Aug 15 2009
Mars’ environment destroys methane very quickly
Methane gas on Mars may be destroyed 600 times faster than it is on Earth, and possibly in as little as one hour, new calculations suggest. If so, whatever process is responsible for the destruction may be wiping out other organic molecules, which are necessary for life as we know it.
I expect we’d better ship the dairy industry to Mars.
Aug 14 2009
I have a friend who is a social worker in the Antelope Valley of California, which includes the Palmdale/Lancaster area. She sent me this accounting of government provided health care in the area:
As a Social Worker in Los Angeles County I have a lot of dealings with Government provided insurance (Medi-Cal). My clients receive this coverage. As such, they have real limits on access to care. For example, in the Antelope Valley (that is Palmdale/Lancaster), make sure you don’t break a bone. If you break a bone you can only have it treated one day out of the month. If it is not the designated day for them to treat broken bones, you are out of luck, unless you can afford to drive to Los Angeles to get it treated. This, despite the fact that there are two hospitals and a county Medical HUB (treatment facility) in Lancaster. All of which have the ABILITY to treat it, but don’t, because they “can’t allocate the resources” for it. Seriously. It is incredible. They will make a child go a whole month without even setting the broken bone– I’ve seen this in action. Los Angeles is a long ways off, and many of our clients don’t have the transportation or money to drive there.
At the hospitals in Lancaster, if you are on Government Health care and break a bone, they will x-ray the break and diagnose it, but they WILL NOT TREAT IT. Im not kidding. This is just the way it’s done.
Further, I had a client who was reportedly having some kind of neurological problem. The Medical HUB refused to refer her for a Neurological Exam, citing they did not have sufficient resources to provide this. I argued with the administration, the doctors, fought it as far as I could. Didn’t matter.
Ultimately, I had to get a Court Order in order to get her a Neurological Exam. Even then, she was admitted to the hospital 3 times (for at least a week each time) before finally they referred her for a Neurological Exam.
That is Government insurance. Yes, they are “technically” covered, but they just can’t access the health care services. “Not enough resources.”
Some people reading this will undoubtedly say that this proves that “health care reform” is necessary. Yet it’s difficult to deny that this is exactly the kind of bureaucratic silliness that we see in other government agencies, local, state and federal. To put this at its simplest, the farther away the decision makers are from the patients, the worse things will be. Someone has told people having coffee in local hospitals that they should not set broken bones for children, except on one day per month.
There is very little chance that the government can reform its bureaucracy by creating an even bigger one. And in the meantime, while tilting at bureaucratic windmills, it will have reduced or removed the ability of the private sector to take up the slack, as more and more employers see that it’s in their best interest to dump employees into the “government option.”
Aug 14 2009
ObamaCare Will Lead to Rationed Care for Elderly And the rest of us, too. Read it all at the link.
Elderly Americans are turning out in droves to fight ObamaCare, and President Obama is arguing back that they have nothing to worry about. Allow us to referee. While claims about euthanasia and “death panels” are over the top, senior fears have exposed a fundamental truth about what Mr. Obama is proposing: Namely, once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, rationing care is inevitable, and those who have lived the longest will find their care the most restricted.
***Far from being a scare tactic, this is a logical conclusion based on experience and common-sense. Once health care is a “free good” that government pays for, demand will soar and government costs will soar too. When the public finally reaches its taxing limit, something will have to give on the care and spending side. In a word, care will be rationed by politics.
Mr. Obama’s reply is that private insurance companies already ration, by deciding which treatments are covered and which aren’t. However, there’s an ocean of difference between coverage decisions made under millions of voluntary private contracts and rationing via government. An Atlantic Ocean, in fact. Virtually every European government with “universal” health care restricts access in one way or another to control costs, and it isn’t pretty.
Aug 13 2009
Wednesday July 26, 2009: Ed Thomas, football coach of Aplington-Parkersburg High School in Parkersburg, Iowa, is shot and killed by a mentally disturbed former student.
Thursday, June 27, 2009: Pop star Michael Jackson dies of an apparent cardiac arrest, possibly brought on by a drug overdose.
Could there be two lives more unalike, more disassociated, and more stark in contrast. And yet, they were brought together for at least a moment, by a shared sordid and sensational means of death and accompanying national headline.
The death of Coach Thomas has already been forgotten by most. His death would have been anonymous had it not been for the headline-grabbing manner in which he was killed. I also happen to believe the story would have rekindled gun-control debate in the press for a longer period of time had Michael Jackson’s death not pushed it from the front page the following day.
