Desert trippin' 1969 (photos by Michael Cooper)

More of Gram Parsons, Keith Richards & Anita Pallenberg at Joshua Tree.

@'Selvedge Yard

Mulling Rove and Romney in Iowa

President Obama made a surprise visit to an independent bookstore in downtown Iowa City after delivering a speech on health care reform.
"Well, this used to be my favorite place," Obama said as he walked around the store, Prairie Lights.
Obama looked around in pursuit of a couple of books for his daughters, Sasha and Malia.
Along his way he picked up "No Apology" by Mitt Romney and "Courage and Consequence" by Karl Rove.
"What do you think guys?" he asked reporters, holding up a hardback copy in each hand before setting them back down.
Obama disappeared downstairs for a few minutes and emerged with two books: “Journey to the River Sea” by Eva Ibbotson and “The Secret of Zoom” by Lynne Jonell.
He pulled out five $20 bills to pay the cashier and then offered to pick up the book his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, had grabbed: a large Star Wars pop-up book for his six-year-old son, Ethan.
"It's a little expensive, sir,” Gibbs said to his boss as he handed it over. Obama nonetheless forked over the $37.44 for the book.
"I can handle it,” he said. “It’s for keeping his dad away for too many hours a day.”
"I need more books than that, sir,” Gibbs remarked.
Obama thanked the employees.
"You have a wonderful bookstore,” he said, adding that hopefully he’s helping “to make sure everybody has health insurance.”
He then shook a few hands of customers in the store. Someone remarked about the significance of his dropping by the store.
Obama said he hoped so. "It's not every day a president stops by,” he said.
On his way out the door, Obama said the books he purchased for his daughters were “based on recommendations.”
“Of course the question is how they take to them, but I think they’re going to like them,” he said.

@'Politico' 

The Predator Priest Who Got Away

The Document Trail

The White Buffalo

Saw this LA singer/songwriter play live in the Mojave desert last weekend. Great show. Whiskey soaked...

Radiohead had their Karma police, the UK gets its Christian police.

A Christian policing group which believes that the power of prayer can catch criminals and keep officers safe from harm has been awarded a £10,000 grant from the Home Office to widen its involvement with local church groups.

The Christian Police Association (CPA) wants members of the public to "adopt a cop" by praying for the safety of local officers as they ply their beats. Subjects that the association says congregations should be encouraged to pray for include "helping officers make on-the-spot decisions" and encouraging them to "resist corruption".

The nationwide organisation, which boasts 2,000 members, claims that there is "circumstantial evidence" to suggest that regular prayer sessions can help reduce crime rates and encourage criminals to make a new start to their lives.

...

Don Axcell, a retired Metropolitan Police sergeant who heads the CPA, told Police Review: "We want people to pray for the police, for example in solving crimes or protecting officers. We want to see the Christian community fully interacting with the service. I think it will break down barriers."

 Jerome Taylor @'The Independant'

For my own part, I'd rather see that £10,000 backed by empirical evidence. But that's just me.

The Improbable Research blog had this to add:

The 1994 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to John Hagelin of Maharishi University and The Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, promulgator of peaceful thoughts, for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C.

Hagelin reported his results in the paper “Interim Report: Results of the National Demonstration Project to Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental Effectiveness In Washington, D.C., June 7 to July 30, 1993,”
Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, Fairfield, Iowa”.

Other observers noted that the crime rate in DC actually achieved historically high levels during that period.
 @Meditation and/or prayer vs. crime

Envious Australia finally gets its own T-Rex!

"Today sees the publication of a paper by Roger Benson and colleagues on the first Australian tyrant dinosaur (Benson et al. 2010). Thanks to this find, we now know that tyrants did, indeed, get deep into the south. The specimen is, unfortunately, not a complete skeleton or even a partial one: it's a single, 30-cm-long pubic bone, currently known only by its catalogue number, NMV P186046 [shown here, image provided by Roger Benson]. It's from the famous Dinosaur Cove site in Victoria, and its detailed anatomy demonstrates it tyrannosauroid identity. Additional clues show whereabouts the specimen lies within the tyrannosauroid radiation."

 

Australia might finally be getting its own t-rex! Not to brag, but in Canada, we had ours way before: Albertosaurus, discovered in 1884. Better late than never, I guess...

