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{TRE aka DharmaPath (The Man in a Dictionary) posted this on FB. I told him I'm borrowing it. Don't worry, I'll give it back.}
How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon The perverse allure of a damaged woman. Johann Hari Slate Nov. 2, 2009
Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them.
Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in the darkest corners of American political life. But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging against: compassion.
Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote "a scathing denunciation of childhood," headed with a quote from Pascal: "I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise."
But the Rosenbaums' domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs—but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father's pharmacy was seized "in the name of the people." For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde. In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her father tried to set up another business, but after it too was seized, he declared himself to be "on strike."
The Rosenbaums knew their angry, outspoken daughter would not survive under the Bolsheviks for long, so they arranged to smuggle her out to their relatives in America. Just before her 21st birthday, she said goodbye to her country and her family for the last time. She was determined to live in the America she had seen in the silent movies—the America of skyscrapers and riches and freedom. She renamed herself Ayn Rand, a name she thought had the hardness and purity of a Hollywood starlet.
She headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories that expressed her philosophy—a body of thought she said was the polar opposite of communism. She announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen who are productive and "the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. He is "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned." It is evil to show kindness to these "lice": The "only virtue" is "selfishness."
She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."
It's not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living (1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: "I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them."
She poured these beliefs into a series of deeply odd novels. She takes the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them with political ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on. All have the same core message: Anything that pleases the Superman's ego is good; anything that blocks it is bad. In The Fountainhead, published in 1943, a heroic architect called Howard Roark designs a housing project for the poor—not out of compassion but because he wants to build something mighty. When his plans are slightly altered, he blows up the housing project, saying the purity of his vision has been contaminated by evil government bureaucrats. He orders the jury to acquit him, saying: "The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!"
For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand returned to a moment from her childhood. Just as her father once went on strike to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation—and said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil. The abandoned masses are described variously as "savages," "refuse," "inanimate objects," and "imitations of living beings," picking through rubbish. One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand makes it clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing in horror how they all supported the higher taxes that made the attack necessary.
Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.
As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: "There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy."
Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a killer of people." The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand's claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.
In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas. She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult's No. 2, and she named him as her "intellectual heir"—until he admitted he had fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman. As Burns explains, Rand's philosophy "taught that sex was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human achievement." So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: "You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value?"
She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in our lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up despising herself. In her 70s Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after insisting that her followers smoke because it symbolized "man's victory over fire" and the studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. By then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone in her apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her philosophy is right—if the only human relationships worth having are based on the exchange of dollars—this was a happy and victorious death. Did even she believe it in the end?
Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.
I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand: I feel sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it back into my face. What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people—large numbers of people—who see her writing not as psychopathy but as philosophy, and urge us to follow her. Why? What in American culture did she drill into? Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough, readable books can offer much of an answer to this, the only great question about her.
Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I'm the only one who matters! I'm not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.
This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre joke? In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn't make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.
She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors only," with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have preapproved. It's useful—if daunting—to know that there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable.
We all live every day with the victory of this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls. Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers and even invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when he joined the Ford administration. You can see how he carried this philosophy into the 1990s: Why should the Supermen of Wall Street be regulated to protected the lice of Main Street?
The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties.
By AP / CARLA K. JOHNSON Time Magazine Monday, Nov. 02, 2009
(CHICAG — Researchers studying antibiotics in pregnancy have found a surprising link between common drugs used to treat urinary infections and birth defects. Reassuringly, the most-used antibiotics in early pregnancy — penicillins — appear to be the safest.
Bacterial infections themselves can cause problems for the fetus if left unchecked, experts said, so pregnant women shouldn't avoid antibiotics entirely. Instead, women should discuss antibiotics choices with their doctors. (See how to prevent illness at any age.)
The new study is the first large analysis of antibiotic use in pregnancy. It found that mothers of babies with birth defects were more likely than mothers with healthy babies to report taking two types of antibiotics during pregnancy: sulfa drugs (brand names include Thiosulfil Forte and Bactrim) and urinary germicides called nitrofurantoins (brand names include Furadantin and Macrobid).
