are dropping out. My guess is that many of them are coming from homes that are destructive or where education just isn't important. A social worker that I know who works in a mental hospital with kids says that for some patients, the most effective treatment might be a "parentectomy."
The People Think They Are Smarter Than Congress
One of William F. Buckley's more thoughtful comments is that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard. It turns out that the population has looked at Congress, and reached a similar conclusion. From the February 11, 2009 Rasmussen Reports poll:
I've long believed that random selection of members of the legislature and Congress would be a better choice than the current process. Would randomly picked members be smarter than the crowd up there now? No, I don't think so. They might not even be as smart. But they certainly would not be as corrupted by the continual pursuit of campaign funds, outright bribes, and sex with pages--and that's the biggest problem we have now. 
Congress (and it wasn't dramatically better when Republicans ran it) is primarily in the business of redistributing wealth from those who work to those who connive. For the most part, the redistribution of wealth that Congress causes is upwards, with the occasional bread crumb thrown to the poor to make a pretense of concern for the poor.
Someone For Gun Control With Good Reason
Unsurprisingly, Obama has appointed yet another gun control nut, this time to the job of Drug Czar, Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. And you know what? I can see why this guy believes in gun control--it's something that he hasn't quite mastered himself. From the January 5, 2005 Seattle Times:
Boring is Boring
For the ScopeRoller business, I often have to enlarge the interior diameter of a hole in a piece of Delrin to a particular, fairly precise size. I rough out the hole with a Forstner bit a bit smaller than the intended size, then use a boring tool to finish it to the required size, +- .002". Most of the time, the diameter that I need is just a few hundredths of an inch larger than the diameter of one of my Forstner bits, so one or two passes with the boring tool is sufficient.
Today, I'm making a set of ScopeRollers for the Celestron NexStar Super Heavy Duty mount, which requires a 2.400" bore. I have a 2.125" Forstner bit that fits into the chuck that mounts in the tailstock of the lathe, so it was easy to make a very accurately centered hole.
I also have a 2.375" Forstner bit, but it requires a 1/2" chuck--and there isn't one made that I can find that fits into the tailstock of the Sherline lathe. I can do it in the drill press, but the resulting hole isn't quite so precisely centered.
Anyway, the result is that to enlarge from 2.125" to 2.400" takes a number of passes. And it gets very boring. It occurred to me while doing this that "boring" (in the sense of being uninteresting and tedious) had its origin in the boring of cannon, which is a similar and much slower process. This online etymology dictionary seems to confirm that:O.E. borian "to bore," from bor "auger," from P.Gmc. *boron, from PIE base *bhor-/*bhr- "to cut with a sharp point" (cf. Gk. pharao "I plow," L. forare "to bore, pierce," O.C.E. barjo "to strike, fight," Alb. brime "hole"). The meaning "diameter of a tube" is first recorded 1572; hence fig. slang full bore (1936) "at maximum speed," from notion of unchoked carburetor on an engine. Sense of "be tiresome or dull" first attested 1768, a vogue word c.1780-81, possibly a figurative extension of "to move forward slowly and steadily."
There is nothing that describes the process of boring better than "to move forward slowly and steadily." I suppose that I should try to find a 2.375" or 2.25" Forstner bit with a 3/8" shank, so that my boring is less boring.
Thanks For All The Fish
If you read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you are familiar with this line.
I want to thank those of you who are making contributions through PayPal. I am about to start working at my day job (the one that actually pays me decently), and while it's a pretty good job--I sure would prefer to spend my days working on public policy issues and blogging. Unfortunately, nearly all wealth in this country is concentrated in the hands of the left, and as a result, there simply isn't any opportunity for me to do what I prefer, and what I believe helps to make this country a better place.
Not Letting The Crisis Go To Waste
A while back, Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's chief of staff, made the observation, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Panic provides a wonderful opportunity for dramatic expansions of governmental power--look at the Reichstag fire. (And while I think the PATRIOT Act, overall, was a good thing, there were provisions to it that we were fortunate had a five year expiration date.) And it appears that the first steps towards government rationing of health care have been stuck into the porkulus bill:
For all the leftist screeching about Big Pharma, the major reason that American health care is expensive is because, for the vast majority of us that have health insurance, our medical care is extremely good.
My daughter has been part of a chat room group of expectant mothers in a number of different countries. She has been really impressed with the difference between the medical care that she and the other American mothers-to-be receive, compared to the British and Canadian women. Britain and Canada, the two models for nationalized health care that the left loves, both rely heavily on rationing to keep health care costs down.
So what's the reason for this pressure to keep health care costs down, even at the expense of quality health care? I suspect that the true believer leftists pushing some of this stuff are doing so because they want universal health care, and if they have to impair the health care for the 260 million of us that are covered, so that the 41 million who aren't covered get care, so be it. (Remember that many of those 41 million can afford to buy health insurance, but choose not, because they are young, and do not anticipate needing medical care. Many others are illegal aliens whose employers are socializing the costs of their labor force, while enjoying the benefits of individual capitalism.)
But the people that really matter when it comes to policy--the sorts who can afford to arrange for Tom Daschle to have a full-time limousine and chauffeur while working as a lobbyist--probably have more nefarious motives. So that the billionaires who fund the Democratic Party (George Soros, Bernie Madoff, the Sandlers who sold a subprime mortgage bill of goods to Wachovia) can continue to loot the taxpayers, even if it means that our health care declines.
Yes, We Need To Keep Doing Bailouts!