The reason everyone knows about the death of Michael Jackson is obvious – he was arguably one of the most famous celebrities on the planet. The manner in which he died is yet to be determined, though there is already sinister speculation and allegations of a drug overdose. And with celebrities, especially this one, there will always be reasons their death remains in the news long after they are laid to rest.
Much can be said about the lives of these two men. Both were very influential within their sphere of influence, one in a town of 1,900 people, one on a world stage. Both deaths had a profound impact on those who knew them. Both met with what we would all agree is an untimely death. Both apparently died at the hands of another, though the full truth about Michael Jackson may never really be known. But there are some very important differences to note and as I do so I intend no disrespect to the memory of either man.
While Michael Jackson enjoyed an amazing level of popularity and success as an artist that few ever obtain, he paid dearly for his celebrity in private life. With great fame and fortune come equally great pressures as ones personal life is exposed in the public spotlight. Most celebrities struggle constantly with keeping a degree of privacy and normalcy in their lives. Rumors of personal eccentricities from quirky to criminal followed Michael everywhere. Serious charges of pedophilia left him forever tainted in the public eye. And whether or not Michael was a pedophile his penchant for surrounding himself with young boys would hardly be considered normal. Michael was also obviously uncomfortable in his own skin. Repeated plastic surgeries throughout his life are not symptomatic of someone who has a healthy self-image.
We mourn the loss of Michael Jackson largely because of nostalgia. His music was so popular and inextricably linked to a season of our lives. When the music maker dies it also somehow brings an end to that part of our lives associated with that music. When I was a young boy I remember crying very hard upon hearing a news broadcast announcing the death of Walt Disney. I had never met the man, but I had certainly been to Disneyland and understood all things Disney would never be quite the same again.
We mourn the loss of a great artist. We mourn also the passing of that season in our own lives. We are sad we’ll never hear or see this great talent again. But for the most part, much like it was for me with Walt Disney, we mourn the memory, we do not mourn the loss of Michael Jackson, the man. A man whose life was sadly warped and twisted by forces beyond the control of the tender, gentle soul he seemed to be.
In stark contrast is the life of Coach Ed Thomas. No one achieves fame or fortune by being a high school football coach in a very small Iowa town. Apparently he was a very successful coach (including 2 state titles and 4 team alums who are now in the NFL) and as such received more lucrative and higher-profile college coaching offers but turned them all down. I think it is safe to say he had other priorities that were entirely unrelated to fame or fortune. A year earlier when a tornado ripped through the middle of their small town it was Coach Thomas who stood as a pillar of strength, galvanizing their community to rebuild as they buried their dead. Such deeds never seem to garner great publicity but it is clear what this man meant to his community. Phrases like “he was the rock this community was built on” and descriptions such as “our icon” give testimony about the sort of man that was Ed Thomas. (click here to read more about the life and death of Coach Ed Thomas)
2,500 people attended the funeral of Coach Thomas. That is 131% of Parkersburg’s population. (If the same percentage of L.A.’s population had come to Michael Jackson’s funeral the attendance would have been almost 13 million)
Two lives entirely unrelated but for their deaths. Two lives about as different as two lives can be. But what is the significant difference to me? i think I can best sum it up this way:
I might point to Michael Jackson and tell my son, “When you grow up I want you to sing like he did.”
But..
I will point to Ed Thomas and tell my son, “When you grow up, I want you to be the kind of man he was.”
Aug 13 2009
It appears that calling someone a bird brain may not be such an insult after all
New research suggests birds are smarter than apes.
Scientists studied whether animals look at the physical world in the same way as humans and apes do.
In the study, the animals had to extract food from a horizontal tube by avoiding two holes cut into it where the food could fall out.
Researcher Professor Russell Gray says the animals were then given a similar puzzle – the only difference being it was a table with holes cut into it instead of a tube.
He says the crows not only learnt to do it very well, it appears they understood what was going on.
Gray says it is a common assumption humans are closely related to apes, and the finding that birds are actually smarter may come as a surprise.
Aug 13 2009
Grand Valley State University (GVSU) has promised to remove “demonstrated commitment to the principles of diversity” from the stated job requirements for prospective faculty seeking appointment to GVSU’s Department of Music. The department will restate its requirements in terms of relevant experience, not vaguely worded personal commitments regarding a controversial political issue. The change, which came after FIRE asked GVSU to restore freedom of conscience on its campus, is a fresh reminder to public universities that they cannot require prospective faculty to demonstrate personal commitment to “the principles of diversity,” any more than they can require a commitment to “patriotism,” “objectivism,” or “communalism.”