It was the first time an association had been seen between urinary tract treatments and birth defects, said lead author Krista Crider, a geneticist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which funded the research. "Additional studies are going to need to be done to confirm these findings."
Used for many decades, the antibiotics in question predate the Food and drug Administration and its requirements for rigorous safety testing. The FDA now grades all drugs for safety to the fetus based on available research, but rigorous studies are so lacking in many cases, that no antibiotics get the highest grade of "A."
Sulfa drugs are the oldest antibiotics and some animal studies have found harm during pregnancy. Nitrofurantoins previously have been viewed by doctors as safe to treat urinary tract infections during pregnancy.
The study, appearing in November's Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, may cause doctors to change the drugs they choose to treat pregnant women with infections. The findings were released Monday.
Dr. Susan Mehnert-Kay, a family practice doctor in Tulsa, Okla., who has written about diagnosing and managing urinary tract infections, said the research is "very interesting" and would cause her to reconsider antibiotic choices in early pregnancy.
The study is important because it looked at drugs that have been used for decades without large studies of their safety in pregnant women, said Dr. Michael Katz of the March of Dimes.
"Some physicians are not as attuned to this as they ought to be, so patients have the right to ask questions," Katz said.
The researchers analyzed data from more than 13,000 mothers whose infants had birth defects and nearly 5,000 women who lived in the same regions with healthy babies.
The women were interviewed by phone from six weeks to two years after their pregnancies. Those who remembered taking antibiotics during the month before conception through the first three months of pregnancy were identified as exposed to antibiotics.
The women's memories could have been faulty, a substantial weakness of the study, which the authors acknowledged. About one-third of the women who took antibiotics couldn't remember the specific type of drug they took.
It's also unclear whether the birth defects were caused by the drugs or by the underlying infections being treated, Crider said.
Birth defects linked to sulfa drugs included rare brain and heart problems, and shortened limbs. Those linked to nitrofurantoins (ny-troh-fyoor-AN'-toyns) included heart problems and cleft palate. The drugs seemed to double or triple the risk, depending on the defect.
"These defects are rare. Even with a threefold increase in risk, the risk for the individual is still quite low," Crider said.
Katz of the March of Dimes said anencephaly, a fatal brain problem linked to sulfas, affects about 1 in 10,000 births in the United States. Cleft palate occurs about 20 per 10,000 births.
Crider said the findings give doctors another opportunity to caution against overuse of antibiotics. Viral illnesses like colds and flus shouldn't be treated with antibiotics, she said.
Women in 10 states, including California, Texas and New York, were interviewed as part of the National Birth Defects Prevention Study.
The FDA recommends that pregnant women discuss medications with their doctors, said FDA spokeswoman Sandy Walsh. The agency has proposed changes to prescription drug labeling that would require more complete information for women of childbearing age, pregnant women and those who breastfeed, Walsh said.
You may be able to write off the swimming pool, but not the prostitutes
Forbes By Robert W. Wood 10.31.09
Long before "Dirty Jobs" premiered on reality TV, we all understood that some jobs are ickier than others and that we really shouldn't hold an unpleasant job against the person doing it. Hence, the cliché: "Don't shoot the messenger."
In the U.S. today, tax collection is seen by many as a dirty job. In fact, some Internal Revenue Service workers are so worried about harassment, violence or just shunning that they use pseudonyms when interacting with the public.
You don't want to hold the tax code against IRS employees whose job it is to interpret, administer and enforce it. Still, there are times when you have to wonder whether the legal technocrats toiling away at the IRS' fortress-like Washington headquarters have lost touch with the common man.
That's how I felt when I read the IRS' take on deducting baby formula as a medical expense. In Private Letter Ruling 200941003, released publicly this month, the IRS denied the request of a mother who had undergone a double-mastectomy that she be allowed to deduct as a medical expense the cost of her baby's infant formula.
