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POPSHe Doesn't Even Understand His Own Insurance Charles Grassley has been a Senator from Iowa for a loooooong time. He has successfully delivered a lot of "pork" to Iowa. (Funny when you think about it.) He is an idiot. You can thank him for Medicare Part D and the vilification of Anita Hill to get Justice Cretin Thomas appointed to the Supreme Court.
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POPSCan't Get Enuf Of That Grafty Stuff (Cont) What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn’t? If I had to guess, I’d say that what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.
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POPSCourt Sanctioned Okeechobee Pollution The U.S. sends tens of millions of dollars a year to Africa and developing countries to help them prevent drinking water contamination. It is ironic that, at the same time, the U.S. EPA is legalizing contamination of drinking water supplies here at home.
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POPSBudget Woes Bonanza For GOP? (Cont) But some economists warn that any short-term economic improvement will probably resemble the "jobless recovery" of the early 1990s, given the loss of jobs in the manufacturing, construction, retail and other sectors. Democrats were trounced in midterm elections two years after Clinton took office, partly because the economic recovery then underway had not significantly reduced unemployment. "There's a potential there that the seemingly out-of-control fiscal situation in Washington could galvanize the public," Edwards said. "The question is whether the Republicans will be smart enough to take advantage of this."
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POPSNo More "Free" Internet (Cont) Inevitably, Diller said, the “base model” of the Internet will be paid, at the end of the chaos. The forms will include not just subscriptions and individual one-time purchases, but rapid-fire micropayments and other mechanisms. The early examples: Amazon’s “one-click” system, where a customer enters billing address and credit card information in advance. Then, a button on the screen for a shopping cart is pressed once and the purchase or purchases associated with that cart are confirmed, billed, paid for and delivered.
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POPSObama Walks The Healthcare Road (cont) Much of the evidence suggests that the more doctors, more drugs, more tests and more therapies given to patients, the worse they fare -- and the unhappier they become, said Donald Berwick, president of the independent research group Institute of Quality Improvement.
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POPSHaters On The Rise (cont) Last November, 37-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero, a 16-year resident of the U.S., was attacked while walking near his home in Patchogue, New York. Prosecutors say a group of seven teens taunted Lucero with racial slurs, beat him, and fatally stabbed him in the chest. The reason? According to prosecutors they were “beaner hopping”: attacking Hispanics for sport. All of the defendants have pled not guilty.
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POPSColor Me Yellow “If we don’t have rumors, what do we have as journalists?” he asks. “You have press releases. So maybe there is some honor in printing rumors.”
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POPSTending The Greenhouse (cont) Among environmentalists, support for the bill varies. Some denounce it for doing less to curb greenhouse gases than was once promised. It aims to cut emissions by 17% below the level in 2005 by 2020, instead of 20%. Greenpeace’s American arm says it cannot support the bill in its current state. Other greens reckon that if this is the strongest bill that can pass, the best idea is to pass it now and tighten it later.
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POPSDogshit Presidency Bush, in one of his few public appearances since leaving office in January, told the students that leaving office lifted a heavy burden.
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POPSNicotinic B2 Receptor's Role In Hyperactivity (cont) It has been proposed that the alteration of behavioral adaptation in ß2−/− mice, coupled with unimpaired memory and anxiety, may model cognitive impairment observed in human disorders such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) , or even in autism . This proposition relies upon the idea that behavioral flexibility is controlled by an adequate hierarchization of motivations, a process known to mobilize prefrontal and cingulate cortex. ADHD symptoms such as inattention lack of inhibitory control, and hyperactivity and prefrontal involvement indeed resemble ß2−/− behavioral deficits, and fit well with nAChR localization and function. Yet, the possible contribution of prefrontal cortex and higher-level top-down processes in open-field behaviors is at this stage not clear.
