Bits & Pieces

Americans United for Change have produced this effective response to the Republican death panel allegations by bringing the real death panels in America out into the open.

Matt Taibbi eulogizes real healthcare reform.

Money quote:

It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing. Personally, I think they’re doing a lousy job even of that. I lauded Roddick for playing out the string with heart, and giving a good show. But these Democrats aren’t even pretending to give a shit, not really. I mean, they’re not even willing to give up their vacations.

(h/t William Gibson)

Q. Turning to your flight, what is your strongest memory of Apollo 11?

A. Looking back at Earth from a great distance.

I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified façade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied. Small, shiny, serene, blue and white, FRAGILE.

Q. That was 40 years ago. Would it look the same today?

A. Yes, from the moon, but appearances can be deceiving. It’s certainly not serene, but definitely fragile, and growing more so. When we flew to the moon, our population was 3 billion; today it has more than doubled and is headed for 8 billion, the experts say. I do not think this growth is sustainable or healthy. The loss of habitat, the trashing of oceans, the accumulation of waste products – this is no way to treat a planet.

- Mike Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module pilot. (via Quotation of the Day mailing list)

According to Reuters.

“This legislation includes a broad range of provisions that are key to effective, comprehensive health system reform,” AMA executive vice president Michael Maves wrote to the House committee leaders.

The current issue of The New Yorker features an article by Elizabet Kolbert chronicling the enormous and rapid weight gains of Americans. The claimed reasons for the problem are many, but no one is entirely certain of all the causes but it could be an amalgam of evolution, cheaper foods, engineered foods and, of course, supersizing. She provides a good overview of the problem and the latest thinking on the subject.

Men are now on average seventeen pounds heavier than they were in the late seventies, and for women that figure is even higher: nineteen pounds. The proportion of overweight children, age six to eleven, has more than doubled, while the proportion of overweight adolescents, age twelve to nineteen, has more than tripled. (According to the standards of the United States military, forty per cent of young women and twenty-five per cent of young men weigh too much to enlist.) As the average person became heavier, the very heavy became heavier still; more than twelve million Americans now have a body-mass index greater than forty, which, for someone who is five feet nine, entails weighing more than two hundred and seventy pounds. Hospitals have had to buy special wheelchairs and operating tables to accommodate the obese, and revolving doors have had to be widened—the typical door went from about ten feet to about twelve feet across. An Indiana company called Goliath Casket has begun offering triple-wide coffins with reinforced hinges that can hold up to eleven hundred pounds. It has been estimated that Americans’ extra bulk costs the airlines a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of jet fuel annually.

The has to the absolute epitome of chutzpa. Guess which party had the gall to put out a statement against the Democrats plan to reform health care?

[t]he federal government would run a health care system–or a public plan option–with the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the post office, and the incompetence of Katrina.

This takes balls. Who are they speaking to? Dems? Independent? Or only their remaining 21% public support?

Now this is very good news for our rapidly aging population (including me).

US scientists say they have successfully reversed the effects of Alzheimer’s with experimental drugs. The drugs target and boost the function of a newly pinpointed gene involved in the brain’s memory formation. In mice, the treatment helped restore long-term memory and improve learning for new tasks, Nature reports.

The same drugs – HDAC inhibitors – are currently being tested to treat Huntington’s disease and are on the market to treat some cancers.

Now this is very good news for our rapidly aging population (including me).
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US scientists say they have successfully reversed the effects of Alzheimer’s with experimental drugs. The drugs target and boost the function of a newly pinpointed gene involved in the brain’s memory formation. In mice, the treatment helped restore long-term memory and improve learning for new tasks, Nature reports.
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The same drugs – HDAC inhibitors – are currently being tested to treat Huntington’s disease and are on the market to treat some cancers.

(h/t BoingBoing)

A bit of levity in the H1N1 worry, from Ken Layne at True/Slant:

I kept a safe distance of six or eight feet behind each shopping party, and when an obese woman began coughing I abandoned my cart and sprinted away. I wanted to yell, Why are you trying to kill me? But then my mouth would be open, and the death germs could fly right in like the Millennium Falcon flew into the Death Star.

He offered this bit of pandemic news earlier.

And he seems to have left his family:



The Awl vs. Wonkette SWINE MEXICAN FLU EDITION from Choire Sicha on Vimeo.

If you liked Supersize Me, King Corn, Fast Food Nation, Our Daily Bread or any of the other recent food production films, you will probably like Food Inc., coming out in June. If it is recommended by Alice Waters, that’s good enough for me.

The H1N1 virus is still raising hell in Mexico.

Mexico urged its citizens to stay home Thursday, suspending government services and asking businesses to close for five days, amid the World Health Organization’s warning that a global flu pandemic appeared imminent.

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Mexican President Felipe Calderon said in a televised address that only essential businesses such as supermarkets, hospitals and pharmacies should stay open, and only critical government workers such as police and soldiers would be on duty from Friday through Tuesday. School had already been canceled nationwide.

A three judge federal court has ruled that a vaccine did not cause autism.  The case refuted three separate theories as to how a vaccine could cause the disease. A victory for science.