The IRS presumably gets more public sympathy for its successful position in another recent case, this time before the Tax Court. The topic? prostitution expenses. In this case, a 78-year-old lawyer (a putative tax lawyer, I'm sad to say) claimed medical deductions for therapeutic "treatments" from members of the world's oldest profession, as well as for the purchase of pornography. In Halby v. Commissioner, TC Memo 2009-204 (2009), the Tax Court cut him off, although Halby is appealing.
The Tax Court had an easy time backing the IRS, since the lawyer had no doctor's note saying he needed this "cure." Besides, the self-prescribed treatment was illegal.
Few taxpayers have the chutzpah to try to write off prostitutes. Still, over the years, taxpayers have successfully written off everything from swimming pools to patio awnings to clarinet lessons (needed for a dental problem) as medical expenses.
If you're considering deducting medical expenses, here's what you need to know.
Medical expenses are deductible as a "miscellaneous itemized deduction" only to the extent they exceed 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income. So if your adjusted gross income is $100,000, the first $7,500 of medical expenses is on you. Still, with medical expenses rising, more Americans are meeting that hurdle — 10.5 million taxpayers deducted an estimated $76 billion in medical expenses in 2007, up from 8.6 million who deducted $56 billion in 2004.
It easier than you might think to exceed 7.5 percent, since you have fairly wide latitude as to what qualifies. The deduction is allowed for out of pocket spending on the medical care of a taxpayer, spouse or a dependent. Medical care includes diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of a disease or disability. Dental, vision and psychiatric conditions all qualify.
Mitigation, in particular, covers a lot of expensive territory, The IRS has said that false teeth, prescription eyeglasses or contact lenses, laser eye surgery, hearing aids, crutches, wheelchairs and guide dogs for the blind or deaf are all deductible medical expenses. You can also deduct premiums you pay for nursing home and health insurance. (If you're self-employed, you don't have to meet the 7.5 percent threshold to deduct health insurance.)
Not surprisingly, you can't deduct expenses covered by insurance or those paid from otherwise tax-advantage accounts, such as Flexible Spending Accounts or Health Savings Accounts.
If it's special, medically required food you're claiming, you'll need a statement from your doctor. Plus, no matter what your doctor says, you need to make sure the food items don't substitute for something else you would otherwise be consuming. For that reason, prescribed low calorie foods don't qualify as medical expenses, since they are substitutes for the food you would normally consume to satisfy nutritional requirements.
This is the point the IRS letter made in turning down the woman who had a double mastectomy — her infant was healthy and the formula was satisfying his normal nutritional needs.
In fact, the IRS has ruled Weight Watchers meals aren't deductible, even if weight reduction has been ordered by a doctor. Even a special diet for a sufferer of Crohn's disease — a serious inflammatory disease affecting the gastrointestinal tract — isn't deductible because the patient has to eat to survive. (On the other hand, a doctor-prescribed supplement taken on top of normal nutrition would be deductible.)
An expense that is merely beneficial to general health, such as a health club membership, doesn't qualify, so no health club dues, over-the-counter medicines, toothpaste or toiletries qualify. Other expenses that usually don't qualify: cosmetic surgery and dancing lessons. Divorce costs are nondeductible even if your psychiatrist recommends the split.
Medically needed modifications to your home are deductible, but only to the extent they don't add value to your home. So that ugly wheelchair ramp you build to accommodate mom when she moves in is likely to be deductible. But a home renovation that includes a luxurious wheelchair accessible bathroom that you figure you might need some day isn't going to be deductible.
In the same vein, if you need a home care attendant, only part of his/her salary is likely to be deductible. The nursing services the aide performs, such as changing dressings, are qualified medical expenses. But other household services the attendant provides aren't deductible.
Lots of unusual medical expenses have passed muster under the tax law. Perhaps not prostitutes, but spa treatments and many others. But one point is crucial: If you're hoping to write off an exotic medical cost, or even a routine one, documentation is where the rubber meets the road. You want written advice from your doctor prescribing the particular treatment regimen, proof that you followed the prescribed regimen and proof that you incurred the expenses.
