More and more, lately, I hear about the government not doing things right, no longer being for the people, etc. The government is no longer a term that can include all the issues that confront us as being handled by a single entity. The government is like a multi-headed monster with all the parts of good and evil fighting themselves. The sad part is, in our culture, the one with the most money has begun winning all the arguments, just as drug cartels have more power and ammunition than police in most countries.
What exactly is our government? Is it the corporations which buy lobbyists and power and can squelch progress that takes profits from them? Is it the many think-tank Institutes who give so much advice? Is it the trash collectors who have the control to put big cities on their knees if they choose to stop working? Is it the Administrative, Legislative and Judicial triad? Is it the many bureaus who scarcely speak to one another like the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, or is it to be found in the alphabetized list of Bureaus you get if you click here?
It was citizens, not yet elected officials as such, who helped set up our government. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Yet, just as the Bible was a great book when it was first written, the Constitution no longer is clear to the average person. Great scholars are required to interpret what the Founders were thinking, just as clergy is needed to try to interpret the Bible. Why cannot we write something that is no longer obsolete for our present society?.
We need to bring our country up to date with its understanding of the way the 'government' really works and just how each citizen can see him or her self as having a role in it. There are choices for all of us. In medicine we insist that doctors allow patients informed choices. Our present government, through media, disallows informed choices. Each party is free to promise and lie as ably as the snake oil salesmen of a century ago.
If the legislative branch members were in Washington to try to represent their constituents rather than lining their own pockets and securing re-election and benefits they do not deserve, while criticizing corporations for their too generous bonuses. Now there is a true picture of hypocrisy at is finest hour.
Isn't it time we started thinking about what works and not just voting for 'change' by putting in total incompetent, greedy, inadequate self-serving representatives? Where are our 'grass roots' advocates? Are they all too busy putting out the fires to find the cause of those fires?
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
THE BLAME GAME PERSISTS
All of a sudden, after the race was lost, advocacy groups are assessing the reasons. They didn't do enough but can now blithely blame Coakley for not including the Hispanics who had supported Obama and on and on the buck passing goes.
Quoting from MONICA BRADY-MYEROV Published January 21, 2010, "Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, shifts the blame to Coakley for not engaging Hispanics who helped elect President Obama. “My sense was it was not an energized campaign and we certainly didn’t see the outreach to the Latino community that you would have expected in order to generate the support and mobilization that could have made a difference,” she said.
Immigrant advocates say if Coakley mobilized the 13 percent of registered voters in Massachusetts who are naturalized citizens or children of immigrants, it might have made a difference. There are also regrets from womens groups who say Coakley missed her chance at making history as the first female senator from Massachusetts."
"National Organization of Women President Terry O’Neill, speaking from a noisy room in the Capitol, said, Coakley didn’t use her gender in the race, and O’Neill wishes she had. “We made it very clear, from our perspective, in our advocacy that her gender mattered to us and was very much a plus,” she said." If she had used her gender more and lost, it would have been believed that she was trying to make too much of it. Despite Coakley’s attempt near the end of the race to make reproductive rights a key issue, it didn’t resonate with voters, said Cecile Richards, who heads the Planned Parenthood Federation of America."
Everyone's budget is small, especially all the non-profits, but it is clear to me that more ads, better timed, which suggests more money spent, seduced voters into thinking that there is a magic bullet out there. Just as Bush seduced voters with his back yard barbecue, Nixon with his dog, voters made the hypocrisy and lack of loyalty to their own past voting clear in the way they bit for the 'change' they see is to go backwards to more Bush years. Go figure! As the Blue Collar Comics state, there is no cure for stupidity...they certainly are right on. Will the Democrats volley back in time for the next elections? I guess there is nothing to do but to hold one's intellectual breath until then.
Quoting from MONICA BRADY-MYEROV Published January 21, 2010, "Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, shifts the blame to Coakley for not engaging Hispanics who helped elect President Obama. “My sense was it was not an energized campaign and we certainly didn’t see the outreach to the Latino community that you would have expected in order to generate the support and mobilization that could have made a difference,” she said.
Immigrant advocates say if Coakley mobilized the 13 percent of registered voters in Massachusetts who are naturalized citizens or children of immigrants, it might have made a difference. There are also regrets from womens groups who say Coakley missed her chance at making history as the first female senator from Massachusetts."
"National Organization of Women President Terry O’Neill, speaking from a noisy room in the Capitol, said, Coakley didn’t use her gender in the race, and O’Neill wishes she had. “We made it very clear, from our perspective, in our advocacy that her gender mattered to us and was very much a plus,” she said." If she had used her gender more and lost, it would have been believed that she was trying to make too much of it. Despite Coakley’s attempt near the end of the race to make reproductive rights a key issue, it didn’t resonate with voters, said Cecile Richards, who heads the Planned Parenthood Federation of America."
