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| Batteries that can store and release energy from wind farms (wind-driven turbines that generate elecricity) are becoming more cost effective and are expected to increase the competitiveness of wind energy. Coal plants can increase power production to meet high demand times of day, then decrease it, but wind doesn't offer that option. A common power storage technology, a pumped hydro plant, involves pumping water uphill using excess power when demand is low, from a lower reservoir to to a higher one. "At hours of peak demand the water flows back down through a turbine, creating electricity." The new generation of batteries may achieve the same goal at less cost: click here for article. | ||||||
| For three part Washingtom Post series about huge numbers of private contractors functioning as part of a national security workforce, click part 1, part 2, part 3. (To go to the Washington Post web page with these three articles, slide shows, videos, and related articles click here or if that comes up small print go to : http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ or Google: washpost, top secret America.) | ||||||
| For a July 1 NYT's article about the improvement in some Latin American economies click here | ||||||
| U.S. strategy for winning Kandahar (Afghanistan) is now less military, more political. LA Times, July 7, click here. The U.S. now says that the Afghan military and police cannot maintain against the Taliban after the U.S. leaves. The U.S. should have figured this out with respect to their overall strategy in Afghanistan a long time ago. Kabul's army is hopeless, local police are just as bad. It is also clear that civilian government agents are as corrupt and despised as the military by the people. Patraeus, who started the awakening councils in Afghanistan, which convinved many Sunni's to take part in the Shia-led government rather than continue as insurgents, has declared a program to cultivate local militias. New York Times, July14, click here. | ||||||
| Equador police discover a submarine for moving drugs which is more sophisticated than what drug agents are used to finding. click here | ||||||
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There is a meeting about Haiti held by the Haiti Action Committee in
Berkeley, CA, at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Saturday,
July 10, 4-6 PM. La Pena phone number: 510-849-2568.
Click here for a copy of the
web page advertizing this meeting (I could not make a link to the page
work; the url is at the bottom of the copied page.) For a short
editorial comment from this site on the U.S. in Haiti and Venezuela,
click here. The War on Drugs.... onward and downward:The federal government sends a lot of money to local police to make drug busts, inducing a lot of corrupt police behavior and dubious spending on the part of local police departments. For a Wall Street Journal article on federal grant money that must be used to dig up marijuana plants in California, whose police departments are cutting more important services because of budget shortfalls, click here. For a drugwar.org web commentary on Byrne grants, federal cash handouts to police who make a lot of phony drug busts to get more federal money, click here. For an excerpt from Michelle Alexander's book, "The New Jim Crow," which recounts a litany of legal abuses of the black community in the U.S., especially abused arising from the "war on drugs," click here. The author notes that between 1980 and 2000 the number of people in jail and prison in the U.S. has jumped from 300,000 to over 2 million, largely a result of arresting non-violent people on possession charges. Much of this activity means federal money for police departments, even though big dealers seem to almost never get caught. Stopdown.net Contents: articles of note from recent years.. humor .Verbatim: original sources from recent decades and past centuries ... Photo Gallery...Art Gallery:1, 2 ..Music ...Education .....Law....History... Emerging democracies, emerging economies, Third World...Cold War .. U.S. Policy in the Muslim World...Science and Math ...Medicine & Public Health.......Environment and public health.... Corruption in U.S. Government and business ............Contact Us, click here. |
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| Solar Fuels: using concentrated sunlight to deliver energy rich molecules. Focusing sunlight with mirrors is a simple way to intensify solar energy, and the process might be used to simply boil water to make steam to drive a turbine. Apparently this is not efficient or cost effective or it would be happening. For a Science Magazine article about using focused sunlight to drive (cook, heat) chemical reactions which will yield fuels that will burn cleaner than coal and gasoline, click here. For example, hydrogen and oxygen could be produced from water by splitting water. Then the hydrogen and oxygen could be recombined, an explosive reaction which is the fuel burning, giving back water as exhaust. Can't get much cleaner than that. More complex molecular products are among the various fuels being researched. Using sunlight to drive "uphill" reactions may be the wave of the future. Lots of scientists are working on these ideas, but the money is not there to push the ideas to industrial feasability. Photosynthesis, whereby plants use sunlight to generate fuels including sugar, does what solar fuel scientists are trying to do with chemical reactors. | ||||||
