Clay Farris Naff's Open Salon Blog

Clay to Dems: Stop Being Stooges and Get Health Reform Done!

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:02:36 -0500

Getting Things Done? Nyuk, Nyuk, Yuk!

Dear Dead-in-the-Water Democrats:

Look, fellas, I know an election is coming in less time than it takes to have a baby. I know it's been a tough winter, and at this point half your caucus is so panicked they are either jumping out the window or spinning on the floor like Curley going "woowoowoowoo!"

    But the only chance you have of earning the respect (and maybe the votes) of Americans at this point is to get something done. And the thing you HAVE to get done is health care reform. Here's how you can do it.

    Poll after poll shows that Americans want healthcare reform, but they are afraid of what might lurk in that paper monster you call a bill. Scaremongers have convinced a lot of them that it contains a blueprint for government takeover of medicine. Boogedy-boogedy-boogey!

    Now, you can stand around saying, "Does not!" and they will go on saying, "Does too!" until the clock runs out. Chances are that damn few senators on either side of the aisle have actually read the whole thing. A penitent monk with nothing better to do would have trouble getting through it. For sure I haven't, and that puts me in company with 99.9 percent of the rest of America.

    So, the Hon. Harry Reid & Co., here's what you can do: break it up into a bunch of small, simple, straightforward bills. Present the "insurance companies may no longer ream you and then toss you out in the street naked and shivering when you get sick" bill, and I guarantee you the public will support it. Let the Republicans vote in a bloc against that at their peril. The very same day, you can put up the "everyone gets insured one way or another, and everyone pays something" bill and let that come to a vote. And so on. Maybe you won't get the whole thing done, but half a bill is better than none. The House-Senate conference can merge them into something unified.

At any rate, please don't bleat to us about Senate procedures and traditions. We don't want to hear it. It's your institution, you had 60 votes, and you still have 59. This week, you actually got some bipartisanship going. If you still can't figure out how to make it work, then we'll look for someone else for the job. But meantime, don't sit on your thumbs. Get cracking!

Obama Outrages GOP with Plan to Privatize Moon Shot

Tue, 2 Feb 2010 08:02:21 -0500

With Drives Like These, How Can We
Afford Not to Go Back to the Moon?

     In a brilliant political stroke, President Obama has proposed killing Project Constellation. This was George W. Bush's plan to return astronauts to the lunar surface, where they could once again play golf by the light of the Earth.

   Killing Project Constellation is a gamble, of course. The Russians might beat us back to the moon -- if they ever decide to bankrupt their country again.

   Anyway, at the pace Constellation was moving, Fiji would have planted its flag on lunar soil before we returned. What makes the president's plan brilliant is that instead he proposes to turn it over to private industry. Now, let's hear the Republicans oppose that!

   Actually, some of them are. The party that normally believes anything government can do, free enterprise can do better, the party that wanted to put Social Security in the hands of Wall Street brokers, has cold feet about canning Constellation.

Or at least members whose states grow fat on NASA's budget do. Senator Richard Shelby, R of Alabamy, sneered at the very idea that industry could do the job better. Turning over the project to the private sector threatens to make the astronauts launched on NASA’s final shuttle mission in September the last Americans sent into space from U.S. soil until well after 2020, he growled.

“China, India, and Russia will be putting humans in space while we wait on commercial hobbyists to actually back up their grand promises,” Shelby said.

    Congressman Bill Posey (R-Fla.) inadvertently revealed himself to be a Maoist when he called Obama’s plan “a giant leap backwards.”

    Is it not too, too funny? Who knew that Shelby and Posey were closet Commies? It took killing Constellation to drag them and some of their fellow GOPers out into the light.

   Actually, it's not quite fair to paint them as Marxists. After all, Marxists believe in principles. And they are truly great principles for society -- if you apply them to bee colonies. For people, not so much. But Shelby and his ilk -- they believe in pork, not principles.

    "Shoot, if you must, this old gray head," (you can almost hear them bloviating), "but spare my state's appropriation."

