Hipocrites

Reminds me of the scene in 'The Aviator' where they dragged Howard Hughes before the Senate. Even more priceless when it happens in real life. If only it happened more.

Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo

Interview with Dambisa Moyo:

You argue in your book "Dead Aid" that Western aid to Africa has not only perpetuated poverty but also worsened it, and you are perhaps the first African to request in book form that all development aid be halted within five years.
Think about it this way — China has 1.3 billion people, only 300 million of whom live like us, if you will, with Western living standards. There are a billion Chinese who are living in substandard conditions. Do you know anybody who feels sorry for China? Nobody.

...

Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.

What do you think has held back Africans?
I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption — historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty — and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.

If people want to help out, what do you think they should do with their money if not make donations?
Microfinance. Give people jobs.

...Go to the Internet and type in Kiva.org, where you can make a loan to an African entrepreneur.

...

Why didn’t you get a bond issue going in your native Zambia or other African countries?
Many politicians seem to have a lazy muscle. Issuing a bond would require that the president and the cabinet ministers go out and market their country. Why would they do that when they can just call up the World Bank and say, “Can I please have some money?”
...

For all your belief in the potential of capitalism, the free market is now in free fall and everyone is questioning the supposed wonders of the unregulated market.
I wish we questioned the aid model as much as we are questioning the capitalism model. Sometimes the most generous thing you can do is just say no.

Protests with a Plan

How to organize and plan a protest:

1. Incoherent messages are fine from the Assembly, but the primary organizers have to be organized. Home-made signs can be all over the place. The more the better. That’s fine. The color and signage look good on TV.

2. Create a theme - like “We want Senator So-and-So to resign for voting for this bill.” Or, “We want the Bill Repealed!” etc. Have a definitive purpose to your Assembly. A central theme will also help public speakers to focus. And don’t be afraid to personalize this. Put it on your Senators, Congress people, and the President. That’s what they are doing to anyone who objects. Remember, they made it personal first.

3. Speakers have to be prepared for the media. If you are an organizer, or the “face” of the event - take an hour to prepare. You don’t need to know everything about your cause. Just find 2 or 3 things - hard facts - you can point to and credibly say - this is wrong, here's how to make it better. It is critical. Not only have a primary message against something, have a message FOR something. People like leaders with solutions.

4. Pass out talking points, just in case Joe or Jane Protestor gets buttonholed by a reporter.

5. This is all about image. If you don’t present the media with a professional, organized and, unfortunately, scripted image, they are going to make their own, and it won’t be favorable.

6. Recruit some help to pack the area around people being interviewed for background. God love the guy in the crazy Uncle Sam suit, and you certainly need some comic relief, but these folks will quickly become THE story because they are colorful or controversial i.e., Good TV. Welcome their support. Maybe give them a minute on the mic. However, mainstream folks have to be the majority. Boring looking, and diverse Americans around the camera. No offense to anyone. Anytime a TV camera comes out, a certain number and type of attention seeker will flock to it. Now is the time for Grandma and Grandpa, the Plumber, the Young Executive, and the Homeschooling Mom to flock to the camera as background. Don’t be shy. Remember, how do you want your cause to be presented by the media? As crazies? Or as Concerned Neighbors?

7. Have an Agenda and a Time. We’re going to Assemble at this Time. We’re going to have a Sign-In Table. We’re going to have a Sign-Making Area. We’re going to have speakers at 10:30. We’re going to March to the Senator’s Office at this time and demand she resign. We’re going to end with Chants, and a Call-to-Action for the next Protest. That, and Protestors want to know what’s going on. If they become unsure, they leave. Organization wins, and it also intimidates the opposition. And the opposition is going to start showing up.

8. Share the Day’s Agenda with the Media. You have to create your own press. Sell it to them. They love good stories.

That’s it. Get a Message. And Get It Out.

UPDATED:

Be sure to have a signup sheet where people can put their emails and other contact information for future events.

Also, consider printing up some postcards addressed to your local Representative and Senators. They should say that they’re from the protest, and carry an organized, standard message. Get people to sign them, and solicit donations for postage, then mail them. Local mail from real constituents makes an impression.