Proper record-keeping is always a good way to ward off IRS troubles. But high medical deductions could make you more likely to be picked for an audit, particularly a by-mail audit where you'll be asked to produce substantiation or your deductions will be disallowed. So keep those records.
So… in a coma-like trance after another couple of days without sleep, I was near awakening when something ran across my back. As some of you know, I live in a basement and, although very clean/modern, a mouse once broke into the house.
I immediately grabbed the thing, but it was a little bit of a struggle. The tighter I squeezed, the more it resisted. I could feel my hand wrapped tight, but wasn’t fully covering it. It was flopping around… DAMN… a fucking snake!!!
Son of a %*%*%*%* bitch. I yelled something out loud and started slamming it into the bed.
This all happened within seconds. Maybe five. My eyes were crusted over and, again, I wasn’t fully awake. Finally, I managed to open my eyes and discovered to my horror…
It was me.
Yep, my other arm.
I had fallen asleep on top of it and it fell asleep.
Relaxed Bush debuts as motivational speaker ‘Man, my life has changed!’ ex-president tells 15,000-strong Texas crowd
By Mary Jordan updated 4:46 a.m. ET, Tues., Oct . 27, 2009
FORT WORTH, Texas - After nine months of being nearly invisible — a big outing has been to a Dallas hardware store for flashlights — George W. Bush made his debut Monday in his latest incarnation: motivational speaker.
Nearly 15,000 people heard the former president, known more for mangling the English language than for his eloquence, reminisce about his White House days. Bush, who is writing a book about the dozen toughest decisions he had to make, used much of his 28 minutes onstage to talk about lighter topics such as picking out a rug design for the Oval Office that reflected his "optimism."
Perhaps in a nod to his dismal 22 percent approval ratings when he left office, Bush noted that "popularity is fleeting. . . . It's not real."
He beamed at the standing ovations from the friendly hometown crowd — he now lives in nearby Dallas.
'Some days were great' Looking younger than his 63 years and relaxed, Bush did not appear to have an overarching theme, but strung anecdotes and jokes together and frequently mentioned his faith in God.
"I don't see how you can be president without relying on the Almighty. Now when I was 21, I wouldn't have told you that, but at age 63, I can tell you that one of the most amazing surprises of the presidency was the fact that people's prayers affected me. I can't prove it to you. But I can tell you some days were great, some days not so great. But every day was joyous." That, he attributed, to the prayers of others.
His speech came after the crowd at the "GET MOTIVATED!" seminar stood up and danced to the Beach Boys' song "Surfin' USA" and batted around beach balls tossed into the audience.
The well-publicized event appears to mark the beginning of a higher profile for Bush.
Just last week he gave three speeches in Canada, and he has joined the Washington Speakers Bureau. He is scheduled to give another motivational speech next month in San Antonio. Former presidential adviser Karen Hughes said he has "quite a few speeches planned" during the fall.
Along with his book, due out next year, Bush is planning his new presidential library and policy institute at Southern Methodist University — the alma mater of Laura Bush. He also has been spotted riding his mountain bike on local trails.
Powell, speaking after a drawing for a door prize of a high-definition flat-screen TV, told the audience to celebrate America's freedom. "We must never be afraid of some clown hiding in a cave," Powell said. Then moving on from Osama bin Laden, he talked about the Chinese: "The only fight we have with them is they want more shelf space at Wal-Mart!"
All this face time — on giant screens for those in the rafters — cost $4.95 for most people. The VIP seats in the front rows went for $89.
Tamara Lowe, co-founder of the motivational speakers series, which did a brisk business selling workbooks and other materials, said she was contractually bound not to reveal how much Bush was paid. His spokesman also declined to comment on published reports that estimated his fee at $100,000.
In Britain, where Bush remains wildly unpopular, the media have been reporting his return to public speaking with incredulity. Some commentators recalled his famous flubs: "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" and "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."
'Down-home' A Telegraph news article noted that the Republican former president — whose policies inspired millions of Americans to vote Democratic in the 2008 election — was now managing to draw crowds and "may yet have the last laugh."