Everyone's budget is small, especially all the non-profits, but it is clear to me that more ads, better timed, which suggests more money spent, seduced voters into thinking that there is a magic bullet out there. Just as Bush seduced voters with his back yard barbecue, Nixon with his dog, voters made the hypocrisy and lack of loyalty to their own past voting clear in the way they bit for the 'change' they see is to go backwards to more Bush years. Go figure! As the Blue Collar Comics state, there is no cure for stupidity...they certainly are right on. Will the Democrats volley back in time for the next elections? I guess there is nothing to do but to hold one's intellectual breath until then.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
OUR MIND-READING MEDIA
It is quite upsetting to listen to the talking heads who state vehemently what, the rest of us can only guess at, is the reason Scott Brown was elected negating all the hope and reasoning that elected Obama just a year ago. They didn't get change fast enough so opt to return the policies, bigotry, discrimination and greed of the wealthy during the Bush administration back.
Drew wrote an interesting article in the
Huffington Post. He writes: It is a truly remarkable feat, in just one year's time, to turn the fear and anger voters felt in 2006 and 2008 at a Republican Party that had destroyed the economy, redistributed massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the richest of the rich and the biggest of big businesses, and waged a trillion-dollar war in the wrong country, into populist rage at whatever Democrat voters can cast their ballot against.
All of this was completely predictable. And it was predicted. I wrote about it for the first time here on the sixth day of Obama's presidency, and many of us have written about it in the intervening year. For his complete article, click here.
Most of the explanations I have heard so far are as believable as Pat Robertson's conviction that the reason the Haitian earthquake had happened was because the Haitians had 'sold' their soul to the Devil 100 years ago to free themselves from France. However, the 'believers' have made Robertson a rich man as they have Limbaugh and many others who know how to touch the easily led; the people who don't dare think for themselves.
With patience, all will be laid out before us in time. I can only hope that Obama will give up waving the olive branch to the Right before the entire list that were the goals for which he was elected become history notes.
Drew wrote an interesting article in the
Huffington Post. He writes: It is a truly remarkable feat, in just one year's time, to turn the fear and anger voters felt in 2006 and 2008 at a Republican Party that had destroyed the economy, redistributed massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the richest of the rich and the biggest of big businesses, and waged a trillion-dollar war in the wrong country, into populist rage at whatever Democrat voters can cast their ballot against.
All of this was completely predictable. And it was predicted. I wrote about it for the first time here on the sixth day of Obama's presidency, and many of us have written about it in the intervening year. For his complete article, click here.
Most of the explanations I have heard so far are as believable as Pat Robertson's conviction that the reason the Haitian earthquake had happened was because the Haitians had 'sold' their soul to the Devil 100 years ago to free themselves from France. However, the 'believers' have made Robertson a rich man as they have Limbaugh and many others who know how to touch the easily led; the people who don't dare think for themselves.
With patience, all will be laid out before us in time. I can only hope that Obama will give up waving the olive branch to the Right before the entire list that were the goals for which he was elected become history notes.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
MOURNING FOR THE WINNERS SINCE THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DID
Alas, there will be no profound outpouring today on this blog. I am in political mourning, awaiting the angst, hair tearing, and chest pounding when Massachusetts voters realize that they voted against 'the white hat' for 'a black hat'.
I can only be grateful to the virtual deities that it will only be a freshman Senator emulating Cheney and that he may take a bit to develop Washington capital.
Meanwhile, when the pounding headaches disappears, life will resume its normal frustrated course.
I can only be grateful to the virtual deities that it will only be a freshman Senator emulating Cheney and that he may take a bit to develop Washington capital.
Meanwhile, when the pounding headaches disappears, life will resume its normal frustrated course.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
MECHANOBIOLOGY...A NEW SPECIALTY TO THOSE OUTSIDE THE RESEARCH WORLD
How I wish it was easier to find the things in life that really interest me. One has to do a lot of looking because the media does little to help those of us who don't care for a second by second description of every disaster for days, as though nothing else in the world is happening at the same time. I've just discovered a new specialty called MechanoBiology (a field linking mechanics and biology).
Today from Science Daily, I learned this: "Carnegie Mellon University's Philip R. LeDuc and his collaborators in Massachusetts and Taiwan have discovered a new function of a protein that could ultimately unlock the mystery of how these workhorses of the body play a central role in the mechanics of biological processes in people." LeDuc, ia an associate professor of mechanical engineering with courtesy appointments in the Biomedical Engineering, Biological Sciences and Computational Biology departments.
"For over 15 years, researchers have been mainly focusing on a protein called Integrin to study these cell functions, but our team found that another lesser known protein called Syndecan-4 is extremely important in cell behavior in a field called MechanoBiology (a field linking mechanics and biology). Syndecan-4 is known to play an essential role in a variety of diseases like cancer," LeDuc said. Essentially what his research does is take a look at how a protein's shape and form determines how it functions in the human body from a mechanics perspective. "Proteins are composed of long chains of amino acids than can form bonds with other molecules in a chain, kinking, twisting and folding into complicated, three-dimensional shapes, such as helices or densely furrowed globular structures."
"These folded shapes are immensely important because they can define a protein's function in the cell," said LeDuc, who is also developing novel biologically inspired diagnostic approaches and materials as well as computational methods to understand molecular behavior."
"Misguided proteins have been linked to disease such as cancer, arthritis and wound healing, among others," LeDuc said. "Our research is looking at how protein shapes affect cells and how cell biomechanics impacts the entire process."
