Dr. Steve continues his frontline anthropological reports from the only state known to be more backward than Kansas.
There is a bill which will be introduced in the Oklahoma legislature
which will permit children not to do homework if that homework is at
odds with their religious belief. That means that a child of Jewish
heritage will be able to skip any homework related to Mia Hamm or
Francis Bacon.
This should be the final nail in the coffin – conclusive proof I am right when I insist our legislature is the dumbest of all.
We also have the dumbest U.S. senator.*
And the highest pollen count.
__________
* Sen. James (The Imbecile) Inhofe
I just rescued my Baby Jesus Radish from a dark and lonely coat pocket where he lay forgotten and abandoned for nearly six hours. Now he’s back, safe and sound, in his bowl of water in the refrigerator.
How carelessly we treat our life-changing experiences. I had taken the miraculous radish to Starbucks, wrapped in swaddling paper towels, to show him to a friend.
It was an astounding discovery, probably a reward for the fact that I lead an exemplary life. I had bought an ordinary bunch of radishes in the supermarket for $1.79, and when I set them out in the kitchen to trim them, there he was – the spitting image of the baby Jesus in the form of a radish. A double radish, the lower one fairly large and the upper one small, so there is a small head with a green tuft of hair, a chubby belly – and, well, a tail, but I may trim that off.
It’s hard to know if that sort of thing is permissible. I haven’t cleaned him with a vegetable brush either, which I really should do before I photograph him for display on E-Bay. Would that be a desecration? I mean, you can’t very well set a minimum bid of $20,000 on an immaculate religious icon with dirt on it, can you?
It’s not covered in the Ten Commandments. I Googled them.
There’s a bacterial parasite living inside a protozoan parasite living inside termites, which are parasites living inside our houses if not our guts.
However the tiniest pest in this nested pestilence, the bacterium, has a plausible alibi because it gives back maybe more than it gets. That qualifies it as a symbiont, the symbiosis having to do with what enables termites to digest dead wood, as in your porch.
Researchers have sequenced the bacterium’s genome because they’d like to learn the same trick. If we could digest dead wood commercially, we could use it as biofuel.
Well, shit. Why not just burn it?
From Eric Alterman’s article on Obama’s victory in the Dec. 1 issue of The Nation:
These Are Better Days
“Barack Obama’s election to the presidency is the greatest electoral moment of my lifetime and unless you were around in 1932 – or perhaps 1860 – yours too …
“How wonderful to have our faith in the very idea of hope fully restored in this way, following eight years of full-throated fearmongering in the service of nothing but cronyism, corruption, ignorance, and arrogance.
“How empowering to learn that the Bush/neocon vision of America has been signed, sealed, and delivered to the ash heap of history.”
Given how many important things you have to remember, and how hard it is to keep track of them, it’s a luxury to have some facts of no significance that you can forget with impunity. I offer you four:
I’ve long known that there are about 4,000 different religions actively practiced on earth. This stuck in my mind because I run into people who don’t seem to value the separation of church and state, and I like to remind them that mixing the two could get burdensomely complicated.
Today, in two separate articles, I learned that there are 4,000 different minerals on earth – minerals being rocklike substances that have developed various kinds of lattice or crystal structures – and also 4,000 kinds of heritable genetic diseases.
And at least 4,000 people have told me (when I lit up) that there are 4,000 chemicals in cigarette smoke.
Does any of this count as vital information? Let’s hope not. Who could ever keep track of the 4,000 other things there are 4,000 of?
In Sunday night’s interview with the Obamas on 60 Minutes, the president-elect was asked if he would push for more financial regulation.
Yes, he said. It’s a top priority. “And keep in mind that the deregulation process, it wasn’t just one party. I think there’s a lot of blame to spread around.”
Really?
Deregulation of the financial industry – the reign of anarchy destined to blow up the markets and the global economy — started in 1999 with repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. Clinton was president, but Republicans controlled congress. In the Senate, all 53 Republicans voted for repeal along with exactly ONE Democrat. That opened the gates to the orgy of lax supervision and non-supervision of bankers and Wall Street freebooters.