Many people interviewed afterward said they liked Bush, perhaps even because he wasn't the best speaker of the day. He could have said a thesaurus was a big scaly creature that roamed the planet millions of years ago and they would have applauded.
His most memorable story, one after another said, was about Barney, his Scottie:
Mindful of his new neighbors, who have had to endure as many as 650 people a day gawking at his new house in a cul-de-sac, Bush said he took Barney for a neighborhood stroll with "plastic bag on his hand" to scoop poop. That was a moment, he said, when he realized "Man, my life has changed!"
"He is just a normal guy! He wasn't the best speaker. But I was happy to see him!" said Lubbock salesman Patrick Kruger, 50.
Anthony Champagne, a professor of politics at the University of Texas at Dallas, said many presidents go underground for a period after they leave the White House, but then "even Richard Nixon came back in the public eye."
He said approval ratings of presidents often rise the longer they are out of office.
Sparklers and rock music Along with Bush, former secretary of state Colin Powell, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, retired football great Terry Bradshaw and a host of professional speakers spoke on a stage decorated with red-white-and-blue signs that said "Motivate!" and "Achieve!"
Sparklers, rock music and a perky master of ceremonies ever-complimentary of Fort Worth kept the crowd on its feet.
"Cut the word 'impossible' out of your vocabulary!" thundered the Rev. Robert Schuller, televangelist and author. After telling the sad story about his daughter getting her leg amputated after a motorcycle accident, he came back big with an account of her playing baseball, trying for home runs so she wouldn't have to run: "Never look at what you have lost. Look at what you have left."
"I kept looking for a teleprompter, but I didn't see one," said Joanne Ryan, 35, a financial adviser in the audience who noted, "I know the media makes him out to be an idiot," but he seemed genuine and "down-home."
Ryan said Bush seemed more comfortable speaking now than he did as president.
In the crowd of real estate agents in suits, housewives in jeans, students and senior citizens, Chris Clarke, 25, a salesman from Dallas, stood at the back. Like many people, he said that other speakers were better — Colin Powell was his favorite — but he thought Bush was good. In fact, he said, it could turn out that Bush may be more suited to motivational speaking than being president. He said when Bush misspeaks, it sounds "incompetent if you are president. But here it can be inspiring. It makes him seem like a regular guy, no better than me."
Greenery grows more roots to absorb resources when next to ‘strangers’
MSNBC
Plants can't see or hear, but they can recognize their siblings, and now researchers have found out how: They use chemical signals secreted from their roots, according to a new study.
Back in 2007, Canadian researchers discovered that a common seashore plant, called a sea rocket, can recognize its siblings — plants grown from seeds from the same plant, or mother. They saw that when siblings are grown next to each other in the soil, they "play nice" and don't send out more roots to compete with one another.
But as soon as one of the plants is thrown in with strangers, it begins competing with them by rapidly growing more roots to take up the water and mineral nutrients in the soil.
Researchers from the University of Delaware wanted to find out how the plants were able to identify their kin.
"Plants have no visible sensory markers, and they can't run away from where they are planted," Harsh Bais, assistant professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Delaware, said in a statement. "It then becomes a search for more complex patterns of recognition."
Bais and doctoral student Meredith Biedrzycki set up a study with wild populations of Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant that is often used as a model organism in plant research.
They wanted to use wild populations instead of laboratory-bred species, because the latter "always has cousins floating around in the lab," Bais said.
In a series of experiments, young seedlings were exposed to liquid containing the root secretions, called "exudates," from siblings, from strangers (non-siblings), or only their own exudates.
The length of the longest lateral root and of the hypocotyl, the first leaf-like structure that forms on the plant, were measured. A lateral root is a root that extends horizontally outward from the primary root, which grows downward.
Plants exposed to strangers had greater lateral root formation than the plants that were exposed to siblings.
Further, when sibling plants grow next to each other, their leaves will often touch and intertwine, while stranger plants near each other grow rigidly upright and avoid touching, the authors say.
In future studies, Bais hopes to examine questions such as: How might sibling plants grown in large monocultures, like corn, be affected? Are they more susceptible to pathogens? And how do they survive without competing?
