Later On

Two excellent posts from Steven Benen. The first deals with the Republicans’ avoidance of accountability. It begins:

Following up on this item from yesterday, I had an interesting conversation via email yesterday with Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations. Bruce made a point that really resonated with me, and he was gracious enough to allow me to republish it here.

I believe that political parties should do penance for their mistakes and just losing power is not enough. Part of that involves understanding why those mistakes were made and how to prevent them from happening again. Republicans, however, have done no penance. They just pretend that they did nothing wrong. But until they do penance they don’t deserve any credibility and should be ignored until they do. That’s what my attacks on Bush are all about. I want Republicans to admit they were wrong about him, accept blame for his mistakes, and take some meaningful action to keep them from happening again. Bush should be treated as a pariah, as Richard Nixon was for many years until he rebuilt his credibility by more or less coming clean about Watergate with David Frost and writing a number of thoughtful books.

One reason this isn’t happening is because the media don’t treat Republicans as if they are discredited. On the contrary, they often seem to be treated as if they have more credibility than the administration. Just look at the silly issue of death panels. The media should have laughed it out the window, ridiculed it or at least ignored it once it was determined that there was no basis to the charge. Instead, those making the most outlandish charges are treated with deference and respect, while those that actually have credibility on the subject are treated as equals at best and often with deep skepticism, as if they are the ones with an ax to grind.

I am truly baffled by this situation, as I’m sure you are.

As regular readers may imagine, …

Continue reading. And the second post has Bartlett trying to explain why it happened:

Yesterday, I published an email from Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations, about the Republican Party, to this day, to pretend it did nothing wrong over the last eight years. The media doesn’t treat the GOP as if it’s been discredited, Republicans don’t take steps to correct their mistakes, and "those making the most outlandish charges are treated with deference and respect, while those that actually have credibility on the subject are treated as equals at best and often with deep skepticism."

The item generated some interesting discussion, here and elsewhere. Most notably, Atrios asked, "I’d be curious to hear what someone like Bartlett thinks about why the situation is as he describes."

Bruce responded to the question, and gave me permission to republish his thoughts on this:

"Like I said, I don’t know why the media is so unwilling to exercise editorial judgment any more, but here are some thoughts…

Continue reading.

Evolution is (save for the crazies) an established theory and in fact can be seen in actual operation. Indeed, the basic mechanism—variation in DNA due to mutations and combinations, with variations better adapted to the current environment crowding out those less suited—is so logical and simple that one wonders how it can be questioned.

Still, it’s a cold sort of picture: the process continues forever and blindly, creating new DNA combinations followed by the inevitable and unavoidable testing of those combinations against the rock of reality. For example, the millions of people who die from disease and the women dying in childbirth are just the process working away. The process in time—lots of time—works out exquisite answers, but at what a cost in failed variations. And all this is not, from a rational perspective, for a higher end or noble purpose or with any sort of goal. It’s simply an endless process of duplication, variation, and testing. That’s in effect what life does: reproduce, vary, and try to live.

I believe that we all, left and right, want to make the US as strong a nation as it can be, and certainly part of a nation’s strength is a citizenry that is well-nourished and healthy and well-educated and community-minded. The US is strong if its multitudinous communities are strong. So, in the national interest, we want all those communities to be strong.

Thus the government has a national interest in supporting a good educational system and seeing that its citizens are well educated. And we do indeed have government schools and universities that work toward this mission, albeit with insufficient research into, and replication of, programs that produce the best educational outcomes. And we are working toward healthcare reforms that will, one hopes, provide adequate medical and dental care for all citizens, not just those with sufficient money—it does the nation no good if groups of citizens cannot get healthcare, since they can serve as pools of infectious diseases. And we have programs such as Food Stamps to ensure that all citizens are nourished.

All of this goes to make the US a stronger nation, something I think everyone would want.

Steve Lopez (of The Soloist fame) in the LA Times:

“Do you want to see the tooth?” Dr. Mehrdad Makhani asked me Friday morning at the free clinic being staged inside Inglewood’s Fabulous Forum. “Come. I’ll show you.”

Jenny McLean, 36, opened her mouth and Makhani aimed a little flashlight in there.

“You see here?” he said.

The area around a back tooth was red and swollen, and McLean’s eyes were teary with discomfort. She’d endured the pain for more than a year because she’s had neither insurance nor the money for a dentist since losing her job as a social worker.

It was a story repeated hundreds of times last week at the Forum, where a nonprofit called Remote Area Medical had brought in volunteers to treat legions of the uninsured.

Read the rest of this entry »

Susan Milius in Science News:

When trees fall in the forest, unheard or not, they may change the shape of bird wings.

As logging whittled away at Canada’s vast boreal forest during the past century, bird species that frequent mature woodlands developed somewhat pointier wing tips, says André Desrochers of the Center for Forest Research at Laval University in Québec City.

During the same period, forests expanded in New England. Mature-woodland species there trended toward rounder wing tips, he reported August 13 in Philadelphia at a meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union.