Darren Naish @'ScienceBlogs'

It's going viral...

(sanity)
(Tip o'the hat to Simon Owens!) 

...and I guess the subtlety of this comment is lost on them!

"Juat a little concerned here, now that we've eliminated ACORN, clearly THE #1 source of America's woes over the last 40 years, what can we do next? I read conservative blogs all day and a few months ago I was clearly given the indication that America was being disassembled brick by brick by ACORN's very existence... So now that America's saved, isn't the fight over? Or do we just need to keep inventing new Ultimate Symbols of Evil to focus the base on and achieve the most important thing for us all, a Republican run everything? Clearly the world didn't figure out the last 8 years we ran things how GREAT a Rep world would be, from the great remodeling work we did for free in Iraq, to the strength of our friendship with such paragons of ethical, humane, and above all AMERICAN ideals as Halliburton, Blackwater, Exxon-Mobil, and the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia?"

For the devotional hooligan

Roni Size and acclaimed composer William Goodchild combined their creative forces with the Emerald Ensemble Chamber Orchestra, a Gospel Choir, and Roni's own band, Reprazent, for a unique, one-off performance at Bristol's Colston Hall.

The psychology of homelessness

When you see a blanket-covered body shifting uncomfortably ina doorway, hole-ridden boots protruding at one end, matted hair at the other, what do you think? That we don’t have enough houses? That the person in question should get a job? Do you feel compassion or disgust?

The reality is that the filthy, dirt-poor person you’re looking at may well have been abused or neglected as a child. They’ve no doubt been rejected time and again. They’re almost certainly in bad health, physical and mental, and could be addicted to alcohol, drugs or both. If they’re female, it’s likely they’ve suffered domestic violence.

Until recently, research on homelessness was focused on economic issues and social policy. But gradually psychology and society are waking up to the psychological processes that lead many people to become homeless in the first place. Researchers are trying to pin down how people end up with nothing and how to get them back on their feet. Therapists are listening to homeless people’s stories, equipping them with the skills to cope and move on. 

PDF

Facebook And Sexually Transmitted Diseases: What You Need To Know

This morning, the Twitterverse was abuzz with mentions of Facebook and syphilis. The Sun published “Sex diseases soaring due to Facebook romps” (according to The Guardian, the original headline was “Facebook spreads syphilis”). So what’s this all about?

Obviously, a website cannot “spread” a sexually transmissible infection (STI) such as syphilis, which is transmitted through vaginal sex, oral sex and anal sex.

Well, apparently a public health official from the NHS commented that young people in the areas most affected by syphilis were 25 per cent more likely to log on to Facebook than young people in other areas of the country. It is also claimed that several of the approximately 30 people in one area who contracted syphilis had met partners through social networking sites, such as Facebook. Unfortunately, it is this notion, thanks to sensationalist journalist practices, that Facebook can spread syphilis that went way more viral than syphilis itself.

Clearly, there could be several other things going on here: maybe these individuals use the computer more often overall, or use a variety of sites to meet people, or else they use all sorts of resources at their disposal to meet people for sex (not just Facebook but also bars, parties, etc). Were these things assessed in the study? It wasn’t mentioned.

Ever since the early days of the internet, various websites have become easy scapegoats for sex-negative claims, such as scary stories about how people meet sex partners through the internet and then bad things happen. However, rarely is the good of the internet mentioned in this regard.

Do websites, especially social networking websites and dating websites and casual sex sites, make it easier for people to find each other for romantic and/or sexual encounters? Of course they do. And this is often a positive thing for those involved and does not always result in STI transmission.

What people often overlook is that these same sites can also make it easier for public health professionals to track a burgeoning epidemic and stop it before it gets out of hand. Before the internet, if you were limited to meeting people at bars, you may have known very little about them if you chose to have a casual sexual encounter with them. Maybe you didn’t even know their first or last name or how to get in touch with them.

However, let’s say you do meet someone through Facebook and then you arrange to meet. A week or two after the encounter, you find that your genitals feel funny or that you have discharge, or maybe you just decide to go in and get tested as you had a new partner recently (good for you for getting tested!). Let’s say that you then find out you have an STI, such as syphilis. Guess what? You can now track down that person, should you choose to (and I hope you do), and let them know that they should get tested for syphilis too.