    Defunding the moon project is good politics, but is it good policy? You bet. I'm all for the exploration of our solar neighborhood and points beyond, but there is absolutely no need to send people into space. It is costly beyond reckoning, has a high fatality rate, and gives us almost no margin of scientific return over robots.

    Returning to the moon was always pointless -- even George W. only proposed it as a stepping stone to Mars. Sending astronauts to Mars, as I have previously argued in these pages, is wrong-headed in every way. The costs are phenomenal, the risks ridiculous, and any potential for increased scientific knowledge over what we're learning from our robot pals on the Red Planet is more than offset by the potential for contaminating the scene of what might be another harbor for life.

    To give but a single example, it would take only one giant solar flare on the yearlong journey to fry everyone on board. In the meantime, Spirit and Opportunity, our valiant little explorers, have given us a wealth of data about Mars without the risk of a single human life.

   People will venture into space again. But first we must rebuild our economy, and give the biotech revolution a chance to unfold. There are bacteria whose genes confer an amazing resistance to radiation. Maybe we'll learn how to take advantage of those -- and many other biological gifts that could make interplanetary travel a reasonable risk.

    By the time we're ready for ethical and affordable human spaceflight, it is to be hoped, a peaceful global civilization will have emerged. Sharing the costs among billions of people would make it just that much better.

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Do Women Secretly Tell Men When It's Time to Have Sex?

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:01:31 -0500

     I have to admit that after all these years, sex is still a mystery to me. Especially human sex. Not that I've tried any other kind.
    What I'm trying to say here is that for all that biologists and other researchers have learned about human sexuality, there are still some fundamental mysteries. A new study published this week deepens one of them. Why is that in women, as opposed to, oh, I don't know, let's say, baboons, the estrus cycle is concealed?
     Contrary to what certain poets and humorists say, there is no "mating season" for humans. Stranger still, in any given month there is no obvious way for a man to tell if a woman is ready to conceive. So, humans have sex on a regular basis year-round -- at least until they get married. (Settle down, only kidding.)
    This is in stark contrast to many other critters -- including most of our primate relatives. If you're a male baboon, knowing when to mate is no problem. Female baboons in estrus practically put billboards on their rears saying "Get It Here!"
    Not so with women. However, according to Dr. Jon Maner, lead researcher in the Florida State study, the scent of a woman in heat is enough to send a man's testosterone on the boil. He and his colleagues got women to wear T-shirts to bed during various phases of their monthly cycle. They then had men sniff the T-shirts, along with some that hadn't been worn at all. The men who sniffed the T-shirts of fertile women experienced a significant rise in their testosterone level.
    Maner calls this a smoking gun. Together with other evidence of subtle female estrus signaling, he says it clearly demonstrates that women guide men's sexual behavior toward intercourse at the time likeliest to result in pregnancy. (You can hear my interview with him online this Saturday at 8:30 a.m. CST on kzum.org.)
    Maybe. But other studies of human sexuality don't support the conclusion that increased testosterone correlates with well-timed intercourse.
    Besides, the whole business of concealed estrus seems strange. Why so coy? Some researchers have speculated that women evolved to disguise their estrus so that they could keep one or more men hanging around the old cave at all times.
    Again, maybe. But then men evolved Moe's Tavern. Move, countermove.
    Anyway, if women are signaling men via their scent, I think this may fall into the category of Nature's Mistakes. Just as women persist in the misguided idea that men notice their shoes, choosing scents for signals seems deeply mistaken. Generally, men are oblivious to the smell of old socks, spilled beer, and wet dogs. Why should they notice something so subtle?
    Or perhaps it's quite ingenious. After all, if a woman wants to manipulate a man, the very best way to do it is without his ever knowing it happened. And if it all ends happily in sex, who's to complain?

