7 December 2007

Local notes
Peoria Pundit brought some interesting things to our attention:

Distraction by cell phone can be fatal.

A pedestrian apparently absorbed in a cell phone call was struck and killed by an Amtrak train in San Leandro today after he walked around a lowered crossing gate and onto the tracks, authorities said.

The victim, a man who was not immediately identified, was struck at 12:30 p.m. by a northbound Capitol Corridor train at the Alvarado Street crossing [...]Crew members aboard the Sacramento-bound train told authorities they saw the victim talking on the cell phone before he was struck, Graham said. The warning lights and gates at the crossing were functioning properly, she added.

A local Democratic candidate (state House) has launched her campaign website and our local Democratic candidate for the US. House seat (Ray LaHood’s current seat) has dropped out. Frankly, I am glad that Versace has dropped out; his campaign wasn’t exactly full of energy. I hope that Bill Edley runs.

More Politcs Barack Obama has had another good week. Even one of Hillary Clinton’s Iowa co-chairs has left her campaign to support Obama!

Posted on Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 9:35 PM

For Some, Negative Turn is a Turn-Off

DES MOINES — Once, Garry Thomas counted himself a Hillary Clinton supporter — even signing up to be one of her 25 co-chairs in Iowa alongside with former Iowa First Lady Christie Vilsack.

But Thomas now says he felt obliged to switch sides in recent weeks. “I think the Clinton campaign went negative,” Thomas said in a telephone interview on Thursday. He attributed his defection to the new tone Clinton took last weekend, describing it as divisive. Obama officials said Thomas committed to them this week.

So, the Clinton campaign has started to take shots at Obama’s health insurance plan. They claim that it leaves substantially more people uninsured than her’s does. In fact, we’ve presented evidence to the contrary; keep in mind that the main difference in the plans is that Obama’s puts more money upfront and has fewer mandates; that is, Clinton plan places more of a mandate on people to buy insurance if they can afford it. Obama doesn’t see the main problem being that people that can afford insurance won’t buy it but rather too many people can’t afford it.

Mandates have a place but Obama’s plan places them later in his program, so to speak:

The Concord Monitor | December 07, 2007

By Monitor Staff

The great health care mandate debate is a sideshow. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards insist that forcing individuals to buy a policy is crucial to providing universal health care or something close to it. Rival Barack Obama disagrees. A mandate may be necessary to force those who refuse to sign up once affordable options are available, he says, but that step should come at the end of the march to universal care, not at the beginning.

The debate has degenerated into arguments over who is or isn’t being honest with voters. The question voters should focus on is which candidate, if elected, can convince enough Republicans – who will use words like “confiscation” to describe any mandate – to go along with a plan. The next question should be: Is this plan the best and most affordable path to universal coverage?

On the honesty question, when it comes to health care mandates, the edge goes to Obama. He rightly says they force people to buy something before they know what it will cost and how good it will be, and many won’t comply. On the honesty question, when it comes to health care mandates, the edge goes to Obama. He rightly says they force people to buy something before they know what it will cost and how good it will be, and many won’t comply.

A mandate could make insurance cheaper for everyone by forcing the young and healthy, a group that traditionally opts out of the system, to sign up. But making people buy insurance before good plans are affordable could lead more people to ignore the mandate. A mandate to buy insurance before much more is done to make it affordable would also mean even higher profits for insurance companies and bigger government subsidies to make coverage affordable.

Nor do mandates come close to guaranteeing universal coverage. The Massachusetts health care plan enacted when Republican Mitt Romney was governor mandates coverage. By the end of this month, every Massachusetts resident is supposed to be enrolled or pay a penalty.

The plan has caused some 200,000 previously uninsured people to sign up, according to the New York Times. But at least that many, and probably far more, have not. The $219 penalty in the form of a loss of the personal exemption on the state income tax was not severe enough to prompt everyone to enroll. That penalty is expected to grow to at least $1,000 next year. [...]

More here.

Ok, what about Romney’s speech? Here is an interesting quote about it; can you guess who said it?

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else.

Hmmm, obviously the “idiots” were part of the intended audience and Romney sure as heck wasn’t talking to liberal Democrats. So, whoever wrote this was talking about socially conservative Republicans.

Was it some ultra left winger who said this? Hardly; it was Peggy Noonan, the very one who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan (who in my mind, did the best job of appealing to the moron vote).