Facebook and other social networking sites have the potential to make STI partner notification programs that much easier – and that’s a good thing.

Many health departments have partner notification programs, especially for infections such as syphilis, Chlamydia, gonorrhoea and HIV that they are particularly worried about spreading. Often these programs mean that if you test positive for an infection and don’t want to contact your past or present partners yourself, you can give your healthcare provider the contact information of your past/present partner(s) and they will call those people for you. They will NOT give your name but they may say something along the lines of “You have been identified as a possible sexual contact of someone who recently tested positive for (fill in the blank with the STI you tested positive for).” They then often offer STI testing to that individual. Cool, huh?

To me, the bottom line has nothing to do with Facebook. It goes back to the basics.

Get tested for STIs if you are:

- about to have sex with a new partner

- have not been tested since your last new partner

- have had unprotected vaginal sex, anal sex or oral sex with someone whose STI history you do not know

- if you feel you have any other risk factors

- if you think your partner may have had sex with someone else since being with you

- if you just want to know. It doesn’t hurt to get tested for STIs on occasion, even if you are pretty certain that you and your partner are monogamous and not having sex with anyone else.

And let’s not blame Facebook for everything now, shall we?

Debby Herbenick @'Gizmodo'

Russia To Test New Unique Project 855 Yasen Nuclear Submarine

 Russia will begin tests of its new state-of-the-art multi-purpose nuclear submarine Yasen, Project 855, already in 2010. The unique submarine qualitatively differs from all of its predecessors. Moreover, Yasen will become the first submarine, which was entirely built in Russia during the post-Soviet period, Oleg Burtsev, a senior spokesman for the command of the Russian Navy said.

The new submarine is to be launched in the beginning of May. JSC Sevmash, the company that builds all Russian submarines, is currently busy with making preparations to the landmark moment.

The submarine was named Severodvinsk. Engineers of the company said that it would be quieter and much more powerful than the USA’s Sea Wolf.

Severodvinsk is a twin-hull nuclear submarine with decreased level of acoustic field. The submarine has ten compartments. The cruiser carries an extraordinarily strong complex of arms capable of solving combat tasks with practically any type of modern surface vessels and submarines. For the first time in the history of domestic ship-building, torpedo-launching systems are located behind the compartment of the central station. The new sonar complex Irtysh was installed in the fore end of the sub. Severodvinsk has eight vertical missile-launching systems: each of the systems houses three missiles.

Anti-vessel 3M55 Onix missiles will reportedly become the basic attack weapon of the new submarine. The missile was designed to strike targets at a distance of up to 300 kilometers under the condition of radio-electronic and combat resistance. The missiles are equipped with the system of artificial intelligence and can recognize all electronic images of surface vessels. They destroy the central target in a group, change their tactics and continue to destroy targets on the principle of their importance.

The new submarine will become the perfect weapon for military actions in the distant ocean zone. Official spokespeople for the Russian Navy said that the Severodvinsk would be passed into service in 2011.

Russia also plans to launch the serial production and put into service eight strategic submarines of Project 955, Borei class. The submarines will make the basis of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces after 2018. The Yury Dolgoruky submarine is currently being tested in the White Sea. JSC Sevmash is currently building three nuclear submarines. Each of them will carry up to 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The Russian Navy should have 50 nuclear submarines, Oleg Burtsev believes. Russia now has about 60 strategic, multi-purpose and diesel submarines. The navies of France, Britain and the USA have nine nuclear submarines on constant combat duty.

“We should have two or three nuclear cruisers at sea as deterrent weapon. Other countries must know that Russia is always ready to respond to any attack,” Burtsev said.

@'Pravda'

Supersize that last supper, dude!

"Da Vinci’s is the most well known Last Supper, but it’s joined by more than 50 other noteworthy interpretations produced in the last millennium. The guest list remains the same in the various paintings, and the people stay lithe. But the Wansinks measured the portion sizes in 52 Last Suppers, and found that the bread was 23 percent bigger in more modern paintings, while the entrees grew a whopping 70 percent. As measured against a constant: the apostles' heads. So the trend toward larger portions may have started centuries ago, culminating with the modern, super-sized supper, last or otherwise."

