Read This: Bathing, but Not Alone – NYTimes.com

Oddly, I actually enjoyed hearing the results of this study. I think it’s good for people to learn about the reality of humanity’s relationship, and constant exposure, to bacteria. It’s not “bad” just because it’s bacteria, folks.

In fact, there is some concern that the deluge of antibacterial products sold today may have more negative side-effects than positive. For one, the products may lead to the evolution of bacteria resistant to antibacterial formulations. The use of such products may also increase the frequency of allergies in children because the kids are not exposed adequately to naturally occurring bacteria.

Excerpt:

There are some things it is better just not to think about. Like the 10,000 bacteria you inhale with each breath in the average office building. Or the 10 million bacteria in each glass of tap water. Microbiologists have now added something else to the list of things too gross to contemplate: the deluge of bacteria that hit your face and flow deep into your lungs in the morning shower.

via Bathing, but Not Alone – NYTimes.com.

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Read This: Why Is Universal Health Care ‘Un-American’? | CommonDreams.org

Rev. Jim Rigby, pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX, asks a valuable question in a recent article.

Excerpt:

I can’t believe I am standing today in a Christian church defending the proposition that we should lessen the suffering of those who cannot afford health care in an economic system that often treats the poor as prey for the rich. I cannot believe there are Christians around this nation who are shouting that message down and waving guns in the air because they don’t want to hear it. But I learned along time ago that churches are strange places; charity is fine, but speaking of justice is heresy in many churches. The late Brazilian bishop Dom Hélder Câmara said it well: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” Too often today in the United States, if you talk about helping the poor, they call you Christian, but if you actually try to do something to help the poor, they call you a socialist.

via Why Is Universal Health Care ‘Un-American’? | CommonDreams.org.

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Read This: Steven Chu, A Political Scientist — TIME

This article on Steven Chu, the new Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE) — note: I am a consultant for the DOE — provides an interesting perspective on China’s attitudes about climate change. Is it possible that, despite its rapid expansion of “dirty” coal power and its polluted cities, China is more serious about climate change than the US? Particularly, are China’s leaders more willing and able to respond to the threat than the US’s divided political system, where many of our politicians still deny that climate change even exists?

Excerpt:

The clear message Chu took home from China was that its leaders are dead serious about climate change and clean energy. They won’t accept an emissions cap before we do — understandably, since our per capita emissions are still four times higher — but they’re preparing for a carbon-constrained economy. They already have cars that are more fuel-efficient than ours, and they’re developing more-advanced transmission lines. They’re still building a new coal-fired plant almost every week, but two years ago, they were building two of them every week. They’re making a huge push into wind and solar and should be the world’s largest producer of renewables by 2010. “Every Chinese leader I met was absolutely determined to do something about their carbon emissions,” Chu said. “Some U.S. policymakers still don’t think this is a problem.” (Read “One Voice in a Billion: Changing the Climate in China.”)

In fact, GOP leaders have said that global warming is a hoax, that fears about carbon are “almost comical,” that the earth is actually cooling. When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years — and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: “See? It’s gone down! The earth must be cooling!” But then he got serious, almost plaintive: “You know, it’s totally irresponsible. You’re not supposed to make up the facts.”

Welcome to Washington, where a Nobel Prize winner’s opinion is just another opinion, where facts are malleable and sometimes irrelevant. It’s tough to be Mr. Outside in a town where policy happens on the inside. Congress is blocking Chu’s plan to create eight “Bell lablets” to investigate his game changers, along with his efforts to scuttle hydrogen-car research he considers futile. He’s trying to make DOE’s bureaucracy more nimble, but it still pushed less than 1% of its stimulus funds out the door in five months. And while Chu ends speeches with Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about “the fierce urgency of now” — one of Obama’s favorites — the clean-energy bill is on hold until health care is done. There’s still a broad perception in Washington that dealing with climate change will require sacrifices that Americans won’t tolerate.

The Chinese don’t seem to worry about that. At one point, Chu acknowledged that democracy makes change a lot tougher, although he hastened to add that he’s a big fan of democracy. “We just have to do a better job communicating the facts so the electorate can educate themselves,” he said. Soon he sounded like he was talking to himself again: “Let’s be positive. The facts really do matter to the American people.”

via Steven Chu, A Political Scientist — Printout — TIME.

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Short Pants and Long Stretch for “News”

Sometimes I don’t think we have a new reporting industry in the US so much as we have a news manufacturing industry.

This should be good news for those bemoaning the decline of the industrial manufacturing segment of the American economy. We can replace the forging of automobiles with the forging of controversy by the media.

If the media can whip up a storm this quickly 0ver a pair of shorts, then one finds some insight into how much of this health care debate, and the oft-covered clashing between progressives and conservatives, might be just a illusory flame fanned by news outlets.