Also, encourage them to contact local media after the event, and either compliment them on their coverage, or politely criticize it, as appropriate.

Adult Stem Cells Help AIDS / Leukemia Patient

Via Bloomberg:

A German AIDS patient was able to stop drugs he had been taking for 10 years after getting a transplant of stem cells from a donor with a rare gene variant known to resist the deadly disease. The transplant also cured his leukemia, researchers reported.

The stem cell donor was among the 1 percent of Caucasians who have the variant gene that lacks a section known as CCR5 that helps the AIDS virus enter a cell, according to a report today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Doctors in Berlin hoped that putting the donor’s stem cells in the patient would rebuild his immune system and blood cells so they would lack the CCR5 piece.

The results of the experiment may point researchers to a new way of controlling the AIDS virus HIV that doesn’t force patients to take drugs for the rest of their lives.

Roman History

Cicero said...

When politicians, enthusiastic to pose as the people's friends, bring forward bills providing for the distribution of property, they intend that the existing owners shall be driven from their homes. Or they propose to excuse borrowers from paying back their debts.

Men with those views undermine the very foundations on which our commonwealth depends. In the first place, they are shattering the harmony between one element in the State and another, a relationship which cannot possibly survive if debtors are excused from paying their creditor back the sums of money he is entitled to. Furthermore, all politicians who harbour such intentions are aiming a fatal blow at the whole principle of justice; for once rights of property are infringed, this principle is totally undermined.
...

The real answer to the problem is that we must make absolutely certain that private debts do not ever reach proportions which will constitute a national peril. There are various ways of ensuring this. But just to take the money away from the rich creditors and give the debtors something that does not belong to them is no solution at all. For the firmest possible guarantee of a country's security is sound credit...

So the men in charge of our national interests will do well to steer clear of the kind of liberality which involves robbing one man to give to another.

To bad the Roman Senate didn't listen to him.

First Malaria Vaccine on the Way

From PopSci:

A vaccine with a 53 percent success rate doesn’t normally call for a celebration. But when that means protecting one in every two African children from a disease that kills a kid every 30 seconds, those odds start looking better. “The impact is tremendous,” says Joe Cohen, inventor of the first malaria vaccine. “We could save hundreds of thousands of kids every year.”

This spring, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline will enroll 16,000 infants and toddlers, the groups most at risk, in what could be the largest malaria-vaccine trial to date in Africa, setting up labs in 11 hospitals in Kenya, Burkina Faso, Malawi and four other countries. The test follows on the success of recent small-scale studies in Kenya and Tanzania that reduced infection by 65 percent in infants.

Congratulations to GSK. I hope this pans out successfully.

Perspective

From blogger davefoulk.net:

Each bill of United States Currency weighs one gram... Let’s say we had a pile of one dollar bills….787 billion of them- same as the Stimulus Package. How much would that cash weigh?

86,759 TONS

That’s more than an Iowa class battleship.

Or put another way, according to Senator Lamar Alexander, (much better at numbers than me), if you spent a million dollars a week, starting the day Jesus Christ was born. You would still have money left over. And you could spend it on a new calculator because the old one just died of shock.

Actually, to correct my former Governor, if you spent EIGHT million dollars a week for 2009 years, you'd be around $8.35 billion. And we're not counting the interest on this debt that will most certainly send this bill's cost over a trillion dollars.

Life

Curing Disease with Nanotechnology

Inching towards clinical trials.

“Our lab is creating biological nano-machines,” says Dr. Peer. “These machines can target specific cells. In fact, we can target any protein that might be causing disease or disorder in the human body. This new invention treats the source, not the symptoms.” Dr. Peer’s recent paper reported on the device’s ability to target leukocytes (immune cells) in the guts of mice with ulcerative colitis. Calling his new invention a submarine, Dr. Peer has developed a nano-sized carrier which operates like a GPS system to locate and target cells. In the case of Crohn’s disease, for example, it will target overactive immune system cells in the gut. In other diseases such as cancer, the submarine can aim for and deliver material to specific cancer cells, leaving the surrounding healthy cells intact. While other researchers are working in the area of nano-medicine and drug delivery, Dr. Peer’s submarines are among the first to combine a drug candidate with a drug delivery system. As the submarines float through the body, they latch onto the target cell and deliver their payload, a drug based on RNAi. This new kind of drug can affect faulty RNA machinery and reprogram cells to operate in normal ways. In essence, RNAi can essentially restore health to diseased cells or cause cells to die (like in the case of cancer cells).…

A Pack or a Herd?

