Eers v. Cards in twenty minutes.
Go Mountaineers!
*** Update ***
That was like watching the Steelers. Grats to the Cards.
by John Cole| 12 Comments
This post is in: Sports
Eers v. Cards in twenty minutes.
Go Mountaineers!
*** Update ***
That was like watching the Steelers. Grats to the Cards.
This post is in: Politics
There are few things that make me warmer and fuzzier than this Newsweek story about Michael Schiavo campaigning against the assholes who chose to inject themselves and the federal government into his marriage. Let’s start with a real profile in courage, Marilyn Musgrave:
Last week Michael Schiavo took a seat only 15 feet away from Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave—all the better to taunt her. She had been an outspoken advocate of what Schiavo considered government intrusion in his wife Terri’s right-to-die case last year. When Musgrave’s camp objected to Schiavo’s presence, one of the event hosts tried, unsuccessfully, to have a cop force him to change seats. Though Musgrave wasn’t asked about Terri during the debate, Schiavo had already met his goal—evoking his wife’s case, and the privacy concerns it raised, for the press and the public.
During the height of the Schiavo affair, Musgrave had the following to say from the floor of the house:
“When we talk about a permanent vegetative state, I am offended by that. Terri (Schiavo) smiles and acknowledges the people that love her when they come to see her. She cries when they leave. How heartless are we to call somebody like Terri Schiavo a vegetable? What are we thinking?”
And now, the mere presence of the man she helped to villify scares her.
I love it.
by John Cole| 60 Comments
This post is in: Military, Politics, War on Terror aka GSAVE®
Someone alert HUAC- Ralph Peters has gone wobbly:
Iraq is failing. No honest observer can conclude otherwise. Even six months ago, there was hope. Now the chances for a democratic, unified Iraq are dwindling fast. The country’s prime minister has thrown in his lot with al-Sadr, our mortal enemy. He has his eye on the future, and he’s betting that we won’t last. The police are less accountable than they were under Saddam. Our extensive investment in Iraqi law enforcement only produced death squads. Government ministers loot the country to strengthen their own factions. Even Iraq’s elections — a worthy experiment — further divided Iraq along confessional and ethnic lines. Iraq still exists on the maps, but in reality it’s gone. Only a military coup — which might come in the next few years — could hold the artificial country together.
Defeatocrat.
by John Cole| 85 Comments
Kerry has now apologized for something he didn’t really say, and surprise of surprises, it still isn’t good enough for some, as Drudge is splashing this AP story by Tim’s bestest friend, John Solomon, titled “Kerry’s ’72 Army Comments Mirror Latest“:
Kerry apologized Wednesday for the 2006 campaign trail gaffe that some took as suggesting U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq were undereducated. He contended the remark was aimed at Bush, not the soldiers.
In 1972, as he ran for the House, he was less apologetic in his comments about the merits of a volunteer army. He declared in the questionnaire that he opposed the draft but considered a volunteer army “a greater anathema.”
“I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown,” Kerry wrote. “We must not repeat the travesty of the inequities present during Vietnam. I also fear having a professional army that views the perpetuation of war crimes as simply ‘doing its job.’
“Equally as important, a volunteer army with our present constitutional crisis takes accountability away from the president and put the people further from control over military activities,” he wrote.
In 1972, if you were uneducated, or, in Kerry’s words, ‘black or brown,’ there was a good chance you would get stuck in Vietnam. That isn’t the case today with Iraq, and regardless, it isn’t what Kerry said the other day. Trying to claim the two comments are ‘part of a trend’ is more of the same from the credibility lacking John Solomon.
This post is in: Military, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Outrage
Words can not express what I am thinking right now after reading this:
If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.
“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”
There is a special place in hell for folks like Sey Hersh, who it appears would like nothing more than to turn our soldiers into villains. I have come to the conclusion that this war was a mistake, and that this administration was wholly unqualified to successfuly prosecute this war, and I think there are a lot of people like me out there who once supported this war and now feel the same way.
But if Sey Hersh and whatever cohort he belongs to thinks we are going to return to the ‘glory’ days when we villainized the troops on their return, he has another thing coming.
If Hersh has details or pictures about possible war crimes committed by our troops- take them to the military so they can be prosecuted. Otherwise, STFU.