After all, how much of health reform coverage is about issues and how much is about “death panel” sound bites? Yes, an ill-minded politician must first utter those drivel words, but after they leave his or her mouth, they are born into a life of their own via the resuscitative breath of the news. I’d rather the phrase were never spoken at all, but avoiding the over-exposure of such distracting and worthless issues would be a worthy consolation.

Next story: Justice Sotomayor photographed on vacation not wearing her judge’s robe!

(See poignant story below from Newsweek about the “news” of Michelle’s shorts.)

Who, Exactly, Is Outraged At Michelle Obama’s Shorts?

Kate Dailey

(Dana Felthauser/AP)

Michelle Obama wore shorts to visit the Grand Canyon. Have you heard? Everyone is up in arms—if by “everyone” you mean no one, or rather a large, shadow-y group of no ones.

According to the Today show, “some” are calling her fashion choice inappropriate—but the article quotes only those who support the look or, in the case of Washington Post fashion writer Robin Gihven, those who are “ambivalent” about bare legs for an August hiking trip in Arizona.

The Examiner declares Obama beautiful, then bemoans the fact that “some members of the media and the public” are upset. Who are those members of the media and the public? We don’t know—the article then goes on to endorse Obama and rebuke the nameless attackers. Even in the comments, readers overwhelmingly approved of Obama’s choices, save for the few spare trolls that will always criticize a photographed celeb (the shorts are unflattering, etc). My experience from reading the NEWSWEEK comments shows that if there’s something negative to be said about the administration, an anonymous reader will usually say it, often in several consecutive posts. If the comments are mostly positive, then there probably isn’t much of a controversy.

Continue reading at:

The Human Condition : Who, Exactly, Is Outraged At Michelle Obama’s Shorts?.

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I hate Swiss cheese, but I’ll eat it over nothing

I hate Swiss cheese (meaning, the stuff called “Swiss cheese” in America, not necessarily all cheese from Switzerland), but I would take the Swiss health care model over no reforms at all (I guess we call that American cheese, which is also terrible).

From the New York Times:

The Swiss Menace

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: August 16, 2009

It was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor’s Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance,” because the National Health Service would consider his life “essentially worthless.”

Professor Hawking, who was born in Britain, has lived there all his life, and has been well cared for by the National Health Service, was not amused.

Besides being vile and stupid, however, the editorial was beside the point. Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain — or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland — which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn’t a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.

… continue reading here: Op-Ed Columnist – The Swiss Menace – NYTimes.com.

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Healthcare Rationing: What Price Is A Life? — Social Edge

This is a short blog post from SocialEdge.org, but a must-read.

It is important to also look at the concept of healthcare “rationing” from a global perspective.

Healthcare Rationing: What Price Is A Life?

Was Dick Cheney’s quadruple bypass surgery worth the money?

In the United States healthcare reform is policy wonk talk for changing up the way Americans ration health. Conservatives criticize change in the healthcare status quo as “rationing”. Liberals blithely promise reform will not include “rationing”. Both are fibbing.

Rationing healthcare is what health systems do. No scheme, no government, no insurer, no individual (save perhaps the über-rich) has unlimited money to buy all the healthcare everyone wants.

In America, we ration healthcare by place of employment. If you have a steady job with a large employer, you probably have decent health insurance. If you are self-employed, maybe not.

Vice President Dick Cheney suffered four heart attacks beginning at age 37. Thanks to American socialized medicine for elected officials, Cheney has been cared for at the very best taxpayer-subsidized hospitals. His is a life worth saving.

If Cheney were a poor, young, Latina private housekeeper, most likely he would not have had health insurance when he needed it. And, it is damn certain he would not have gotten any preventive checkups in, no doubt, a “secure, undisclosed location”.

If Mr. Cheney were born in the developing world, he might well have died in infancy. Dr. Donald R. Hopkins, Vice President, The Carter Center, writes, “Children born in most advanced industrialized countries…experience infant mortality rates of 10 per 1,000 live births…and can expect to live an average of more than 70 years. Children born in developing countries…face infant mortality rates of 150 or higher (with) a life expectancy of 50 years or less.”

The cure for measles, a highly contagious disease, has been in use for over 30 years. As a result, measles has been wiped out in the developing world. In poorer countries, measles still infects 30 million people annually, mostly kids.

Would you deny the Vice President, a former heavy smoker, his quadruple bypass surgery (estimated cost: $45,000.00) to pay for inoculating 180,000 children against measles (estimated cost: 25 cents per child)? That is reality of global healthcare rationing.

900,000 poor children are annually sentenced to death because measles inoculations are unavailable (rationed?). Would you spend a quarter to save a child’s life?

via Healthcare Rationing: What Price Is A Life? — Social Edge.

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