Former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge just wrote a book in which he tells us what we already knew, according to Think Progress:
[He]was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.My initial reaction: If true, those responsible should be criminally prosecuted. My second reaction: They won't be.
The Onion is now weighing in on health care reform. The title to the Onion's article says it all: "Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care." It's well worth a read, if you like humor with an especially sharp edge on especially serious topics.
Quick! Name a small and numerous component in the brain that allows us to think. If you said "neuron," you would be only partially correct. According to Carl Zimmer's blog at Discover, "The Loom," evidence is accumulating that thinking is also accomplished by astrocytes
—named for their starlike rays, which reach out in all directions—are the most abundant of all glial cells and therefore the most abundant of all the cells in the brain. They are also the most mysterious. A single astrocyte can wrap its rays around more than a million synapses. Astrocytes also fuse to each other, building channels through which molecules can shuttle from cell to cell.To put glia into a broader perspective, consider Zimmer's introduction to his post on glia:
I’ve asked around for a good estimate of how many neurons are in the human brain. Ten billion–100 billion–something like that, is the typical answer I get. But there are actually a trillion other cells in the brain. They’re known as glia, which is Latin for glue–which gives you an idea of how little scientists have thought of them.
It has now been shown that astrocytes can sense incoming signals, respond with calcium waves, and produce outputsIn other words, they have at least some of the requirements for processing information the way neurons do. Alfonso Araque, a neuroscientist at the Cajal Institute in Spain . . . find that two different stimulus signals can produce two different patterns of calcium waves (that is, two different responses) in an astrocyte. When they gave astrocytes both signals at once, the waves they produced in the cells was not just the sum of the two patterns. Instead, the astrocytes produced an entirely new pattern in response. That’s what neurons—and computers, for that matter—do. If astrocytes really do process information, that would be a major addition to the brain’s computing power . . . neuroscientist Andrew Koob suggests that conversations among astrocytes may be responsible for “our creative and imaginative existence as human beings.”
Stop Discriminating against Sick People! Jonathon Alter was a guest on "the Ed Show" tonight on MSNBC. In a noisy debate with Ed, he said that the goal of healthcare reform should be "to end discrimination against sick people". He said that the path to reform was largely irrelevant. That whether or not there was a public option was largely irrelevant. That healthcare reform is a civil rights issue, and that reform had nothing to do with the mechanics of that reform. To be clear, Mr Alter stated that he was personally very much for a public option. But he was also very clear that regardless of the public option, this reform needed to pass. I agree with Jonathon. Discrimination against sick people must stop. Discrimination against people with 'pre-conditions' must stop. Discrimination against people, must stop. It's time to act. Call your congressman. Enact healthcare reform.
I like Barney Frank. He says what he feels, usually in a way that makes his argument better. But it's almost a no-brainer to do a comeback on the idiocy with which he was faced in Dartmouth, Massachussetts this past week. I mean, what do you say to someone who thinks it's a valid statement to compare Obama to Hitler? A woman carrying a poster with Obama's image modified with a Hitlerian mustache stepped up to the microphone to ask why Frank supports a Nazi policy. There are so many things wrong with this it boggles the mind where to begin. Frank's response was probably the most effective. "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" he asked. Then: "Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table." He then commented that her freedom to carry that poster and make such lamebrained statements was a tribute to the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech. I salute his restraint. To compare any president of the United States to Hitler is a stretch, even with the likes of Obama's predecessor. (I might consider it for Cheney, but even he does not match the level of malignancy achieved by Adolph, nor does our system allow for such people to act with unrestrained impunity, hard as that might be for some to accept.) But to compare Barack Obama to the man man of the 20th Century is such a profoundly ignorant mischaracterization that it is tempting to write off this whole experiment in potential civilization as a failure. Where does this shit come from? The Republican Party, what is left of it, is grasping at straws, sinking in the quicksand of its own inanity. We must take care to not be pulled into the quagmire in some misguided attempt to rescue it through well-intentioned but doomed bipartisan sentiments. The Republican Party has devolved into a nasty cadre of ideologues, a shrinking room of hydrophobic screechers who claw and scratch at anyone who tries to do this country a service by bringing it back to some semblance of decency. They have fed on their own conspiracy-fevered viscera for so long that they cannot even hear the words much less the sentences of opposing viewpoints. We should perhaps let them sink and drown. It would be a kindness. The fear-mongering is reminiscent of everything we've seen since 2000. Rachel Maddow, who is one of the most able of contemporary analysts on television, shows the process and the connections here. Shouting, screaming, inane blather---noise filling the spaces in which rational discourse might take place if only the decibel level could be reduced. Platitudes, sloganeering, slander, and lies are flooding these so-called town hall meetings and shoving aside reason and discovery and thought. These are not people who are interested in understanding anything, they are people bent on stopping something they've been told---been told---they should not allow.