| editorial note: An argument no one ever seems to raise with regard to illegal (undocumented) immigrants is that U.S. citizens and government have not enforced hiring standards all these years, and we as a nation are complicit in the lawbreaking. The 1986 Simpson Mazzoli immigration bill was just window dressing: it only required that employers check ID, not run a deeper check to make sure the I.D. is valid (Wikipedia: a "clause in the law which explicitly releases employers from any obligation to check the authenticity of documents presented to them.") We have all known that undocumented workers are here in large numbers and U.S. citizens a party to maintaining this class of workers whose rights are in legal limbo. I wish more commentators and public call-ins to programs on immigration would point out that the U.S. business community, public, and politicians are just as guilty as the unauthorized workers for what has been going on here. That is why amnesty for the workers is fair and sensible. It would seem right to start requiring employers to do a government-confirmed I.D. check, but we should first establish residence claims for workers who have been living here and apply to be processed. It is pure hypocrisy to focus blame and vindictive measures on people who work without papers as if the rest of us are innocent. (If you see a media editorial or statement from immigration advocacy groups expressing the view that Americans share the blame for the illegal work force, would you please send a citiation? Go to contact us or email ericqb@msn.com. People tell me they have seen such editorials, but I know of no such example. | ||||||
| BP's management of safety issues. For a ProPublica article, which the Washington Post ran June 8, looking back over recent years at BP's lax and evasive safety culture, click here. For a June 6, NewYork Times article on unfocused management and safety lapses pertinent to the Deep Horizon rig that blew up and sank, click here. There is a lot yet to come out about this disaster. This kind of willful negligence should be criminally prosecuted. Murder charges over the people who died on the rig. If someone in private life took a risk willfully with someone else's life and someone died there would be murder charges. But not if business people do it and employees die. Oh no, that's different say the courts and prosecutors. Drunk drivers get away with it because they're drunk, even if they have multiple priors and thus should have taken measures to stop it from happening. This stays so | ||||||
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New Article: Crops like soy and cotton are engineered by Monsanto to be resistant to the weed killer Roundup, made by Monsanto. "Roundup-Ready" crops enable farmers to hit the weeds with heavy dose of Roundup without killing the crops that get sprayed at the same time. The weeds are now becoming resistant to Roundup, so new crops are being engineered (DNA changed), which will be resistant to older weed killers, like Paraquat, which had largely been replaced by Roundup. For Wall Street Journal article click here. (Among many issues at play here is the expanding control of the seed market that goes with the Roundup-ready crops. Around the world small farmers are having to go to Monsanto for seeds that they used get from plants whose lineage goes back centuries. Now because the old strains are not competitive with the Roundup Ready process, farmers are under the thumb of Monsanto.) |
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| An article in the June 1 NY Times science/health section describes the danger of toddlers swallowing lithium cell batteries, the small, round, flat metallic discs found in cameras, watches, toys, bathroom scales and other devices. Newer batteries are stronger and more dangerous. 20 millimeter batteries numbered 2032, 2025 and 2016 cause 90% of severe cases. In recent years cases with serious complications have risen from about 12 per year to about 100 per year, out of the approximately 3,500 cases of cell battery ingestion reported annually to poison control centers. The battery's current can trigger a chemical reaction that lesions tissues including the esophagus, trachea, vocal chords and aorta. Early misdiagnosis is frequent and long-term injury and death can occur. Click here for article. | ||||||
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Click here for a short essay with links on the futility of U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, given that the governments of Maliki, who seems to want a civil war in Iraq, and Karzai, who is a swaggering, corrupt nutcase despised by Afghans, will not survive after the U.S. leaves. Below is a Feb., 2010 picture of a crowd gathered to hear the Afghan forces declare that they have liberated Marja from the Taliban. Don't they look thrilled to know that the corrupt, cowardly, incompetent, abusive Kabul military, supported by the despised, abusive (household raids), civilian-slaughtering (airstrikes) U.S. military, has displaced the ruthless, merciless, despised Taliban? |