Of course, Mike Huckabee is picking up socially conservative voters (e. g., the “idiot vote”; gads I love that term! Evidently so do honest Republicans )
But don’t underestimate him. He is a woo all right, but isn’t the wide eyed “ah shucks” nice guy that many portray him as:

in this recent profile of Huckabee, the New York Times undertook no real investigation of any of Huckabee’s past work or inflammatory remarks, stating simply:

Mr. Huckabee served as Mr. [James] Robison’s announcer, advance man and public relations representative, drumming up attendance and coverage for his prayer meetings and appearing on broadcasts. (The organization was based near Dallas, which is how Mr. Huckabee came to work on the 1980 Reagan rally). Mr. Robison could be harsh — he yelled in the pulpit and referred to gay people as perverts — but Mr. Huckabee was a genial ambassador

That is all well and good, until you realize just who Huckabee was working for:

(my note: this is one mean, nasty SOB)

Huckabee also shared his views regarding the proper treatment of people who are infected with HIV:

“It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population,” he said. “This deadly disease, for which there is no cure, is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.

“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague.”

This was 1992 – four years after the federal government distributed a pamphlet penned by then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop entitled “Understanding AIDS” which explained that the disease could not be contacted through everyday contact. And is not as if Huckabee just didn’t see the pamphlet, since it “was sent to all 107 million households in the United States in 1988, the largest public health mailing ever done.”

Huckabee likes to portray himself as a different kind of right-wing leader, one who is conservative but “is not angry about it.” But judging by his past remarks, he appears far more like his right-wing allies than he would like the nation to believe.

Remember: this guy is a woo and a theocrat who has every intention of taking us back to the days of medieval science and auto-de-fes. So hey, if you think that the universe is 6000-10000 years old, created just for us, if every major science department is either delusional or under some satanic spell; if you think that witches should be put to death and that whales (or great fishes) swallowed people whole just to spit them out alive on some land in order to preach to a people; if you think that a campaign is being supernaturally aided by some deity, then he is your man.

If you believe the findings of modern science (that has extended longevity, cured diseases and reduced child mortality) and that we ought to live in the 21’st century; if you believe in separation of church and state, then reject this clown.

Speaking of science: a pheromone which elicits aggression in mice has been found.

A whiff of a single type of protein from urine is enough to make a male mouse pick a fight, researchers have found. Pheromone scents that elicit aggressive behaviour have long been predicted, but have proven elusive until now.

Male mice will attack other mice they see as a threat, such as males that invade their territory, but will generally welcome females and leave juveniles or castrated males alone. When they do attack it can be quite aggressive. “The resident will chase the intruder, bite, kick and wrestle with him,” says Lisa Stowers, a biologist at the Scripps Research Institution in La Jolla, California who along with her colleagues has identified a protein that provokes this aggression. [...]

On another matter, a 500,000 year old homo erectus fossil has been found; evidently this poor soul had TB! Or at least one scientist says that it did. Others are reacting with skepticism:

EurekAlert is running a very interesting press release on the discovery of a 500,000 year old Homo erectus fossil recovered from Turkey. Apparently the fossil, a fragment of skull bone, shows lesions that the individual had tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis is a deadly infectious disease caused by multiple strains of mycobacteria. Because the mycobacteria have lost numerous coding and non-coding regions in its genome, it is hard to retrace the genetic differences that would tell us of the origins, relationships, and movement of the disease causing pathogen. But through analyzing relatively modern human skeletal remains (I’m talking thousands of years modern) from Egypt and Peru, we know that tuberculosis was taking a big toll on humans relatively recently in our evolutionary history.

If this Homo erectus really did have tuberculosis, then that means he probably, and other hominids, got sick because his body produced less vitamin D due to lighter skin and had a less vigilant immune system, hundreds of thousands of years ago. From what’s reported in the press release, I don’t buy it. And neither does John Hawks. I think it is over analyzed and sensationalized science to make big headlines.

I really don’t understand why a Homo erectus from Turkey isn’t enough of a killer headline. To my knowledge this is the first hominid found in Turkey and it fills a big spatial gap in understanding human evolution. Of course, I really don’t know enough about the tuberculosis evidence in this individual to make a solid judgment… we’ll have to wait until we get the paper… [...]

Notice that scientists don’t accept new findings quickly or easily. But still a 500,000 year old fossil of one of our ancestors is pretty cool…at least to people like myself.

Some other skeptic related fun:

In the Name of the Towelie goes over some of the over 300 proof’s of god’s existence.

I wonder if “Mike Huckabee will send Chuck Norris to beat you up if you don’t believe” is one of the proofs?

Friendly Atheist: alerts us to a helpful comparison between The Bible and The Golden Compass at the Landover Baptist Church site.

Seriously, can you name two animals which actually talked to humans, according to the Bible? Hint: early in Genesis and in the Book of Numbers; one is better known than the others.