Sharper points on wings typically prove more efficient than blunter shapes during sustained flight, Desrochers says. But previous research on wing shapes and flight also found a cost for those points. On tight maneuvers threading 3-D mazes of branches, pointy wings lose out to rounder ones.

Several other studies have noted wing-shape differences within the same species if some populations migrate and some don’t. House finches in the eastern United States that follow the seasons, for example, tend toward sharper wings than western, couch-potato house finches.

Desrochers said he began to wonder whether human activities that leave forests in fragments might influence wings the same way migratory lifestyles do…

Continue reading.

Margaret Talev in McClatchy:

Much of the money and strategy behind the so-called grassroots groups organizing opposition to the Democrats’ health care plans comes from conservative political consultants, professional organizers and millionaires, some of whom hold financial stakes in the outcome.

If President Barack Obama and Congress extend health insurance coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for it, and limit insurers’ discretion on who they cover and what they charge, that could pinch these opponents.

Most of them say they oppose big government in principle. Despite Obama’s assurances to the contrary, many of them insist that the Democrats’ legislation is but the first step toward creation of a single-payer system, where the federal government hires the doctors, approves treatments, sets the rules and imperils profit.

These opposition groups appear to have spent at least $10 million so far on ads attacking the Democrats’ plans. Still, supporters of a health care overhaul have outspent opponents by more than 2-to-1 so far, according to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks ad spending. Supporters include drug makers angling for their own protections, unions, the American Medical Association and AARP, the seniors’ lobby. Supporters announced this week that they intend to spend $150 million promoting an overhaul.

The opposition groups’ names sound catchy and populist: Patients First. Patients United. Americans for Prosperity. Conservatives for Patients’ Rights. FreedomWorks. 60 Plus. Club for Growth.

Here’s who’s behind them: …

Continue reading.

Interesting site that collects "how-to" videos on various topics.

Rick Pearlstein in the Washington Post:

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: “One day God’s going to stand before you, and he’s going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts.” He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama’s proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that “under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever.” He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make sense of it all. He quoted a spokesman for the conservative Americans for Tax Reform: “Either this is a genuine grass-roots response, or there’s some secret evil conspirator living in a mountain somewhere orchestrating all this that I’ve never met.” The spokesman was arguing, of course, that it was spontaneous, yet he also proudly owned up to how his group has helped the orchestration, through sample letters to the editor and “a little bit of an ability to put one-pagers together.”

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Lisa Grossman in New Scientist:

A statistical method that picks out the most significant words in a book could help scholars decode ancient texts like the Voynich manuscript – or even messages from aliens.

Humans find it easy to identify the words that capture the theme of a text – for example, that "whale" is a key word in Moby Dick – but this is a difficult task for computers. Now Marcelo Montemurro, a systems biologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues have developed a method to identify word importance based on a branch of mathematics called information theory. "It seems that what we call semantics or meaning has a signature at the level of the statistics of words," says Montemurro.

Simply counting the frequency of words in a text is not enough, as connective words such as "for" and "the" confuse the picture. Important words tend to clump in paragraphs and chapters that deal with the topic they relate to, but this only provides a crude guide, says Montemurro.

For a more detailed analysis, the team calculated the "entropy" of each word, a measure of how evenly distributed it is, in both the original text and in a scrambled version in which the words appeared in a random stream. From the difference between the two entropies multiplied by the frequency of the word, the team generated that word’s "information value" in the text.

Connective words are fairly uniformly distributed in both the scrambled text and the original, so their information value is low. Significant words have …

Continue reading.

Ken Croswell in New Scientist:

A LARGE satellite galaxy may be lurking, hidden from view, next door to our own.

Sukanya Chakrabarti and Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that the gravity of a nearby galaxy was causing perturbations that have been observed in gas on the fringes of the Milky Way. "We did a large range of simulations where we varied the mass of the perturber and the distance of closest approach," says Chakrabarti. In the best-fitting simulation, the unseen galaxy has about 1 per cent of the Milky Way’s mass, or 10 billion times the mass of the sun.

That’s a lot. It means the object has roughly the same mass as the Milky Way’s brightest satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)…

Continue reading.

Janet Raloff in Science News:

Within the next two weeks, the vast majority of radioactive-imaging medical tests could be delayed or replaced by less desirable procedures. The reason: temporary shutdowns of Canadian and Dutch reactors that together normally provide some 70 percent of the world’s supplies of the isotope molybdenum-99 and at least 80 percent of North American supplies.

Each week, U.S. doctors prescribe some 300,000 medical-imaging tests that rely on technetium-99m, a radioactive isotope produced from molybdenum-99. About half of those tests measure heart function. Some map the spread of cancer. Others gauge the toxicity of cancer drugs on the circulatory system.

Neither the feedstock isotope nor the imaging isotope can be stockpiled because of their short radioactive half-lives (66 hours for molybdenum-99 and six hours for technetium-99m). New sources of molybdenum must be supplied to hospitals and imaging centers at least every two weeks.

“Right now, we’re managing [with the diminished supply], but just barely,” says Michael Graham, a nuclear medicine physician at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine. “I’m concerned things are going to get worse by the end of this month.”

