Ranting and Roaring

The US should encourage the UN to state its cash demands in Euros.

"Where's Steve Guttenberg?"

It's not the fact that your g*d damn car alarm has been going off for the last 30 minutes that bothers me so much as the fact that your car alarm is on an early 90's Acura that's probably worth about $2000.

I wasn't going to say anything about last night's State of the Union address till I saw sub-moronic LA governor complaining about it on CNN. Jeff Nolan says it right:

Because, you know, well Hurricane Katrina just hasn’t received enough attention and well, you know, the State of Louisiana has just done so much with the money that’s already been sent down there. Yeah that’s right, the Federal government should send more of your tax dollars to the state so that they will continue to not help their citizens. 

CBS:

The world's global average temperature has risen about 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1901 to 2005. The two warmest years on record for the world were 2005 and 1998.

What they mean to say is that the warmest year on record was 1998; that doesn't sound very impressive though.

Gay men find pudgy 50+ hetrosexual couples very arousing.

Dalrymple:

This standard or received view conceives opiate addiction as an illness and therefore implies that there is a bona fide medical solution to it. When all the proposed "cures" fail to work, as they usually do, and when the extension of quasi-medical services to addicts is accompanied not by a decline in the prevalence of the problem but, on the contrary, by an increase, who can blame addicts if, in continuing their habit, they blame not themselves but the incompetence of those who have set themselves up as their medical saviours and offered them solutions that do not work?

But where bureaucracies are concerned, nothing succeeds like failure. For example, the budget of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse increased by 16.2 per cent between 2001 and 2002, which would be quite a creditable performance if it had been a purely commercial enterprise. In the period, $US126,394,000 was added to its budget, but it would be foolhardy to suggest that a single drug addict stopped, or will stop, taking drugs because of this extra funding

[...] The addict has a problem, but it is not a medical one: he does not know how to live. And on this subject the doctor has nothing, qua doctor, to offer. What he ought not do, however, is to mislead the addict, or allow the addict to mislead him, into thinking that the problem is medical and requires, or is susceptible to, a medical solution.

An interesting, perhaps stunning, breakthrough in the cancer fight:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

The science behind it is fairly accessable if you want to click through and read the article.  Notes:

• since the drug is off patent and available, it's possible we'll see this being tested in humans sooner than later, whether or not the government and pharmaceutical industries agree
• more in The Economist
• another way of doing the same thing (reactivating shut down mitochondria to in turn reactivate apoptosis in glucose consuming cancer cells) using hot peppers (via MPrize); you'll remember that capsaicin was also behind the recent breakthrough in Diabetes treatment (/cure!).

Recently, Psychology Today touted a study by John T Jost on conservatives as “the most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date.” What did Jost find out? Well, that a “conservatives score higher on measures of dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, needs for order, structure, and closure and to be lower in openness to experience and integrative complexity than [are] moderates and liberals” and that conservative ideology is driven by “the psychological management of uncertainty and fear”.

Okedoke. How did Jost and his co-science guys come up with this conclusion (besides using an "impeccable methodology"?) The Iron Shrink gives up all the dirt. To briefly summarize the Iron Shrink's post:

• they develop a rigourous definition of conservative; i.e. people who enjoy sodomizing small children and eviscerating small woodland animals (the Iron Shrink nor JTJ use these examples, but they might as well have)
• they study people who enjoying the child sodomizing and animal eviserating, from a typical subset of the population: i.e. poor undergraduate students
• they extend the results to the population as a whole by comparing the results to typical right-wing societies (e.g. Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia) against typical left-wing societies (e.g. Sweden and Canada). Unfortunately, I'm not actually making this last part up.
• they conclude that conservatives are really sick deviants. I'm not making this part up either, or at least not too much.

BTW, if you think conservatives are resistant to change, why don't you read about the current kerfuffle about some long overdue improvements to one of Toronto's seedier crack and prostitution ridden neighbourhoods. No offense to Mark, but the phrases "rent seeking" (established locals want tribute to be paid by newcomers for the inconvenience of change), "preserving privilege" and "reactionary" all seem to be fairly applicable to the situation.

Well deserved for the Pats and well self-inflicted by the Chargers, but arggggg!

Update: ESPN has an excellent recap of the game. Pats with the ball in the air during the entire second half, Charges relying on LT to make anything happen, and San Diego continually doing stupid things to keep New England drives alive.

Environment Canada:

St. John's and vicinity

3:49 PM NST Saturday 6 January 2007
Wind warning for
St. John's and vicinity issued

West winds gusting to 120 km/h will develop Sunday morning.

This is a warning that potentially damaging winds are expected in these regions. Monitor weather conditions..Listen for updated statements.

A cold front will sweep across Newfoundland on Sunday. Strong west winds behind the front will gust to 120 km/h over portions of the south coast and east coasts.

They weren't kidding.