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| A study from Rutgers and Columbia says children on Medicaid are four times as likely to receive antipsychotic drugs as children on private insurance. The article notes that much of this prescribing is done "off label," meaning for disorders like ADHD, or just for problems like aggressive or erratic behavior. These drugs are distinct from Ritalin, a methamphetamine variant being prescribed very prevalently for ADHD without any clear understanding of the long term effects. Given the known effects of methamphetamines on long- term recreational users, this is dubious practice. Another aspect of this can of worms is university doctors, who use their position to extol the use of psychoactive drugs for children, being paid a lot of money from drug companies -- supposedly for "consulting" and the like. In some cases, including a big name in the field at Harvard, these professors have lied to their university about the amount of money they have been receiving. For article click here | ||||||
| There was an article by Jane Brody in the New York times on Nov. 2, 2009 about a breathing method that has helped people with asthma. Konstantin Buteyko invented the method in the 1950's. Inhalers use steroids and this has some downsides, including, possibly, interfering with the body's natural ways of correcting the asthma. Click here for Wikipedia article. | ||||||
| Stopdown.net Contents: articles of note from recent years.. humor .Verbatim: original sources from recent decades and past centuries ... Photo Gallery...Art Gallery:1, 2 ..Music ...Education .....Law....History... Emerging democracies, emerging economies, Third World...Cold War .. U.S. Policy in the Muslim World...Science and Math ...Medicine & Public Health.......Environment and public health.... Corruption in U.S. Government and business ............Contact Us, click here. | ||||||
| Medicare made no effort to pursue fraud until the 1990's. Now they are doing something, but as a recent 60 Minutes report points out, Medicare fraud is rampant and the staff assigned to deal with it is not changing anything. Sixty billion in fraud a year, according to estimates. Criminals get patient lists and write invoices for equipment or services that never were delivered. Medicare pays. As the 60 Minutes report recounts, one individual spent five years telling Medicare there were phony charges on her statements. Medicare ignored her for five years. For report Google: 60 Minutes, Medicare Fraud. | ||||||
| A Science Magazine article reports that in Iraq the U.S. has deliberately arrested thousands of civilians with no terrorist affiliation because these people, when interrogated, will create an information network that can be parsed with computer programs to reveal information about terrorists. All during the Cold War and now in the Middle East the U.S. has supported and carried out brutal, murderous treatment of civilians. In the Cold War this drove people into the communist militias, and in the Iraq and Afghanistan maltreatment is driving young people to join the militants. Many U.S. soldiers have spoken of how our military abuses people we are supposedly trying to help, treating everyone they encounter as an enemy, trashing homes and terrorizing the people in them, killing for no reason. This new twist, throwing people in jail just to create a database, is about as Orwellian as it gets. For Science Magazine article click here. For this site's page on U.S. policy in the Middle East click here. | ||||||
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The health care reform bill has passed the House, but the important aspects of saving money, improving health care and serving the poor are being overlooked by the politicians and the press, as occurred under Bill and Hillary Clinton's effort. These aspects include the necessity of going to the costly emergency room for non emergencies, the fact that hospitals that serve the poor are being shut down, the insane amount of paperwork insurers foist on doctors offices, insane malpractice judgments and more. For this site's discussion and a NYT's editorial about a type of government health center that is working, click here. |
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| Brooksley Born called it right as the economy headed for the cliff. Brooksley Born, head of the commodities board, is a person, like Sheila Bair of FDIC, whom Obama should have picked for the positions held by Summers, Geitner and Rubin. These guys are no better than Bush's Paulson. In non-government and government roles they pushed to deregulate derivatives, increase leverage (the debt to equity ratio) and in general based their strategy on an ever-rising market. Bair and Born were sensible, thoughtful, but when they argued common sense they were rebuffed or ignored by their colleagues. It is crazy to put the same people who caused this world-wide disaster in charge of remediation, passing over the ones -- Born and Bair -- who wanted to stop and look at the recklessness of it all. Obama's "greed is our salvation" guys are just stuffing taxpayer money into the pockets of their low-life Wall Street cronies. Credit has not emerged because the bankers are using their taxpayer billions to protect themselves rather than try to help the economy. Loan modifications are being denied and a provision to let judges require banks to remake loans on better terms was taken out of legislation, with, of course, no complaint from Obama inc. For Stanford Magazine article on Brooksley Born click here. | ||||||
| World Bank not addressing graft where loans are sent, report says. The Wall Street Journal cites a World Bank-commissioned report that says interest-free loans to poor countries are getting eaten up by corruption on the part of government officials in those countries. The report tucks the cruel truth away in inconspicuous paragraphs, apparently not wanting to rile its sponsors, but it says the corruption is rampant, the World Bank hasn't done anything concrete to stop it, and staff who want to report on corruption are afraid of retribution from managers. Click here for April 24 WSJ article. | ||||||