Karen Hopkin @'Scientific American'

Meth babies - fact or fiction?

 When it came to babies born to crack-addicted mothers, the media went overboard, creating a crisis in the form of an epidemic that never quite was. By contrast, when it came to babies born to alcoholic mothers, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome went unrecognized in the science and medical community until 1968.

Now comes a study on prenatal methamphetamine exposure in The Journal of Neuroscience, headed up by Elizabeth Sowell of the University of California, Los Angeles, with support from both the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA.) The report garnered considerable media attention. “We know that alcohol exposure is toxic to the developing fetus and can result in lifelong brain, cognitive and behavioral problems,” Sowell said in a press release. “In this study, we show that the effects of prenatal meth exposure, or the combination of meth and alcohol exposure, may actually be worse.”

It makes sense that meth might effect the health of unborn children.  There is a modest body of research to support the notion. The Sowell study points a finger at the caudate nucleus, a brain region involved with learning and memory.  The study showed that the caudate nucleus of the meth-using group was reduced in size. “Identifying vulnerable brain structures may help predict particular learning and behavioral problems in meth-exposed children,” the press release optimistically states. And the potential problem is real enough: More than 16 million Americans have used meth, according to government numbers. An estimated 19,000 of these users are pregnant women.
But is this particular study a definitive one? The icing on the cake? To begin with, the press release from The Journal of Neuroscience admits to a major problem right up front: “About half of women who say they used meth during pregnancy also used alcohol, so isolating the effects of meth on the developing brain is difficult.”  Even in cases of meth exposure only, there are a host of negative behavioral factors that often accompany meth addiction (bad nutrition, minimal health care, poor health) that can significantly effect fetal development.
The study team compared the MRI brain scans of 61 children: “21 with prenatal MA (methamphetamine) exposure, 18 with concomitant prenatal alcohol exposure (the MAA group), 13 with heavy prenatal alcohol but not MA exposure (ALC group), and 27 unexposed controls. While finding “striatal volume reductions,” as well as increases in the size of certain limbic structures in both groups with meth and/or alcohol exposure, the researchers conclude that striatal and limbic structures “may be more vulnerable to prenatal MA exposure than alcohol exposure.” However, that conclusion was apparently reached despite the fact that only 3 of the 61 children under study were born to mothers who did meth, and meth only, during pregnancy.
Furthermore, there is significant controversy over brain scan studies that measure gross anatomical changes in the size of specific brain regions, rather than brain region activity based on blood flow.
Is there other evidence for the danger of meth use during pregnancy? There is, but as is frequently the case, some of the best evidence comes from animal studies. A 2008 guinea pig study by Sanika Chirwa showed neural damage to the hippocampus, another region involved in memory, in newborn animals with prenatal meth exposure. Furthermore, the newborn animals showed an impaired ability to distinguish novel objects from familiar ones.
In 2006, a study at Brown Medical School, published in Pediatrics , found that newborns exposed to meth during pregnancy were born “small for gestational age,” meaning they were born full-term, but smaller than babies not exposed to meth in utero.  According to study author Barry Lester, “Children who are born underweight tend to have behavior problems, such as hyperactivity or short attention span, as well as learning difficulties.”
However, Lester added an important caveat in a Brown University press release : “I hope that the ‘crack baby’ hysteria does not get repeated. While these children may have some serious health and developmental challenges, there is no automatic need to label them as damaged and remove them from their biological mothers.”
Similar caution was urged by the authors of a 2009 report in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics: “Efforts to understand specific effects of prenatal methamphetamine exposure on cognitive processing are hampered by high rates of concomitant alcohol use during pregnancy.”
In 2005, an open letter from the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland warned about the dangers of hyperbole, calling upon the media and public officials to “stop perpetuating ‘meth baby’ myths.” The Center argued that “The terms ‘ice babies’ and ‘meth babies’ lack medical and scientific validity and should not be used,” and requested that “policies addressing prenatal exposure to methamphetamines and media coverage of this issue be based on science, not presumption or prejudice.”