Indeed, “it’s predicted that in a week or 10 days, [U.S. supplies] could fall to perhaps 15 to 20 percent of our demand,” says Jeffrey Norenberg, director of radiopharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and executive director of the National Association of Nuclear Pharmacies.

Five foreign reactors produce the vast majority of molybdenum-99. With an average age of 47 years — compared with an expected lifetime of only 35 years — those feedstock-producing reactors are all living on borrowed time. And they are subject to frequent outages for repairs.

The first reactor to go down this year was …

Continue reading.

I watched Charles Laughton in Hobson’s Choice last night—an interesting and enjoyable movie, but I particularly enjoyed the documentary on Laughton’s life and career included on the DVD.

I’m doing the various Sunday tasks, but after the past few days we’re exhausted. The Wife had a restful night, which is good. Megs is now sleeping comfortably here and there on the living room floor, instead of having to find a more secure resting place, which is good. I’m consciously including more potassium-rich foods in my diet, which is good.

Overcast sky adds to a feeling of malaise, but it should clear later and then things may perk up.

Above is Megs, about five minutes ago. She’s been out in the living room more and very interactive: walking over me, sitting on my legs, lying asleep in my lap, just hanging out across my shins. And now that I think of it, she’s been sleeping on me since she got back home, and she hadn’t done that lately at all. I guess she’s getting (and giving) comfort.

In the meantime, The Wife has continued to get the antibiotic IV drips, and the plastic surgeon and the hospitalist have looked at the state of her wounds and have independently decided that she can go home—but one more antibiotic IV just to be on the safe side. So I’ll pick her up sometime around 6:30. Yay!

Made a mercy call at the hospital: took The Wife (at her request) a bar of Scharffen-Berger Extra-Rich Milk Chocolate.

Along the way stopped to buy some potassium-rich food: a couple of large Idaho potatoes, a butternut squash, and several cans of tomato sauce.

They also had fresh smelts, and when the fish butcher asked if I was going to fry them, I told him about my going to poaching. He asked about the poaching liquid (water), and said he had been thinking about cooking them in tomato sauce. Ideal!

So I’m thinking, sauté a chopped onion and several cloves of minced garlic in a little habanero oil, add tomato sauce, chopped kalamata olives, and some capers, along with a little lemon zest and lemon juice. Let that cook a while, then add the cleaned smelts and simmer for about 8 minutes. Should be yummy, right?

Sony is getting with the program, as reported by Brad Stone in the NY Times:

Paper books may be low tech, but no one will tell you how and where you can read them.

For many people, the problem with electronic books is that they come loaded with just those kinds of restrictions. Digital books bought today from Amazon.com, for example, can be read only on Amazon’s Kindle device or its iPhone software.

Some restrictions on the use of e-books are likely to remain a fact of life. But some publishers and consumer electronics makers are aiming to give e-book buyers more flexibility by rallying around a single technology standard for the books. That would also help them counter Amazon, which has taken an early lead in the nascent market.

On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.

Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.

After the change, books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub. Those include the Plastic Logic eReader, a thin device that has been in development for nearly a decade and is expected to go on sale early next year.

“There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.”

Sony’s move comes amid mounting concern about Amazon’s market power in the budding category of electronic books. E-book sales in the United States hit a record $14 million in June, a 136.2 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the Association of American Publishers…

Continue reading to see how Apple can tip the balance.

If your diet is high in protein and cereals (including corn-based products), then you will lose muscle as explained in this earlier post. That’s a post worth review. The solution is to raise the amount of fruits and vegetables in the diet, especially those high in potassium (listed at the link). Worth looking back at that.

Megs, verifying that a warm bed is nicer than a dusty cold concrete garage floor. Still, she did seem to want to dash out the door this morning when I went to do laundry. She’s by no means the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Another fine razor from Elite Razors, this one a Merkur 38C with a gold-laced white-quartz handle. A lovely shave with a new Astrak Keramik Platinum blade.

The Simpsons Key Hole 3 Best whipped up another great lather from Kell’s Original Hemp Blend Amber shaving soap. I now have down pat the amount of water to use with Kell’s—less than with other soaps—and I get a fine lather every time.

Paul Sebastian aftershave is a favorite and always a good finish.

Large sauté pan.

Larger splash of habanero than usual, extended with just a modicum of olive oil.

1 med onion, chopped

Add onion to heated oil and let it sauté over medium heat.

Good handful of asparagus, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 thick-cut boneless pork chop, cubed

Add the above and sauté, stirring frequently. Add:

Salt
Pepper (generous)

When it has sautéed long enough, add:

Dash of good soy sauce
Good splash of balsamic vinegar
Juice of a lemon

Cover and simmer over low heat for 8-10 minutes

Talk about perfect! The this balanced the that, and the one cut the other, with surprising blah blah blah. Worth repeating, and I will because I have another pork chop and the other handful of asparagus.

The Eldest called to tell me something she heard from a long-time friend: "The problem with the government death panels is that they will put out of business all the mom-and-pop death panels."