| Science ..... Scientists are reporting that sea sponges contain a chemical, algeferin, that thwarts bacterial resistance to antibiotics, as demonstrated in the lab. When antibiotic resistant bacteria are treated with algeferin they become vulnerable again and antibiotics kill them. The bacteria so far tested include those that cause ear infections, whooping cough, septicemia, food poisoning, MRSA (resistant staph), and pseudomonas aeruginosa, which causes devastating infections in wounded soldiers. So far it has worked on every type of resistant bacteria tried. Biofilms, which figure in infections contracted in hospitals and are usually very resistant to treatment, dissolve when treated with algeferin, the report says. Reseachers had found sponges living where other life had been wiped out by bacteria, and began to investigate. (Report from the Hollings Marine Lab in Charleston, presented at the AAAS meeting Feb. 14, review by Science News) Click here for article. | ||||||
| A glimpse of history: immigration and race in 1936: A 1936 Time Magazine article about a U.S. government offer to pay the travel cost for Filipino men to return to the Philippines -- a program intended to free up scarce jobs for citizens -- cites the opinion of a judge that the Filipino men should go home because their skills in the arts of love enable them to take white girls away from their white boyfriends. click here | ||||||
| Humor: two New Yorker cartoons click here | ||||||
| The Sahara was green not that long ago. From about 10,000 years ago until about 5000 years ago the Sahara desert area of Africa was green, as a recent excavation of human remains illustrates. Click here (Although this site supports controls on greenhouse gases (like auto emissions) because it appears they are changing the climate, it remains a fact that natural climate is not a stable affair, viewed over thousands of years. | ||||||
| Article: Terrorists have nuclear bomb plans thanks to officials in Pakistan. Uranium enrichment technology and nuclear bomb blueprints were sent to Lybia, Iran, and North Korea, apparently by Abdul Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear weapon program. In 2004 U.S. intelligence figured this out but got no help from the Pakistan government in investigating Khan, a national hero, or agents of Khan's network within the Pakistani government -- even though this government, under the now sidelined Musharaf -- has been deemed a U.S. ally in the war on terror. Now it has become clear, through CIA investigations of Khan network computers in Switzerland, Dubai, Malaysia and Thailand, that a bomb design for a much smaller bomb than what was revealed in 2005 has been disbursed to recipients. The smaller bomb -- four feet wide -- can fit in a missile cone and can be more easily hidden for transport. For NYT's article June 15 click here, article June 16 click here Now (update) Khan (July 4) has claimed Musharraf army personnel supervised a shipment of centrifuges to North Korea in 2000. The Pakistan government denies it. | ||||||
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| Article: Cuttlefish are masters of disguise even though they are color blind. click here for article and pictures | ||||||
| Article:In Malawi the government has defied the U.S. and Europe by subsidizing fertilizer for its small farmers. The result has been an end to famine and surplus crops for export. (The U.S. -- via the World Bank -- dumps subsidized corporate crops on poor countries while threatening poor countries' credit if they subsidize their own farmers.) click here for article | ||||||
| Article: Some governments in poor countries are taking health care money and management away from corrupt government officials, and putting them in the hands of international non-profit contractors. This has transformed the targeted medical care into something that works for people. Corrupt practices include making people pay bribes to get care, and the staff may run off with supplies to use at their own private dispensaries and clinics. This article focuses on efforts in Cambodia. For article click here. | ||||||
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| article: Irwandi Yusuf was a separatist rebel until the Tsunami hit in December 2004, taking 170,000 lives in Indonesia's Aceh ("Achay") province, and shocking the two sides into negotiations. Mr. Irwandi, now the elected governor of Aceh, is still a rebel in that he is fighting corruption, something not many politicians in Indonesia (or anywhere else) bother to do. He is unpretentious, drives his own car, and gets along well with regular folks. Click here for article. | ||||||
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| Recent Article: The Legion of Christ is a Catholic Order whose mission seems to be to provide a social nexus for rich Catholics and, of course, acquire some of their riches. The Legion's founder, a Mexican priest named Marcial Maciel, was accused of child molestation spanning decades but, except for a Catholic Church reprimand issued in May, has escaped prosecution by the law. The Vatican reprimand instructed him to live a penitent life of prayer and introspection, but there was no formal verdict on his actions. For article click here (In this context, we would like to note that the U.S. legal system has chosen not to prosecute bishops and other high ranking church officials for covering up molestations, and for moving accused priests quietly to new parishes to molest again. The Vatican has also said and done nothing about these coverups by church leaders.) | ||||||
