Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Change yr socks twice a day - it's the apocalypse!
"Uh These are just ideas put into a fictional (and very vague) scenario. Hopefully you are smart enough to figure out if they are appropriate and best for your situation."!!!
Found on the Hutaree militia site, "The End of the World as We Know It" Man. When the apocalypse comes, TEOTWAWKI Man recommends using insoles -- "Gels or what-have-you" -- and generally taking care of your feet.
"It's recommended to change your socks, twice a day actually, just to let 'em air out, if nothing else," he says, to the occasional accompaniment of rifle fire and combat plane. "Also, foot powder is recommended."
Lots more on these folks on the show tonight. For now, file this under things that can't be 100 percent, absolutely proved: TEOTWAWKI Man looks an awful lot like Joshua Clough, the guy who's second from the left on the bottom row in this collection of Hutaree mug shots. Clough, now indicted along with eight other Hutaree members for seditious conspiracy, apparently couldn't cut it with Michigan's mainline militia movement.
Amy Cooter, who's been studying the state's militias for a doctorate at the University of Michigan, says TEOTWAWKI Man looks like Clough to her. She reports that the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia -- host of the annual Pumpkin Purge -- sent Clough packing at least a couple of years back.
"He was asked to leave because he was not training safely -- just not following basic safety precautions," Cooter says. She describes the relationship between the Hutaree and the rest of the Michigan's militias as distant. The Hutaree are expressly apocalyptic Christian. The rest of the movement, she says, "is concerned with the Constitution."
The TEOTWAWKI Man videos were posted to YouTube under the account of JC2 Productions (Commercials! Weddings! Movies! Special effects!) We wrote to them and got no answer -- maybe because TEOTWAWKI Man is in jail. Maybe.
Bat out of Hell? How a flying fox virus might help cure Ebola, HIV and other deadly plagues...
It seems germ warfare is about to introduce a new kind of WMD...
Lee is an expert on the viral envelope, the dynamic outside surface of a virus that latches onto a cell, then changes its shape to let the virus enter and infect the cell. This work began as part of a biodefense grant from the National Institutes of Health, screening a library of 30,000 compounds for activity against the envelope of Nipah virus, an emerging infection first identified in 1999 in Malaysia.
Nipah is so deadly that work with the virus itself can only be done in biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labs where researchers wear tightly sealed hazmat suits with internal oxygen supplies. The labs themselves are strongly secured. There are only four in the U.S.
Lee got around that by creating a hybrid virus. He striped off the envelope covering the relatively benign vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) and added the Nipah envelope to that core. This allowed him to screen the compounds in his lab at the university using much lower BLS-2 safety standards, to see if they inhibited viral entry into the cell.
"One compound (LJ001) looked really good, it had an IC50 of one micromolar [meaning that it inhibited the pathogen at a low concentration], which for an initial read is okay. Most importantly, it wasn't toxic" to cell cultures, Lee explained.
Mike Wolf, a grad student in the lab, wanted to make sure the compound was specific to Nipah, so he screened it against VSV. When the inhibition curves came back identical, he originally was disappointed because the study's funding was based on exploring potential therapeutics for Nipah.
Lee, however, encouraged him to be more persistent, and curious. After a series of studies confirmed the activity and lack of toxicity, Lee sent double-blinded samples of the compound and control to a colleague at the BSL-4 lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who tested it against Nipah, Ebola and other viruses. They were shocked when LJ001 inhibited viral entry to all of them.
Nipah is so deadly that work with the virus itself can only be done in biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labs where researchers wear tightly sealed hazmat suits with internal oxygen supplies. The labs themselves are strongly secured. There are only four in the U.S.
Lee got around that by creating a hybrid virus. He striped off the envelope covering the relatively benign vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) and added the Nipah envelope to that core. This allowed him to screen the compounds in his lab at the university using much lower BLS-2 safety standards, to see if they inhibited viral entry into the cell.
"One compound (LJ001) looked really good, it had an IC50 of one micromolar [meaning that it inhibited the pathogen at a low concentration], which for an initial read is okay. Most importantly, it wasn't toxic" to cell cultures, Lee explained.
Mike Wolf, a grad student in the lab, wanted to make sure the compound was specific to Nipah, so he screened it against VSV. When the inhibition curves came back identical, he originally was disappointed because the study's funding was based on exploring potential therapeutics for Nipah.
Lee, however, encouraged him to be more persistent, and curious. After a series of studies confirmed the activity and lack of toxicity, Lee sent double-blinded samples of the compound and control to a colleague at the BSL-4 lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who tested it against Nipah, Ebola and other viruses. They were shocked when LJ001 inhibited viral entry to all of them.