Throughout this feeding frenzy, apostles of deregulation have overwhelmingly come from the hardcore, ideological right wing, egged on by financial industry lobbyists.
And for nearly eight of these nine years, the Bush administration has not only been obliterating federal oversight of the markets but also failing to enforce even the patchy and often toothless regulations still on the books – and firing or demoting any honest civil servant who actually tries to do his job.
Not just one party? Let’s not get so reasonable and so ritualistically consensual that we lose track of reality.
Sure we all share some responsibility – for everyone and everything – but real crimes are committed by real criminals, and the more quickly you forget the sooner they’ll do it again.
These Republican outrages have cost countless people their jobs and their homes and cost millions of others their peace of mind and the ability to take good care of their families.
Right winger (now rich lobbyist) Phil Gramm, John McCain’s “financial guru,” engineered the Enron Loophole when he was in the Senate – exempting energy trading from regulators, leaving Enron free to rape the ratepayers and taxpayers of California – after which his wife Wendy joined Enron’s Board.
Gramm was also the principal enabler of the subprime mortgage meltdown.
Mother Jones has dubbed him Foreclosure Phil. He sneaked a measure into the 2000 budget at the last minute — largely written by financial industry lobbyists and unread by most of the Senators voting on the budget – barring the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating exotic swindles like bundling worthless mortgages.
Meantime Henry Paulson (yes, that guy), then head of Goldman Sachs, was after the SEC to get rid of some silly regulation that prevented investment bankers and hedge funds from using leverage up to 40-1 (You invest 10 million to control 400 million. You can make a fortune, and if later the investment goes bad, you get a bailout and the taxpayers have to cover your losses while you go home to count your accumulated bonuses). At that time the limit was 15-1, or 1,500% — fairly ample, wouldn’t you think?
Paulson didn’t get what he wanted from Clinton’s SEC chairman Arthur Levitt. But when Bush appointed Christopher Cox to the post, he soon gave the all-clear for the insanity of 40-1 leverage, and the stage was set for the meltdown. Culprits? No Democrats. All Republicans. Typical Bush.
By late 2007, it was obvious that predatory lending practices were a growing threat to the mortgage market and to people buying houses. The situation was so clearly dangerous that the attorneys general of all fifty states – Republicans and Democrats alike – filed lawsuits against the worst of the predatory lenders (those folks who, for example, were steering borrowers with sterling credit ratings into expensive and potentially dangerous subprime mortgages – which, later, could easily cost them their homes — because the subprimes were much more profitable and, well, you know, that’s one version of capitalism).
What happened? The Bush administration dug out an obscure 1863 law to suppress all of the states’ anti-predatory lending laws and prevent them even from enforcing their own consumer protection laws in suits against national banks. No, Mr. Obama, this was no bipartisan everyone’s-to-blame, let’s-not-quibble misunderstanding.
It was callous, aggressive Bush administration collusion with bankers, mortgage brokers, and investment bankers who were cheating consumers and investors and endangering homeowners.
The same kind of anti-regulatory zeal pervaded the whole Bush regime, whether in failing to protect consumers against floods or dangerous drugs or contaminated food or polluted air and water or losing precious natural resources or constitutional rights. It was definitely not bipartisan; in fact it was often a flagrant process of reversing the regulatory actions taken under Clinton — e.g., Bush non-regulators telling utility companies to forget those smokestack scrubbers they had agreed to install.
So, sure, let’s be reasonable and reach across the aisle and focus on the future.
But let’s not fudge the facts about who’s to blame. Where there are crimes, let’s prosecute. And let’s never forget.
Nobody gets to write science articles for The Horse unless they’re really good at arithmetic and pharmaceutical geometry, such mastery being essential since we have no patience with peer review and too much integrity to shop our articles around to attract bribes from manufacturers who would like to suppress or falsify our findings. Not every crusading mathematician has his or her price.