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| Issues of the sort we wish to discuss at this site.... The AIDS virus (HIV) in the U.S. and Europe is, according to many health professionals, very rarely transmitted from a woman to a man, outside of heavy drug using circles. In the "third world" this is not true (although women are more susceptible than men), and it has become clear over recent years that circumcision is a factor. We would like to discuss the reasons for the media and public health agencies saying "any one can get AIDS" without citing the above disparities, and the reasons that testing to establish the facts of AIDS transmission has not been deployed in the U.S. For this site's article on these issues click here..........The U.S. and Europe fought fire with fire in the Cold War, establishing reliably anti-communist dictatorships to stop the spread of communism. In every case there was a discarded option to fight fire with water: to support rather than destroy leftist democracies and thus try to keep them on our side. Both approaches can be supported with reasonable arguments. Did the U.S. and Europe choose the most effective way to fight communism? Could the U.S. and Europe have won the Cold War much sooner by supporting democracies, despite the risk of not having control of these governments? Or would this approach have led to many Soviet takeovers? The third world still lives in the political wreckage of the Cold War, so we should debate and study it as part of the effort to help poor nations find a democratic, prosperous future. Furthermore, the "War on Terror" is in many ways a mirror of the Cold War. Until U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. has only supported dictatorships in the Muslim Middle East (including Egypt and Turkey, which, like Mexico and many other U.S. allies, have elections, but the corruption and suppression of political and individual rights is so pervasive that there is no real democracy). for this site's page on Islam and the West click here.........Education: School is boring because we use drills to teach science, we offer memorization of whitewashed accounts for history, we distort the teaching process to get higher scores on government tests, among other factors. The SAT's are sort of like a military drill in math, and in English, they took out the only part that was any good, the word analogies. Teacher training screens out inspired people who refuse to spend a year of their life studying pure baloney. (Professors of education are not good teachers in a regular classroom, or in the teacher training courses. They they are bureaucrats masquerading as academics.) A favorite of PhD's in education is the "I.Q." test, which shows us how stupid we are, to believe some one test can peg your intelligence for life. A young person's aptitudes change and evolve and can improve in any given area, if they are not held down by drills, memorization, and anti-intellectual peer pressure. We think young people have an argument in rejecting the system, but we want to be part of making a new system. A lot of African American and Latino and other students are just walking away from the idea of learning. That makes us, the people, weak, when we need to be strong and fight for justice and an economy where there is opportunity outside of getting a degree in business and joining a corporation. For this site's page on education click here. | ||||||
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| Article: Proposals and rules of recent years intended to protect consumers of beef from mad cow disease have not been put in place, with the result that calves are still being fed cows' blood as a "milk substitute" and cows are still being fed the litter from chicken farms: feces, feathers, parasites and so on. Cows and sheep are now (since mad cow disease appeared) officially not supposed to consume remains of cows and sheep, but chickens, pigs and other livestock are still being fed brains, spinal cords, nerves, eyes, tonsils and intestines from cows. Thus cows do consume the content of these tissues because they eat chicken litter, and also cows are fed plate scrapings from restaurants. (Not to suggest that cows eating chicken litter is O.K. by itself.) The FDA is now making another proposal, that brains and spinal cords from older cows be kept out of animal feed, while still allowing all the above from younger cows. The newly proposed rules are weaker than earlier proposed rules (which weren't adopted), and there is little effort anyway to enforce rules. For article click here. The surfacing of a video showing a "downer" cow, a cow unable to walk, being lifted by a forklift so it could be brought to slaughter has enhanced public awareness the the beef industry's lack of ethics. | ||||||
