April 28. 2009 by Dick.

Holy vote counters, Batman!

Arlen Specter, the lawyer who once upon a time became a District Attorney as a registered Democrat on the Republican ticket, has demonstrated once and for all that Washington maybe ought to take over the car business. After all, there is no one on the planet — not even the bond traders or mortgage brokers — who has a better handle on the ethics of used car salesmen than our top level politicians.

Posted in Throw Da Bums Out, Quickies, Politics & News | 2 Comments »

April 27. 2009 by Dick.

Some people say all men are pigs but I disavow all knowledge of swine flu.

My friend Towse wrote about the hype hype HYPE surrounding the swine flu.

“There is always some flu around and flu is always killing some people,” Towse wrote. “Even when a raw mutant flu manages to kill off more people than a shooting-war, flu has never ravaged whole cities as cholera or the Black Death can do. As awful pandemics go, flu is like the snotty-nosed little sister of awful pandemics.”

As of April 26, there were just 20 confirmed cases of Swine flu in the United States.
California, 7 cases. Kansas, 2 cases. New York City, 8 cases. Ohio, 1 case. Texas, 2 cases.

That said, the swine flu hype is probably justified.

Everyone in the medical community fears a rerun of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. To put it in the computer terms we all understand, “It’s not a question of whether your hard drive crashes but when.”

I came to know more about the 1918-19 pandemic through Vermont Poet Laureate Ellen Bryant Voigt’s narrative poem, Kyrie, This sequence of persona poems connects different speakers by their location in the pandemic. That epidemic killed more than 30 million people worldwide. Some of Ms. Voigt’s narrators “seem related to one another and form a kind of community. It was an amazing devastation,” she said, “encouraged by World War I. The movement of troops made it easy for the virus to spread.” The name Kyrie (pronounced KEER-ee-aa) is from the Greek meaning “Lord.”

The 1918 pandemic was better known as the Spanish flu. That bug killed more than twice the number killed in World War I.

CDC reports that the current “viruses contain a unique combination of gene segments that have not been reported previously among swine or human influenza viruses in the U.S. or elsewhere… It is not anticipated that the seasonal influenza vaccine will provide protection against the swine flu H1N1 viruses.”

The H1N1 viruses are also unique in that, having jumped from swine and birds to humans, they now make the jump from human to human. Modern air travel means they can travel to all corners of the world in days.

Today, the World Bank announced that there is not enough money on hand to underwrite treating a “simple” flu pandemic across the third world.

I had not planned to address the swine flu. After all, it’s not as if there isn’t already enough coverage. This is not a “little boy who cried wolf” issue. It is really a newspaper science versus real science issue. Even if this particular influenza outbreak peters out instead of pigging out on all our peeps, it’s not a question of whether there will be a pandemic but when.

Men cope better with emergencies if they practice practice practice their response. I hope they practice well on this one.

CDC reminded us of the everyday actions people can take to stay healthy:

• Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.
• Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread that way.

And, perhaps most important, avoid close contact with sick people.

Posted in Newspaper "Science", Society, Science (real), Random Access | 5 Comments »

April 22. 2009 by Dick.

Let us, on this holiest of Earth Days, pause to consider.

“The nation that leads the world in creating new sources of clean energy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy,” President Obama told an Earth Day celebration in Iowa. Meanwhile the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classified carbon dioxide as dangerous to public health.

Carbon dioxide?

That would be the stuff we breathe out. Oddly, that would also be the stuff we breathe into drowning victims when we perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

What the President said today is good economics and good science. What the administration did today is bad economics based on bad science.

Global Warming is a good example of the politics of the Far Green overwhelming the truth of science. The popular press and the Congress would have us believe that all scientists agree on the causes and outcomes of Global Warming. And yet. And yet the National Climatic Data Center reports that global temperatures in 2006 were the third coldest on record. And yet 32,000 thousand scientists say “Hey, global warming doesn’t happen the way the politicians say it does.” In fact, as Weather Channel founder John Coleman wrote, “the climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.”

Thanks to the EPA ruling, synthetic trees that suck carbon dioxide out of the air could suck a trillion dollars per year out of the economy. That’s more than the Administration has sunk into Wall Street “banks.” A lot more.

Last month the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ordered the FDA to allow 17-year olds to buy the “Morning After Pill.” The ruling took the FDA to task for allowing ideology to trump the scientific evidence. The Agency had ignored its own scientists in creating the overturned regulations.

The court’s decision is the second major case this year that forces the government to put science ahead of politics.

I don’t like using a judicial decision to determine science but that does seem to be all the Administration understands. It is time for a court to tell the Administration what more than 30,000 scientists already know. It is time for science to trump ideology.

Or we could all hold our breath.

Posted in Society, Science (not-so-real), Science (real), Politics & News, Random Access | 1 Comment »