This is exactly right, of course.
Yet, even with this result at GVSU, a great many college and universities insist on clauses like this in job announcements, contracts, evaluative mechanisms, syllabi, etc. Diversity is the new green mud. When all the other monkeys in the cage are rubbing themselves with green mud, you’d better start scooping it up yourself. Monkeys caught not wearing green mud will be disciplined.
Since diversity is so thoroughly associated with the Left, such clauses amount to a demand that all viable candidates must be Leftists, or pretend to be.
Aug 13 2009
Imagine if one of America’s foremost writers had once been privy to a shadowy plot by Hitler’s Germany to take control of the motion picture industry through its labor organizations and force writers to clear scripts with Nazi censors, and then he courageously stepped forward to blow the whistle on the whole operation.
Wouldn’t it be bizarre if, when this man died, instead of being celebrated for such heroism, he was criticized and even attacked by colleagues for revealing the identities of those who were behind the intrigue?
This strange scenario isn’t far from what unfolded in the media last week when novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg died. The only difference is that Schulberg, once a communist, blew the whistle on Stalin’s murderous Soviet regime and the Communist Party it controlled in America.
Read it all. Exit question for recent college grads: just who WAS Stalin, anyway?
h/t: powerline
Aug 12 2009
Mark Muller is giving away an AK-47 (presumably the civilian legal semi-auto only version, which does NOT qualify as an “assault weapon”) with every new truck he sells. Well, he’s giving them a voucher so that if they can qualify for the legal purchase of the weapon, they can use the voucher to buy it from a licensed gun store.
Watch this thing, and then notice how utterly, completely, risibly clueless this interviewer is. Observe what she must think:
1) If you need to defend yourself, your gun shouldn’t be TOO good. You might actually survive the encounter, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?
2) God doesn’t want us to defend ourselves or our loved ones. I hope she doesn’t have children. Or loved ones. All of whom deserve better from her. Or, she was just asking a stupid question for which she didn’t believe the premise herself. Either way, clueless.
3) She’s obviously ignorant about the definition of “assault weapon.” Civilian legal versions of the AK-47 aren’t assault weapons, because they are semi-automatic ONLY, one round per trigger pull, exactly like semi-auto hunting rifles. But wait, she went to journalism school, I’m sure. And we know that they always do their background research, right? (Sidebar: if someone wants to kill me from a distance, I HOPE they’re using an AK-47 and not a typical American semi-auto rifle, which is usually a LOT more accurate. With the AK, they’ll probably miss the first shot, and I’ll hear it and have time to seek cover. Hey… this is starting to remind me of faculty meetings, in which I spend lots of time taking cover.)
4) She apparently thinks that Jesus doesn’t want parents to protect their children, each other, or themselves. Or she doesn’t think that, and is just asking another disingenuous question of the country bumpkin rube auto dealer.
Keep in mind that these geniuses are the ones reporting to us on nationalized healthcare, foreign policy, the economy, and political intrigue everywhere. You decide if you think they’ve done any more background research on that than on this story.
Aug 12 2009
The Embryo as Human Being: A Scientific Case
For people who advocate the killing of embryonic human beings in the cause of biomedical research, the Holy Grail is an argument that would definitively establish that the human embryo, at least early in its development, is not a living human organism and therefore not a human being at all. The problem for these advocates is that all the scientific evidence points in precisely the opposite direction. Modern human embryology and developmental biology have shown that fertilization produces a new and distinct organism: a living individual of the human species in the embryonic stage of his or her development.
Some proponents of embryo-destructive research are willing to face up to these biological facts. They concede that human embryos are living individuals of the human species, but deny that this gives them the moral status of being persons. According to this argument, not all human beings are equal; not all possess inherent dignity and a right to life. Some, including those at early developmental stages, are not (or are not yet) “persons,” and they may therefore (at least in some circumstances, or in the pursuit of some goals) legitimately be killed.
There is much to be said against this position, but its defects are philosophical, not scientific. Its proponents recognize that there is no Holy Grail out there to find, and they are willing to defend the killing of human embryos while facing up to the biological facts. But then there are the Grail searchers. These people are determined to prove that what modern human embryology has been telling us is wrong, and to this end they scavenge the fields of molecular biology and human genetics.
Read it all.