"It's possible that when kin are grown together, they may balance their nutrient uptake and not be greedy," Bais speculates.
(Related content: Scientists free sexual inhibition in flies... Sorry, I had to keep this line... you have to ask???)
The research also may have implications for the home gardener.
"Often we'll put plants in the ground next to each other and when they don't do well, we blame the local garden center where we bought them, or we attribute their failure to a pathogen," Bais said. "But maybe there's more to it than that."
The study, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, will be published in the January/February 2010 issue of the journal Communicative & Integrative Biology.
In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her Halliburton/KBR co-workers while working in Iraq and locked in a shipping container for over a day to prevent her from reporting her attack. The rape occurred outside of U.S. criminal jurisdiction, but to add serious insult to serious injury she was not allowed to sue KBR because her employment contract said that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration--a process that overwhelmingly favors corporations.
This year, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment that would deny defense contracts to companies that ask employees to sign away the right to sue. It passed, but it wasn't the slam dunk Jon Stewart expected. Instead the amendment received 30 nay votes all from Republicans. "I understand we're a divided country, some disagreements on health care. How is ANYONE against this?" He asked.
He (Jon Stewart) went on to show video of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-A arguing that it's not the government's place to decide who the government does business with and juxtaposed that with Republican sentiment on how the government should deal with ACORN. "I guess it's an efficiency thing. You don't want to waste tax-payer money giving it to someone who advises fake prostitutes how to commit imaginary crimes, you want to give it to Halliburton because they're committing real gang rape."
(See Jon Stewart video clip on tube u and many other places.)
Mini-hole made of metamaterials ensnares microwave light.
Geoff Brumfiel/naturenews
Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat.
The hole is the latest clever device to use 'metamaterials', specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build 'invisibility carpets' and super-clear lenses. This latest black hole was made by Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China, and is described in a paper on the preprint server ArXiv1.
Black holes are normally too massive to be carried around. The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, for example, has a mass around 3.6 million times that of the Sun and warps the very space around it. Light that travels too close to it can become trapped forever.
The new meta-black hole also bends light, but in a very different way. Rather than relying on gravity, the black hole uses a series of metallic 'resonators' arranged in 60 concentric circles. The resonators affect the electric and magnetic fields of a passing light wave, causing it to bend towards the centre of the hole. It spirals closer and closer to the black hole's 'core' until it reaches the 20 innermost layers. Those layers are made of another set of resonators that convert light into heat. The result: what goes in cannot come out. "The light into the core is totally absorbed," Cui says.
"I am very impressed," says John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. Pendry says that the black hole is yet the latest example of the many strange devices that can be built with metamaterials. But, he adds, it is not a perfect black-hole analogy. The enormous gravity of real black holes causes them to emit an eerie quantum glow, known as Hawking radiation. "The optical device reported in this paper has no internal source of energy and therefore cannot emit Hawking radiation," Pendry says.
Nevertheless, Cui says that the hole could prove useful. By the end of the year his team hopes to have a version of the device that will suck up light of optical frequencies. If it works, it could be used in applications such as solar cells.
After a brief but concerted challenge by the White House to the credibility of Fox News Channel as a legitimate news organization — including a detailed takedown by Communications Director Anita Dunn on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday — a spokesman for Fox responded with a de facto admission that the channel is nothing more than a propaganda arm of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
CNN described Fox’s statement this way: “In a written statement given to CNN, Fox News said its programming was comparable to the editorial page of a newspaper.”
The fact that Fox says its programming is based on opinions not facts would likely come as a shock to Fox viewers — but, of course, they’ll never know about it. Fox will protect them from this harsh reality the same way it deals with all news that makes conservatives look badly: by not covering it.
Here’s the statement by Fox to CNN: “An increasing number of viewers are relying on Fox News for both news and opinion,” Fox News Senior VP Michael Clemente said in the statement, “and the average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming represents.