| Article: An Army captain, Ian Fishback, whose allegations about ongoing prisoner abuse in Iraq were published in a report by a human rights group, was grilled by investigators and pressured to reveal sources, but the investigators did not pursue questions about the abuse itself, such as how much officers may have known. Captain Fishback, a 26 year old West Point graduate whose father fought in Viet Nam, has been lodging complaints with the Army since this spring to no avail, so he took his concerns to the Senate Armed Services Committee and Human Rights Watch. He says the abuse of prisoners is a "systemic" and a "leadership problem" For article click here. FBI reports from 2002 about torture at the Guantanamo prison have now surfaced showing many of the same methods used in Iraq. The administration, including Justice and CIA stifled these reports, and it is becoming clear that prosecuting enlisted soldiers while attaching no blame to officers is an ongoing miscarriage of military justice. (It is much akin to the refusal of the Catholic Church or U.S. prosecutors to punish the bishops and priests who covered up for the molesting priests, sending them off to new parishes to molest again, and hiding their past crimes.) | ||||||
| 9-11 related News: (It is amazing that Americans have not raised some noise about this. It appears to be a sure thing that the FAA and Airforce colluded to keep the jets on the ground on 9/11. It is obvious they lied to the 9/11 Commissions for two years, and then lied about lying. The Times and Post have acted as if this is no big deal. This a horrendous situation that something so serious has been passed over by the mainstream press and the public. ) ..... The Air Force had no communication with the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) until 51 minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, '01, but the FAA originally told the 9-11 Commission that it had contacted the Air Force right after the first plane hit. And the Air Force originally claimed it had planes airborne quickly on 9-11 and had a chance to shoot down flight 93 over Pennsylvania. According to the now accepted timeline, the Air Force was very slow to respond on 9-11. .....The FAA and Air Force stuck to their version of the events for two years while some members of the 9-11 commission persisted in saying that that facts did not support those claims. After two years the FAA and Air Force finally admitted they were wrong. They finally admitted that they did not communicate and respond as they had claimed they did. This led to the question, how did the FAA and Air Force get their facts so wrong on something so important, and why did it take them two years to figure out or admit they were wrong? The answer to that question was put forth by FAA and Air Force investigators. Both agencies are claiming innocent errors were to blame, poor record keeping and the like..... For many months, in incidents prior to 9-11, when air traffic controllers lost communication with a flight or the aircraft deviated from its planned flight path, there was consistently quick communication by the FAA with the Air Force, whose jets were promptly in the air. It is hard to imagine that the Air Force and FAA did not deliberately impede the normal response on 9-11, and it is almost impossible to believe that their initial false claims about that response were not lies, and that they did not lie in standing by their claims, for two years, about when the interceptor jets went airborne. And with these new reports, blaming accounting errors, they are lying again. For articles and links click here. | ||||||
| Medical ......In the news: 25% of U.S. pregnant women have genital herpes, according to a New York Times article on an appeal by a group of experts for better reporting on herpes transmission from mother to newborn infants. Estimates of such transmission range from 460 to 2,800 per year, in the U.S. Untreated neonatal (infant) herpes is usually fatal, and most survivors have permanent disabilities. Even with treatment death and disability are common, and treatment must be prompt to be successful. (New York Times, 8/24/05) Note: for years the standard doctors' advice on genital herpes was that transmission did not occur without visible lesions (open sores). But a New England Journal of Medicine article, from about two years ago, cited evidence that transmission can occur without lesions. It has become clear that the longstanding public health dogma on this question has been wrong, and that asymptomatic transmission is widespread, not rare. We are seeking citations for editorials in the journals noting that doctors have been feeding the the public false information for decades. | ||||||
| Medical .....Think twice: The five-year survival rate of lung cancer patients whose tumors were detected early by a CT scan is 80%, compared with 15% for patients who did not receive the CT scan. One problem with this statistic is that a CT group patient's 5 year clock starts earlier because his or her tumor is diagnosed earlier with the with the scan. So that while the tumors of a CT-scan patient and a non-CT-scan patient may start at the same time, and while the patients may lapse into cancer and die at the same time, the CT-scan patient will be said to survive more years from diagnosis. The other "numbers lie" problem is that about 4 out of 5 in the CT scan group will actually have inactive tumors that will not progress to cancer, and yet they are likely to undergo the dangers chemotherapy and/or surgery. The death rate for screened patients is actually higher than for non-screened. View article. |
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Images Left: Getting down at the mudhole -- Lynaecid butterflies pulling up water with their straw-like proboscises. Right: Painting by Aya Takano from a show by the Japan Society on post war (World War II) culture in Japan.
