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POPSBush and Blacks The message—both in words and action—is clear, consistent, and stirring . This year he joined forces with Washington D.C.’s black Democratic mayor, Anthony Williams, to win passage of the first federally funded voucher program, which will provide $7,500 each to poor minority children in the nation’s capital, giving them some of the same educational options that their wealthier neighbors enjoy. The Bush administration has also tried hard to help lift Africa out of its deepening misery. Last year, the president pledged $15 billion—a twenty-fold increase from Clinton-era funding levels—to help stem the AIDS pandemic sweeping the continent, and he has sent troops and diplomatic envoys to try to quell violence in Liberia and Sudan. African-relief activist Bob Geldof recently acknowledged, “The Bush administration is the most radical—in a positive sense—in its approach to Africa since Kennedy.”
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POPSNewly described 'dragon' protein could be key to bird flu cure This unexpected relationship between the two subunits could inspire a number of different therapies or vaccines for H5N1 that rely on muzzling the "dragon's" jaws with another molecule or chemical compound that would block the PB1 subunit's access to the PA site, according to Joachimiak. "If we can put a bit in the dragon's mouth, we can slow or even potentially someday stop the spread of avian flu," he said. "Since we are talking about a relatively small protein surface area, finding a way to inhibit RNA replication in H5N1 seems very feasible."
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POPSCommon Wealth: Sustainable future We are in one another's faces as never before, crowded into an interconnected society of global trade, migration, ideas and, yes, risk of pandemic diseases, terrorism, refugee movements and conflict. We also face a momentous choice. Continue on our current course, and the world is likely to experience growing conflicts between haves and have-nots, intensifying environmental catastrophes and downturns in living standards caused by interlocking crises of energy, water, food and violent conflict. Yet for a small annual investment of world income, undertaken cooperatively across the world, our generation can harness new technologies for clean energy, reliable food supplies, disease control and the end of extreme poverty.
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POPS'Banality of tomorrow' its the future,now The future spreads, almost like an infection. The distribution of the future is less an endeavor of conscious advancement than it is an epidemiological process -- a pandemic of tomorrows, if you will.
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POPSPhysicians Create List of Who Will Live and Die Who is Out of Luck? It's being recommended that every hospital choose a triage team to decide who will get lifesaving treatment and who will not, but the guidelines already spell out some people who are supposed to be denied care. They include: * People older than 85 * People with severe trauma, such as critical injuries from car crashes and shootings * Severely burned patients older than 60 * People with severe mental impairment, such as advanced Alzheimer's disease * People with severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes
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POPSCalifornia DPH: the old and sick are officially expendable I shouldn't need to remind you about a certain report done back at the turn of the millennium by FEMA listing the three major disasters that Americans would possibly face - a major terrorist attack, the Gulf Coast being flooded, and a massive earthquake on the West Coast. Two down....
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POPSBird Flu: US Accused of Developing Bio Weapon Indonesia, the WHO, and the US conflict over bird flu samples that will make millions for US Pharma companies and the Indonesia Health Minister claims in a book that the US wants it to make biological weapon. By the way, the neoconservative Project for New American Century blueprint for "global hegemony", in addition to space dominance and a "new middle east" does mention the use of bioweapons : The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".
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POPSAmericanism: The good, the bad and the ugly The famous go-to-war-for “American way of life,” underlines America’s persistent claims of a monopoly on morality. What is it, this American morality? This righteousness? Is it our religious roots in the fable of the Puritan settlers, those super religious people who in their hardships were bigots, perhaps also practitioners of incest and racists soon morphing into dogmatic chauvinists who early-on labeled their dissidents and different-thinkers witches and demons. The same Americanism initiated then which today fosters the rights of the rich to become richer, the strong to trample the weak . Meanwhile, out in the empire, as long as it is distant, the Puritan legacy instills blindness to the use of cluster bombs from the stratosphere and hidden torture in places with foreign names like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib . . . and while our neighbors in Haiti eat dirt, literally.
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POPSAmericans in WW1: B&W pics "Of the approximately 115,000 American dead in the Great War, only about 52,000 died of battlefield wounds. More than 200,000 became more or less seriously wounded. Some 60,000 soldiers and sailors died of disease, mainly the complications of the global pandemic flue (influenza). During the war over 4,355,000 American men and women served in the armed forces. At the end of the war 1,950,000 Americans were actually fighting in France and Flanders. One in five was foreign-born and one in four was functionally illiterate."
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POPSIt's Evolved! H1N1, by the way, is the same virus that caused the 1918 pandemic. Scaaaary. (Not.)
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POPSBlack Death 'discriminated' between victims While many apparently healthy people died, the black death was more likely to kill people people in poor health, poor nutrition, or with compromised immune systems. While this sounds obvious there seems to have been the allusion that the black death killed whoever it crossed. No doubt there were people in good health who had an immune system that was capable with dealing with it
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POPSA sure fire way.... ....to get dem thar nano-bots in ya. GPS anyone? How about a little mind control? Or better yet an exploding bot for those damned dissenters! Happy trails, to you!
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POPSLies, damn lies and twaddle In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities, plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in cyberspace. This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact. We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world.
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POPSFlu: One shot deal An attempt to find a flu shot that will protect for a lifetime is having some success. This shot <strike>will</strike> would protect not only against the annual flu but also against the pandemic flu varieties such as bird flu.
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POPSHuman beings only have a 50-50 shot of making through the 21st century nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler. Drexler describes grey goo in Chapter 11 Engines Of Destruction: "...early assembler-based replicators could beat the most advanced modern organisms. 'Plants' with 'leaves' no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough, omnivorous 'bacteria' could out-compete real bacteria: they could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we made no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies."
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