Bob Roehr @'ScientificAmerican'
Tea Party activism is not about political dissent - It's about vile, storm trooper sound bites
Why has somebody done it? Because in the current climate, people have been convinced they can. Or, more likely, that they should.
My son is in the seat next to me in the car. He says, "This isn't the only one. There are others in different parts of town."
At least here it is only vandalism about this President and the country's new health care bill, not phone threats left for some members of Congress. It is not an honorable old hero of the civil rights movement like Rep. John Lewis hearing the kind of racial insults he heard nearly 50 years ago in America. Or other congressmen being spat upon, all in the name of democracy at work.
At least here it is not Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan, being called a "baby killer," or a brick through a lawmaker's window. It is not Sarah Palin on her Twitter page - this woman who officially puts the twit in Twitter - posting the following message:
"Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD."
As always, you wonder where this patriotism and righteousness and Tea Party activism was during Bush-Cheney. You wonder if all the people who want to take to the streets - and to the television cameras now - decided they weren't needed for eight years because they thought the country was going so good. Or maybe they have just convinced themselves that the Obama who must now be stopped didn't just inherit this America, he created it.
This is no longer about political dissent. It is about storm trooper sound bites, and hate. This isn't the kind of honest debate on which our system of government has been built. It is vile, back-alley fighting, getting worse by the day, with no end in sight. People say that opposition to all Presidents, even the most unpopular white ones, sounds like this. No, it doesn't.
"It's so good to be here for the showdown in Searchlight [Nev.]," Palin says on Saturday. "So proud to be with all you who are proud to be Americans."
Palin is in Nevada because Sen. Harry Reid is a Democratic candidate she and other lovers of America are "targeting" this November. Of course, the implication, as always, is that anybody on the other side of the debate - about health care or anything else - isn't nearly as good an American as she is.
Palin is such a fighter and great American that she quit on her stool as governor of Alaska because there was more money to be made in the other 49 states, shouting about death panels and health care and "European socialism" and writing unreadable books. In so many ways, she is a perfect media darling for our times. She doesn't scrawl graffiti, she thinks in it.
If you even think that this President ought to be given a chance, that he might have some good in him, that he doesn't hate America the way the radio idiots say he does, then you must be someone just like him and she will help shout you down. You are another lousy, lefty Socialist who doesn't understand the new health care bill is unconstitutional. Why? Because the screamers say so, that's why. They learned it online.
"The country does not like this [health care] bill," Republican strategist Mike Murphy says on television Sunday.
The country. Another guy speaking for the whole country, coast to coast, Washington Heights to Starbuck, Wash. Is America divided over health care right now? Sure it is, the way it was divided over Social Security under FDR and Medicare under LBJ and just about every important social program in the country's history.
Will a bill be presented to my children and their children on this bill someday? It likely will be. And economists say that Iraq will eventually be a $3 trillion war for this country. But all those who have taken to the streets because of the bill that Obama signed the other day must think that Iraq has paid for itself, no matter how much money it continues to cost this country, how many dead or broken bodies.
But Obama is the one who must be stopped, on health care and everything else. Stop Obama. Sometimes you wonder what that really means. Sometimes you probably find yourself wondering just how much you have to hate this President before you love America enough.
Mike Lupica @'NY Daily News'
Grey's Unethical Anatomy
The moral to this story is: never trust your TV! But I'm sure you knew that.
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A medical student and faculty directors from the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics analyzed depictions of bioethical issues and professionalism over a full season of two popular medical dramas -- "Grey's Anatomy" and "House, M.D." -- and found that the shows were "rife" with ethical dilemmas and actions that often ran afoul of professional codes of conduct.
The authors of the review, available in the April issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics, say they were well aware that their findings would end up stating the obvious. But they nonetheless wanted to provide data that would shed light on the relationship of these depictions on the perceptions of viewers, both health professionals and the general public.
...
Informed consent was the most frequently observed bioethical issue. Of 49 total incidents, 43 percent involved "exemplary" consent discussions, while the remaining instances were "inadequate." In general, exemplary depictions portrayed "compassionate, knowledgeable physicians participating in a balanced discussion with a patient about possible treatment options."
Conversely, inadequate depictions were "marked by hurried and one-sided discussions, refusal by physicians to answer questions" and "even an entire lack of informed consent for risky procedures," the authors state.
They also tallied 22 incidents of "ethically questionable departures from standard practice," most of them depicting doctors endangering patients unnecessarily in their pursuit of a favorable outcome. "In almost all of these incidents (18 out of 22), the implicated physician is not penalized," the authors note.
davidhepworth Miss Ultimo sack Peaches Geldof because recent allegations mean she's no longer a "positive role model". Did I miss her saintly phase?
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