Our current object of scrutiny: We keep seeing these TV commercials showing a race between a tortoise and a hare.
We’re able to calculate with great precision who is going to win because the tortoise is plugging patiently along this green, serpentine racetrack and the hare is off lounging about, munching on a carrot, and generally acting silly. Neither one is smoking, but the product they’re advertising is Chantix (varenicline tartrate), which is too hard to pronounce, so let’s just call it Veronica. She helps you to stop smoking by blocking some of your nicotine receptors.
Actually, the hare may be onto something because carrots are good for you and have no known side effect except that if you were to eat your weight in carrots you would probably turn orange.
Veronica is another matter.
She’s an alternative to nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) like the patch, and in clinical trials proved more effective in getting people to quit. But two weeks ago the Institute for Safe Medication Practices released a summary of prescription drug-related injuries reported to the FDA:
Veronica had more incidents than any other drug.
It wasn’t the first indication of problems. Last February, the FDA called a news conference to announce a public health advisory, warning that some Veronica users had experienced mood changes, suicidal thoughts, and actual suicide.
The Los Angeles Times reported that over two dozen traffic accidents had been linked to Veronica, and even Pfizer issued a warning about the risks of driving under her influence. In May, the Federal Aviation Administration banned the use of the drug by pilots and air traffic controllers due to possible neuropsychiatric effects which could threaten public safety.
But the TV commercials keep running, the tortoise looks perfectly healthy, and we’re constantly reminded that clinical trials proved Veronica is effective in getting people to quit.
That’s where the arithmetic comes in. Clinical trials for an anti-smoking drug will count each person who quits as a success. Those who keep on smoking count as failures. Simple percentages. But what about the accident victims and suicides?
When they stop breathing, they stop smoking; so were those counted as successes?
If we’re going to ignore side effects – as Pfizer seems willing to do as they keep advertising the tortoise race – then let’s do the same for all the other available cures.
Apart from one really nasty side-effect, suicide is the most effective method of smoking cessation ever devised.
I just tagged another blog for my “News” menu — my first from Egypt. The blogger is Elijah Zarwan in Cairo (http://elijahzarwan.net/blog/) who lists himself as an editor, journalist, and human rights researcher. He could add humorist – this is the most elegant wit I’ve seen in the Wednesday reactions to Obama’s election.
______
A new day dawned in Cairo today. As it does every day.
And it started as it always does: with birds, schoolchildren, and car horns. No national holiday here.
I’m looking forward to going out in the streets to hear the reaction. The best reaction I’ve heard so far:
“Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”
Bah humbug. I confess I’m moved.
Continuing our scripture feature, we seek out passages to inspire hope and fearlessness during troubled times. To this purpose we had hoped to acquire the Lindisfarne Bible, but after the stock market collapse, the only bible we could afford was a disreputable, overthumbed edition from AbeBooks which may in fact be a Boy Scout manual from the 1930s. Still, in the words of Bob Cratchet, it’s the spirit that counts.
*
“Sneak and ye shall find.”
- Paul’s Epistle to the Alaskans
*
“The ox knoweth his owner,
and the ass his master’s crib.”
- song of Salomon Bros.
*
“In that day seven women shall
take hold of one man.”
- Lascivious LXIX
*
“The last shall be first
and the first shall be last,
so the guy in the middle
just keeps getting passed.
Alleleujah”
- Proverbs
*
“Though your sins be as scarlet,
they will soon be white as snow.”
- Public Relations I, 3
*
“It is better to go the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting. Unless, you know, like if you’re hungry.”
Ecclesiastes VII, 2
*
Exegesis:
Noah was six hundred years old when the sluices of heaven opened. At that age, it is really, really hard to capture birds of the heavens, a male and female of each, wild beasts and reptiles, and to gather up resinous wood and build a huge boat. Of course Noah had some younger men to help. His sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth were in their mid-570’s.
*
“He (Yahweh) rescues you from the snares of fowlers hoping to destroy you; he covers you with his feathers. Pfffft!”
- Psalm 9