Here is a front page NY Times story on our guys. Should these guys be reviled, Seymour?
by Tim F| 9 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, War
The president: Rumsfeld now, Rumsfeld tomorrow, Rumsfeld forevah.
For those not in the know, Gregory Djerejian probably hates Rumsfeld more than you do. Or to phrase my point as an SAT analogy question, Rumsfeld is to him what the Terry Schiavo bill is to John Cole.
by Tim F| 13 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology
It’s late and for some inexplicable reason I feel uninspired to write about politics. Not that there is anything going on at the moment, eh. Go figure.
Inexplicable ennui notwithstanding the Washington Post just ran with a piece that will likely get lost in the melee if some enterprising blogger (me) doesn’t catch it first. Some of you remember that a while back I went on about groundbreaking ideas coming from a researcher at Harvard, David Sinclair, who thought that he had a handle on the biochemical mechanism behind the negative effects of growing old. Specifically Sinclair used a biochemical assay of his own design to identify a compound that at least appeared to push back the ill effects of aging and disease. What’s more, for reasons that have to do with yeast and redox chemistry the only natural place that you find this compound, resveratrol, is in a bottle of red wine.
Well before Sinclair’s time we knew that animals fed a starvation diet lived a lot longer and did a better job of resisting disease. Fine as far as it goes, but who wants to live like that? For some reason the North Korea Diet never took off. As is often the case Sinclair made progress by turning the question around. What if you made the body think that you’re starving? He narrowed his question to the DNA repair pathway and identified a shockinly potent activator called resveratrol that interacted with a novel set of DNA binding proteins that he called Sirtuins.
Armed with the right tools reagent Sinclair and competitors first showed that normally-fed animals live longer when you add resveratrol. Eliminating sirtuin proteins also eliminated resveratrol’s influence on longevity, placing the proteins in the same pathway as the drug. Since then resveratrol has turned up in studies on an amazing number of maladies; to get a sense of the scope try this link to Google Scholar and add any given illness to the search terms.
It seems reasonable to trick a body consuming a normal diet to think that it isn’t getting enough food. Sure, most of us wouldn’t fit into our prom outfit anymore but with a gym membership and a healthy dose of free timemost of us can get pretty close. For a body with serious eating and weight problems the answer is not nearly as clear. It seems improbable that one compound acting on one pathway can negate complicated problems including horomone cocktails produced by excess fat tissue, insulin disorders, cardiovascular weakness and more, yet that is exactly what Sinclair’s group claims to have found. From the WaPo article:
The substance, called resveratrol, enabled mice that were fed a high-calorie, high-fat diet to live normal, active lives despite becoming obese — the first time any compound has been shown to do that. Tests found the agent activated a host of genes that protect against aging, essentially neutralizing the adverse effects of the bad diet on the animals’ health and longevity.
[…] “This represents a likely major landmark,” said Stephen L. Helfand, who studies the molecular genetics of aging at Brown University. “This really pushes the field forward. It’s quite exciting.”The research, published online by the journal Nature, helps explain a host of observations that have long intrigued researchers, including why French people tend to get fewer heart attacks even though they have high-fat diets and why severely restricting the amount of calories that animals ingest makes them live longer.
Keep in mind that resveratrol treatment hovers in about the same promising what-if stage as stem cell therapy, waiting on numerous clinical trials and safety studies whose results are not preordained. But if the promise pans out it is almost impossible to overstate the consequences that resveratrol could have on daily life. The preventative aspects alone could force a major realignment in healthcare priorities – if you were an insurance company, wouldn’t you want your clients taking the stuff? If it holds down the claim rate then Resveratrol treatment would easily pay for itself. Resveratrol seems relatively cheap and simple to manufacture even at the current niche-market level of production (judging by the chemical structure, aspirin should be harder to make) so the promise of lifespan and health won’t even stratify that easily along class lines the way much of our current healthcare does.
To footnote this post, I don’t have the numbers on hand but I did have the chance to stop and chat with Dr. Sinclair some years back when he swung through my department on a speaking engagement. He told me that wine doesn’t have quite enough of the chemical to offer a real therapeutic effect without risking other problems – liver damage, for example, or DUI arrests. But, he acknowledged, an occasional glass can’t hurt.