For those of you who might understand what I do not, Syndecan-4 binding to the high affinity heparin-binding domain of fibronectin drives focal adhesion formation in fibroblasts. Woods A, Longley RL, Tumova S, Couchman JR. Department of Cell Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, 35294-0019, USA. awoods@cellbio.bhs.uab.edu, click here.
Today from Science Daily, I learned this: "Carnegie Mellon University's Philip R. LeDuc and his collaborators in Massachusetts and Taiwan have discovered a new function of a protein that could ultimately unlock the mystery of how these workhorses of the body play a central role in the mechanics of biological processes in people." LeDuc, ia an associate professor of mechanical engineering with courtesy appointments in the Biomedical Engineering, Biological Sciences and Computational Biology departments.
"For over 15 years, researchers have been mainly focusing on a protein called Integrin to study these cell functions, but our team found that another lesser known protein called Syndecan-4 is extremely important in cell behavior in a field called MechanoBiology (a field linking mechanics and biology). Syndecan-4 is known to play an essential role in a variety of diseases like cancer," LeDuc said. Essentially what his research does is take a look at how a protein's shape and form determines how it functions in the human body from a mechanics perspective. "Proteins are composed of long chains of amino acids than can form bonds with other molecules in a chain, kinking, twisting and folding into complicated, three-dimensional shapes, such as helices or densely furrowed globular structures."
"These folded shapes are immensely important because they can define a protein's function in the cell," said LeDuc, who is also developing novel biologically inspired diagnostic approaches and materials as well as computational methods to understand molecular behavior."
"Misguided proteins have been linked to disease such as cancer, arthritis and wound healing, among others," LeDuc said. "Our research is looking at how protein shapes affect cells and how cell biomechanics impacts the entire process."
For those of you who might understand what I do not, Syndecan-4 binding to the high affinity heparin-binding domain of fibronectin drives focal adhesion formation in fibroblasts. Woods A, Longley RL, Tumova S, Couchman JR. Department of Cell Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, 35294-0019, USA. awoods@cellbio.bhs.uab.edu, click here.
Monday, January 18, 2010
HOPE FOR CORD STEM CELL CLOSER TO REALIZATION
For leukemia sufferers who have had to struggle with donor cell rejection, a technique which may eventually remove the need for matched bone marrow transplants has been used in humans for the first time.
A BBC article states: "It is hoped that "master cells" taken from umbilical cords could be used on any patient without rejection.
The latest advance, published in the journal Nature Medicine, greatly multiplies the tiny number of cells from the cord ready for a transplant.
UK charity Leukaemia Research said this could be the "holy grail" for doctors. "
Only people, who live their lives with daily fear of uncontrolled rejection, and their loved ones can appreciate what meaning this would have to those with leukemia/lymphoma. While our greedy bankers, politician's and corporate leaders continue to squeeze out their lion's share of anyone's available funds, there are researchers who are dedicated to solving, not creating, the world's problems. Outside of the once admired USA leaders, we hang on to our proud leadership history though it no longer exists. Too many people are listening to the people destroying our freedom from within. While their are terrorists from al Qaeda trying to kill us, we have Americans from within who are killing us gradually with their fabricated religions, hallucinated dictums from God, and the audacity to believe that theirs is the only way to live...narrow views, prejudices, lack of knowledge about the world and its people's needs, and constriction of advancement of civilization.
But I digress, for more on the findings of the cord stem cell research, click here.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
MORE CORPORATE BLOOD SUCKERS
Cerberus Capital, one of Wall Street’s most notoriously ruthless leveraged-buyout firms (or “private equity firms” in PC-speak), recently made a $1.8 billion killing on its human plasma investment, a company called Talecris. Talecris was purchased for a mere $82.5 million just four years earlier, meaning Cerberus made 23 times its investment on human plasma. This was accomplished by the most savage, heartless means possible: by paying peanuts to impoverished human plasma donors, who increasingly come from Mexican border towns to blood-pumping stations set up on the American side, jacking up the price of plasma by restricting supply (a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission accused Cerberus Plasma Holdings of “operat[ing] as an oligopoly”), and then selling the refined products to the most desperately ill—patients suffering from hemophilia, severe burns, multiple sclerosis and autoimmune deficiencies. The products cost so much—one, IVIG (intravenous immunoglobulin) cost twice the price of gold as of last summer—that American health insurance companies have been dropping or denying their policyholders in increasing numbers, endangering untold numbers of people.
Tomas Asher, chairman of a company that trades in plasma, described the business this way: "It's like selling hog bellies or wheat or beef. It gets sold all over."
Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted January 9, 2010. This article in well worth reading in its entirety. While I read a lot of things. this is the first time I've caught this company and this subject so completely described. Click here for the whole article.
Tomas Asher, chairman of a company that trades in plasma, described the business this way: "It's like selling hog bellies or wheat or beef. It gets sold all over."
Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted January 9, 2010. This article in well worth reading in its entirety. While I read a lot of things. this is the first time I've caught this company and this subject so completely described. Click here for the whole article.
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