For the benefit of Brazil. From the February 9, 2009 Latin American Herald Tribune:SAO PAULO -- General Motors plans to invest $1 billion in Brazil to avoid the kind of problems the U.S. automaker is facing in its home market, said the beleaguered car maker.
Yes, I'm angry.
According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur, Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that the manufacturer will receive from the U.S. government and will be used to "complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012."
"It wouldn't be logical to withdraw the investment from where we're growing, and our goal is to protect investments in emerging markets," he said in a statement published by the business daily Gazeta Mercantil.
Those Deadly Australian Fires
CNN mentioned those deadly Australian brushfires that have destroyed whole towns and killed 170 people so far. They even went so far as to mention that arson is suspected. But they left out some details about who might be starting them. From February 9, 2009 Fox News:
Nope, We're In The Trillions
Everytime I turn around, the demands that the Democrats seem to be making to bail out their buddies get a bit bigger. From February 9, 2009 Bloomberg.com:
Pitchforks and torches time may be coming. And I'm afraid that distinctions between the billionaires who didn't back Obama, the Democrats, and the rest of this massive redistribution wealth upwards, and those who did, may not be easy to keep if it comes to that point. Like a sign here in Boise points out, "99% of lawyers ruin it for the rest."
Marketing Fear
A while back, it was very fashionable to hear Democrats claim that Bush was "marketing fear" by making a big deal about the War on Terrorism. (It's not like there was any reason to be concerned, right?) So who is marketing fear when the psychiatric profession starts seeing this syndrome? From the February 9, 2009 Boston Globe:
Actually, a stronger impact on our psyches than our world. The article goes on to repeat the global warming claims--with no recognition that a significant fraction of the world's scientists think those claims are at least overstated, unproven, or utterly false.
Why We Are Losing
This February 9, 2009 Washington Times report is about a lawsuit under way in Arizona that, by coincidence, my friend Dave Hardy is defending:
What Dave tells me is that he was unsure if the woman was unconscious or not, and pushed her with his boot to see if she was responsive. Remember that Barnett was greatly outnumbered by a group of illegal aliens, and he was all alone.
If the government actually, you know, enforced our immigration laws, perhaps it wouldn't be necessary for citizens to end up in these absurd situations. And what provoked Barnett to start this?
I have this uncomfortable feeling that we are never going to get a handle on the major problems confronting our country until the Republican Party decides to stand for something, instead of whoring after the Democratic Party's natural constituency, big companies and the obscenely rich. And so far, I have seen only the slightest hints that the Republican Party stands for anything.
Vaccines and Autism
Professor Volokh links to an article in the February 8, 2009 Times of London that reports that the study that started the whole "vaccines cause autism" claim appears not to have been simply wrong, but something a lot worse:
I recall that there was an epidemic of pertussis (whooping cough) several years back in England, because of this apparently dishonest manipulation of the data. And here in Idaho, there is this disturbing report from Meridian Joint School District #2:Date: February 6, 2009
For those of you who don't know what Eagle, Idaho is like--think of it as the Beverly Hills of the Boise area. It is an area awash in expensive, even absurdly ostentatious homes, part of why we didn't consider it when we moved to the area. And I suspect that it is not a coincidence that a place awash in this kind of wealth would have a lot of kids who weren't immunized against a disease like this.
Pray For Justice Ginsburg's Recovery
I'm serious about that, not just because cancer is a horrible thing, but because I want her to recover fully, so that President Obama doesn't get a chance to put someone on the bench that will be doing damage to the Constitution for thirty more years. I want Justice Ginsburg to stay on the Supreme Court until President Palin or Thompson is doing the nominating.
Is Illinois Next?
An interesting news report from the February 6, 2009 St. Louis Suburban Journals:The St. Clair and Madison county sheriffs both would like to see legislation to allow concealed carry of firearms in Illinois.
Not surprisingly, support for such a proposal among sheriffs includes a list of limitations--but compared to the current system, this is progress:
Madison County Sheriff Robert Hertz, who is on the Illinois Sheriff's Association executive board, recently voted to support the association's resolution asking for legislation to allow concealed carry.
Although St. Clair County Sheriff Mearl J. Justus was unable to attend the winter meeting where the association voted on the resolution, he told the Journals Wednesday that he likes the idea.
With a few exceptions - mostly current and retired law officers - carrying a concealed weapon is a felony in Illinois. According to the National Rifle Association, only Illinois and Wisconsin completely prohibit concealed carry.
"The only people who carry guns in Illinois are police or crooks," Hertz said Wednesday. Hertz said 90 percent of Illinois sheriffs responding to a survey supported concealed carry with certain provisions.
According to the resolution, those "adequate training and safeguards," include:
- Permits should be issued by a state agency to insure consistency;
- Applications should be processed through the local sheriff's office and should the process should include the ability for the sheriff's office to "articulate specific reasons" a permit should be denied and to raise objections about specific individuals;
- For officer safety, there should be some way for permit holders to be identified through their driver's license or state identification, and Firearm Owners Identification card; and
- Those receiving permits should have adequate training including a basic knowledge of firearms, proper handling of firearms, a live fire test to qualify, and instructions on the use of force, including potential liability.
Waiting For Responses From Literary Agents
I sent out a query to about 150 literary agents that I found through Writer's Market. Not surprisingly, since this database was last updated in mid-December, about 15 of the emails bounced, and about 15 so far have said, "Thanks, but not for me." While I wait for the rest to respond, if you are interested, you can see the first few chapters of the book here.