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| Lycaenid butterflies drinking at a mud hole | Illustration by Japanese artist Aya Takano |
More articles of note from the media. (Click on blue type to see article)
Education
According to a writing program director at M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) scores on the new essay section on the SAT verbal test can be predicted by the length of the essay 90% of the time. Longer essay gets a higher score. Click here for article
Culture
In the fall of '04, 28 year old Laleh Seddigh petitioned for the right to compete against Iranian men in auto races. In March, '05 she won the national championship, agreeing not to wave to the crowd of largely women fans, whose enthusiasm at her past appearances had unnerved the organizing committee. Click here for article
Science and Nature
A few reptiles can become frozen -- not hibernating but frozen solid -- and then return to life when they thaw out months later. ( Washington Post, Dec. 12, '04)
Animals in many locations sensed the impending tsunami that struck in December. (Wall Street Journal January 4, '05) Reports of such animal behavior, although not verifiable scientifically, have followed many disasters, especially earthquakes.
History
How natural disasters have altered the course of human history (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 2, '05)
U.S. Government and Business (The golden rule: "Them with the gold makes the rules.")
Minnesota has so far let communities decide whether or not to permit factory farms in their vicinity, and the communities have kept agribusiness from taking over farming. But Governor Tim Pawlenty is working on handing the state over to corporate farming. (New York Times Dec. 2, 'O4) ... There are some states which have, in ways, stymied the spread of factory farms. Some would call this government meddling with the free market, others would say local people are exercising their right to protect their community from nuisances and environmental dangers, and the state governments are complying with community interests as is appropriate.
Federal farm subsidies rose 40% in over 2003 and 2004, to $15.7 billion dollars, even though farm income doubled over those two years due to the big crop yields. (This article is some years old. It is important to note that the same huge subsidies to the richest farms have again been approved by Congress, even though farm income is still high.) Large harvests have lowered crop prices, triggering subsidies formulated to compensate for lower prices. But the fact of higher subsidies in big-income years runs against the principle that farm subsidies are supposed to kick in when farmers are losing money, not when their income is high. The subsidies are not, in fact, even contingent on the sale of a crop: "A farmer can sell his crop early at a high price, say, in a futures contract, and still collect a subsidy check after the harvest if prices are down over all. The money is not tied to what the farmer actually received for his crop. The farmer does not even have to sell the crop to get the check, only prove that the market has dropped below a set rate." (New York Times, Dec. 26, 2004.)
M. J. Troy dies. Former Democratic Party boss in Queens, New York, exposed facts of corruption to the public after being imprisoned. (New York Times, Dec. 6, 2004) Note: The extent to which judges are corrupt is a great mystery in the U.S. because we do not carry out "stings," which would involve putting hidden microphones on government agents who then offer bribes to judges. The same applies to elected lawmakers, e.g. congressmen.
A new California law requires hospitals to make public what they bill for various items and services. (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27, 04) Note: Medical billing is a funny-money realm in many ways. Hospital bills list crazy charges like $50 for a paper hospital gown, in what is called cost-shifting, and the bills are laced with fraud, such as charging for a doctor visit when a nurse gives a shot. Medicare took no measures to prosecute billing fraud until the 1990's, and the private insurers refused to investigate overcharges in the years before they took over medicine in the name of "cost containment," which turned out to be cutting services and putting the money in their pocket. The fraud continues, the HMOS are paying themselves now. This Wall Street Journal article, which reviews wild price disparities in California hospitao billing, is another window into the fact that nothing like a free market is operating in medicine, if it were costs at various hospitals would be more aligned. It is worth noting that the very basis of the HMO process is to deprive the consumer of choice, the choice of his or her doctor. The ability of the consumer to choose the best product or service is what the free market is about. Medicine, like the law, and many aspects of our economy, is a racket, not a free market.
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| Eric, Editor, Outer Mission Street, San Francisco |