Sowell, E., Leow, A., Bookheimer, S., Smith, L., O'Connor, M., Kan, E., Rosso, C., Houston, S., Dinov, I., & Thompson, P. (2010). Differentiating Prenatal Exposure to Methamphetamine and Alcohol versus Alcohol and Not Methamphetamine using Tensor-Based Brain Morphometry and Discriminant Analysis Journal of Neuroscience, 30 (11), 3876-3885 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4967-09.2010
Smith, L., LaGasse, L., Derauf, C., Grant, P., Shah, R., Arria, A., Huestis, M., Haning, W., Strauss, A., Grotta, S., Liu, J., & Lester, B. (2006). The Infant Development, Environment, and Lifestyle Study: Effects of Prenatal Methamphetamine Exposure, Polydrug Exposure, and Poverty on Intrauterine Growth PEDIATRICS, 118 (3), 1149-1156 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2005-2564
 
Dirk Hanson @'Addiction Inbox'

Just so you know...

Eating poppy seeds will not always result in a failed drug test. : The common myth about eating poppy seeds can lead to failing a drug test has a solid foundation in reality, as heroin, morphine, codeine, and other opiates are created from the plants. But Indiana University sheds some light on the reality of the situation, pointing out that only the seeds of opiate poppies cause false positives. For those who have eaten the offending poppyseeds, however, there are ways to determine whether or not the opiate traces come from narcotics or a harmless bagel.

G.O.P. Forces New House Vote on Package of Health Bill Changes

With the Senate working through an all-night session on a package of changes to the Democrats’ sweeping health care legislation, Republicans early on Thursday morning identified parliamentary problems with at least two provisions that will require the measure to be sent back to the House for yet another vote, once the Senate adopts it.

Senate Democrats had been hoping to defeat all of the amendments proposed by Republicans and to prevail on parliamentary challenges so that they could approve the measure and send it to President Obama for his signature. But the bill must comply with complex budget reconciliation rules, and Republicans identified some flaws.

Under the reconciliation rules, provisions in the bill must directly affect government spending or revenues.The successful parliamentary challenge did not appear to endanger the eventual adoption of the changes to the health care legislation. And Mr. Obama on Tuesday already signed the main health care bill into law.

A Senate Democratic aide said the one of the provisions in question involved changes to the Pell grant program, which is part of an education section in the reconciliation bill. The provision would prevent reductions in the amount of Pell grants for students from low-income families as a result of a decrease in money appropriated for the program by Congress.

Shortly after the discovery of the parliamentary issues, at about 2:45 a.m. Thursday, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, indicated that he would bring the late-night session to a close, and that the Senate would resume work on the bill at 9:45 a.m. on Thursday.

Democrats had already succeeded in defeating more than two dozen Republican amendments or other proposals aimed at derailing the legislation or making changes that would delay it by forcing an additional vote by the House.

The developments unfolded shortly before 2:30 a.m. as Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, put forward yet another amendment. Mr. Vitter’s proposal would exempt mobile mammography units from paying a federal fuel tax.

In urging adoption of his amendment, Mr. Vitter declared, “This reconciliation bill is already going back to the House.” At the same time, Senate leaders from both parties were conferring animatedly on the floor.

The House adopted the Senate-passed health care bill on Sunday by a vote of 219 to 212, and Mr. Obama signed it into law on Tuesday, meaning the main components of the Democrats’ overhaul were guaranteed to go forward. Also on Sunday night, the House approved a package of changes as part of a budget reconciliation bill, by a vote of 220 to 211. That bill was sent to the Senate for its consideration.

Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, said that one problem with the bill was the formula for determining the maximum Pell grant award under an expansion of the program.

The second issue was a technical matter that Mr. Conrad described as mostly insignificant.

Mr. Conrad said a third issue was under review by the Senate parliamentarian.

The risk for Democrats in a parliamentary challenge is that Republicans could knock out key provisions of the legislation, or win a decision that upends the mechanisms Democrats rely on to pay for the measure.

“We see no impact on the score and very insignificant impact on any policy,” Mr. Conrad said. “This is not going to be a problem.”

Mr. Conrad predicted that the Senate would complete work on the bill by 2 p.m. Thursday.

In addition to the changes to the health care legislation, the budget reconciliation measure includes a broad restructuring of federal student loan programs that will help pay for billions of dollars in education initiatives, including an increase in Pell grants for students from low-income families.

David M Herszenhorn & Robert Pear @'NY Times'