“So with all due respect to anyone who might still be confused about the difference between news reporting and vibrant opinion, my suggestion would be to talk about the stories and the facts rather than the [sic] attack the messenger . . . which over time has never worked.”
Not surprisingly, this statement from Fox was carefully crafted to obfuscate the truth from busy or hapless readers. Like the classic non-denial denial, it is a non-admission admission.
For example, it is true that “an increasing number of viewers are relying on Fox News for both news and opinion.” Only wrestling has a bigger cable audience than Fox, but its viewers are typical conservatives. They have been trained to distrust the mythical “liberal media,” so their only reference for what is news is the very same right-wing propaganda they have grown accustomed to on Fox.
Fortunately, only a minority of Americans are fooled by Fox’s chicanery. A poll in August found that among all Americans, Fox was considered trustworthy by just 35 percent, while 41 percent felt it was untrustworthy. Among Southerners, however, 46 percent believed Fox was trustworthy, compared with 27 percent in the Northeast and 33 percent in both the Midwest and the West.
It is also true, as the Fox VP says, that “the average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page.” What he doesn’t say but surely knows is that Fox viewers are below-average news consumers. For one thing, Fox viewers appear not to have noticed that in its 13 years on the air, no reporter in Fox’s employ has ever broken a story.
In addition to be self-identified as conservative and therefore proudly ignorant, Fox viewers are predominantly elderly. A recent study by Magna Global that was reported in Variety found that “[among] ad-supported cable nets, the news nets (along with older-skewing Hallmark Channel, Golf Channel and GSN’s daytime sked) sport the most gray, with Fox News Channel’s daytime and primetime skeds the absolute oldest, clocking in with a median age above 65.” (Emphasis added.)
While there are certainly millions of senior Americans who are average and above-average news consumers, these discerning older viewers are, by definition, more likely to agree that Fox is not trustworthy. Elderly Fox viewers came up in the era when the three broadcast networks dominated the news, and are arguably more likely to be taken in. Fox calls itself a “news channel” and the sets and graphics look like a news broadcast, so what they are broadcasting must be news.
The Fox exec’s final assertion is particularly rich. He suggests that the White House should quit attacking Fox and “talk about the stories and the facts” — meaning: Fox would prefer it if the White House would get off the offensive and return to defending itself against Fox’s lies, spin and propaganda.
Can you say, “Uncle?”
How is this not Fox caving to the White House? Fox’s statement admitting that it is propaganda outlet came just hours after Anita Dunn from the White House made these assertions on CNN:
* “If we went back a year ago to the fall of 2008, to the campaign, that was a time this country was in two wars that we had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election what you would have seen were that the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and a something called ACORN.”
* “The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological… what I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party.”
* “Obviously [the President] will go on Fox because he engages with ideological opponents. He has done that before and he will do it again… when he goes on Fox he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point. He is going on it to debate the opposition.”
* “[Fox is] widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.”
And Dunn’s smackdown of Fox is a follow-up of the White House’s slap at Fox three weeks ago when the president chose to do all the Sunday political shows except Fox’s. When Fox complained, the White House responded:
“We figured Fox would rather show ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ than broadcast an honest discussion about health insurance reform,” a White House deputy press secretary told ABC News on Saturday. “Fox is an ideological outlet where the president has been interviewed before and will likely be interviewed again; not that the whining particularly strengthens their case for participation any time soon.”
The White House is winning this battle. Let’s just hope they don’t back down.
On the other hand, don’t be surprised if Fox’s admission that it is a broadcast version of newspapers’ opinion pages is the most un-reported story of 2009.
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— Researchers studying antibiotics in pregnancy have found a surprising link between common drugs used to treat urinary infections and birth defects. Reassuringly, the most-used antibiotics in early pregnancy — penicillins — appear to be the safest.
arguing that it's not the government's place to decide who the government does business with and juxtaposed that with Republican sentiment on how the government should deal with ACORN. "I guess it's an efficiency thing. You don't want to waste tax-payer money giving it to someone who advises fake prostitutes how to commit imaginary crimes, you want to give it to Halliburton because they're committing real gang rape."