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POPSMarriage Rights Granted In California! (cont) The last time California voters were asked to express their views on gay marriage at the ballot box was in 2000, the year after the Legislature enacted the first of a series of laws awarding spousal rights to domestic partners. Proposition 22, which strengthened the state's 1978 one-man, one-woman marriage law with the words "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," passed with 61 percent of the vote. The Supreme Court struck down both statutes with its sweeping opinion Thursday.
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POPSOh Please Not Again? President Obama is starting to reveal the reason for worry in having a negotiator for a chief executive.
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POPSReplay During Sleep Consolidates Memories (Cont) During sleep, the hippocampus, a brain region important in learning and memory, repeatedly “replays” brain activity from recent awake experiences. This replay process is believed to be important for memory consolidation. In the new study at the University of Arizona they found reduced replay activity during sleep in old compared to young rats, and rats with the least replay activity performed the worst in tests of spatial memory.
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POPSAutism in Remission or Cured or What? Cont: Many also have above-average IQs and had been diagnosed with relatively mild cases of autism. At age 2, many were within the normal range for motor development, able to walk, climb and hold a pencil.
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POPSBill Joy's Worst Nightmare Cont: Nanoscale structures offer the opportunity to interface with cells on their own scale. In that sense, they have the potential to become "a totally new interface for living matter," Lieber says. His vision for nanoscale devices is not just to study cells but to use them to communicate with and control them. That in turn could lead to more precise neural prostheses to treat blindness or neurological diseases. "My overarching interest," he says, "is to ask whether one can blur the distinction between an electronic nonliving device and a living device, which is the cell."
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POPSMo Money This is one of many articles that mentions the lack of stringency in the tests and therefore the lack of significance of the findings.
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POPSStormy Weather "For those of you who don't know who I am," she told the lunch crowd at The Roux House, "I'd suggest that you don't Google that until you get home from work."
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POPSSress Tests Too Painful For Banks And then there is the trouble with the assumptions at the heart of the stress tests. As Nouriel Roubini put it: "These are not stress tests but rather fudge tests... The results of the stress tests -- even before they are published -- are not worth the paper they are written on."
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POPSThe Genesis of Bill Nye "We teabagger-Americans have put up with a lot--jokes about grenade sucking, comments about the intelligence of someone who supports Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, homosexual teletubbies, sushi--but, by God, we don't need no fancy Seattle science guy coming down to our national homeland, The Republic of Texas, and tellin' us the moon ain't Jesus' light bulb."
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POPSStay On Message: I Won President Obama must not allow his propensity for compromise to play a role in his nominations for the Supreme Court. The balance is precarious enough as it is.
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POPSPaging Dr. Levin - Salve the Shame Cont: So here's my question: Would Bybee, in his capacity as a federal judge, uphold a murder conviction in which witnesses had been waterboarded? A rape confession? Would it be all right for police to induce confessions by keeping suspects awake for 11 days by shackling them naked in a standing position, dousing them with ice water and smashing their heads into a wall? How about cramming them into coffin-size boxes for weeks? He thought that appropriate for terror suspects.
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POPSLight Me Up Neuroenhancement is not a goal for those prescribed these drugs for ADD/ADHD. The goals are freedom from distraction and impulsiveness. It concerns me that more profligate use might impact the availability of drugs for this legitimate purpose.
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POPSFrom Stress to Depression (cont) "We see big differences in people who have experienced acute stress compared to chronic stress," he says. "The machinery becomes very different." If the stress remains long enough, a person may develop major depression. It is this kind of finding, say the UM researchers, that provides one reason to believe that depression has important connections to the stress axis, and why much research at the MHRI on this topic has involved clinical studies of people with major depression. Overall, says Akil, the stress axis uses "nested loops" of neurons and chemical messengers to provide many avenues for regulating the body's response to stress. Controls via the genetic machinery appear to "define the limits" of the stress response. Other pathways probably provide the various nuances of response. Many control mechanisms, however, remain to be discovered.
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POPSBring On the Technology! I think this is great stuff. If humanists have any chance of being right about our ability to survive through ingenuity, this has got to be part of the brand.
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