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Evolution and the Devolution of Science Reporting

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:01:43 -0500

Rise in Autism Cases Reported, 1992 - 2008

    Oops, it's happened again. As a science journalist, I am frequently embarrassed by the way important scientific ideas tranmogrify into gushy, silly, or scary notions in the media. The idea at stake this time could hardly be more important: it's that evolution plays a central role in many of the pathologies we experience. This idea was explored in a Sackler symposium that became the basis for a news release.
Now, here's how that release is playing out in the media: "While natural selection is best known for weeding out the weak, it may also be partly responsible for the apparent rise of some disorders, such as autism, autoimmune diseases and reproductive cancers, according to researchers." (MSNBC)
    "Pressures from evolution may explain the rise of autism, cancer and autoimmune disease. Researchers believe that taking a broader evolutionary perspective to health can reduce suffering and the risk of death." (Digital Journal)
    "The subtle but ongoing pressures of human evolution could explain the seeming rise of disorders such as autism, autoimmune diseases, and reproductive cancers, researchers write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." (Science Daily)
    The common thread here is a claim in the lede that evolution can explain "the seeming rise" of this, that, or the other. Nonsense. Those rises have been recorded in a matter of decades, not to say years. Unless you believe in LaMarck, there is no way in the world the chart of autism cases shown above can be explained by natural selection. Even with teen pregnancy booming, there is simply no time here for evolution to do its thing.
    What is actually going on with the explosion of autism, allergy, and cancer cases is more probably a rise in diagnoses (or overdiagnoses), combined with the unmasking of some diseases that would not have had the chance to emerge in earlier times, because something else would have killed the poor sod first. Cancer is a prime example. When you double the life expectancy of people by suppressing infectious disesase (as we did in the 20th century), you have to expect far more cancer cases.
     This does not mean that evolutionary medicine is bunk. On the contrary, along with genomics and proteomics, it is the future of authentic medicine. From what I can glean from the National Academies of Science page on the Sackler symposium, no one was proposing that evolution explains the *rise* in diagnoses of autism, cancer, asthma, etc.

There may well be plausible evolutionary explanations for the prevalence of these conditions in relation to our ancestors or primate relatives, but they can't explain what we've seen in recent decades. With the exception of microbial evolution, the timescales are simply out of whack.

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Hold the Phone! That Droid Just Might Be Good For Ya!

Thu, 7 Jan 2010 16:01:14 -0500

Could This Be A Cure for Alzheimers?

Awhile back, I posted a column casting doubt on the claims that cellphones cause brain cancer. Apart from well designed studies that found no evidence to support such claims, there are the simple facts of physics: cell phones emit low-energy electromagnetic (EM) radiation. So low, in fact, that it's weaker than visible light. The probability of such radiation disrupting DNA seems very low indeed. I stand by that position.

Now, however, researchers at the University of South Florida have published research suggesting that cell-phone radiation does have an effect in the brain -- a highly beneficial effect. In mice, at least, it appears to cure Alzheimer's symptoms.

In a news release published by ScienceDaily, lead author Gary Arendash is quoted as saying, "It surprised us to find that cell phone exposure, begun in early adulthood, protects the memory of mice otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer's symptoms."

Fascinating, right? But wait, as they say in SlapChop ads, that's not all!

"It was even more astonishing that the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones actually reversed memory impairment in old Alzheimer's mice, " the USF research professor said.

Astonishing indeed. What is going on here? The scientists aren't sure. The benefits accrue to both the Alzheimer's afflicted mice and the normal-brained control mice, but the mechanisms appear different in each set. The EM radiation appears to slightly warm the brains of afflicted mice, helping them lose the crud that clogs their memories. In the normal mice, something else seems to be going on.

So are these claims credible?

On their face, yes. For starters, the research was conducted at the Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, which presumably means they know something about the field, and was supported by a state organization affiliated with the National Institute on Aging -- as opposed to, say, Verizon.

It was published in a respected, peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. That's no guarantee of validity, but so far, so good.

The study appears to have been well designed -- it had good controls and large enough numbers of subjects to make the results significant. And yet, it would be rash to actually strap a cellphone to your head (as depicted above) and call all your friends.

For one thing, the results of many animal studies do not translate to people. For another, however convincing the study may look, it needs to be replicated before we can really say it has scientific standing. And if it should prove true that EM radiation can prevent or even reverse Alzheimer's, there are surely cheaper and better ways to get it than by spending even more hours on the phone.

Meantime, let's hope they don't find that texting all day prevents arthritis. I just couldn't bear it.

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