Amanda Ripley commenting on why there was no panic on the US Airways flight that splashed into the Hudson:

He asked again and again why people had not become violent and hysterical, until the survivor agreed it was shocking indeed.

The truth is, in almost every disaster I have studied, people treat each other with kindness and respect. Violence and panic are extremely rare. An instant camraderie springs up between strangers--on a sinking ship or a bombed-out subway car. That is the rule, not the exception.

After the terrorist bombings on the London transit system on July 7, 2005, which killed 52 people and wounded hundreds, some victims actually resisted leaving the tube station. “I needed the [others] for comfort,” one survivor explained to U.K. psychologist John Drury. “I felt better knowing that I was surrounded by people.”

One study of U.S. mining disasters found that miners tended to follow their groups even if they disagreed with the group’s decisions. Grown men trapped underground would rather make a potentially fatal decision than be left alone.

In other airplane crashes, passengers have risked their lives because they climbed over seats to regroup with the rest of their family before evacuating. In skyscraper fires, people making arduous journeys down hundreds of stairs will tend to insist that those entering the stairwell from lower floors go ahead of them. In fact, I’ve yet to meet a 9/11 survivor who didn’t help or receive help from a stranger on the way out of the towers.

Why don’t we turn into raving maniacs? Because it is in our interest to be nice to each other. Under threat, we need each other more than ever.

I don't disagree with her last comment, but I think there's more to it than that.

I suspect the likelyhood of someone living through a disaster, whether man-made or natural, are statistically lower today than at anytime in man's history. And when we do encounter disasters, they're substantially more survivable today than at any other time in our history.

However, it still doesn't hurt for a civilization's culture to set some expectations of what's acceptable or not. The phrase, "Women and children first!" wouldn't exist without the prevalence of the "me first" attitude. Woe unto us if the "me first"'s win the day. It can happen and would be a defining benchmark in our civilization's decline.

Rich People versus Government

All Government is Corrupt:

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, with about $60 billion in assets each, are America’s richest men. With all that money, what can they force us to do? Can they take our house to make room so that another person can build an auto dealership or a casino parking lot? Can they force us to pay money into the government-run retirement Ponzi scheme called Social Security? Can Buffett and Gates force us to bus our children to schools out of our neighborhood in the name of diversity? Unless they are granted power by politicians, rich people have little power to force us to do anything.

A GS-9, or a lowly municipal clerk, has far more life-and-death power over us. It’s they to whom we must turn to for permission to build a house, ply a trade, open a restaurant and myriad other activities. It’s government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption.

And to summarize what I've always said:

The only way to reduce corruption and money in Washington is to reduce the power politicians have over our lives.

Beatles "A Hard Day's Night" Chord Mystery Solved

Fourier transform to the rescue.

Grape Seed Extract Kills Leukemia Cells

Awesome:

More than three-quarters of laboratory leukemia cells exposed to an extract from grape seeds died within 24 hours, effectively killing themselves while leaving other cells unharmed, a new study shows.

University of Kentucky researchers say they found that the extract activates JNK, a protein that regulates the cell-signaling pathway the leads to cell death, or apoptosis.

Faster please.

Yawns Explained

It Cools Your Brain.

Brain Reading

WOW:

The advent of techniques like PET scans and functional MRI has enabled researchers to observe the brain in action with a precision that is unprecedented. One of the interesting aspects of these studies is that we can now actually perform a limited version of what might be called mind reading: identifying what's going on in the brain without having the owner of said brain describe it. In the latest development in the field of neuroimaging, researchers have watched the brain of someone watching an image, and were actually able to perform reasonable reconstructions of the image.

Your Government at Work

Every few weeks for nearly four years, the Secret Service screened the IDs of employees for a Maryland cleaning company before they entered the house of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the nation's top immigration official.

The company's owner says the workers sailed through the checks -- although some of them turned out to be illegal immigrants.

As reported by the Post, government in action in its most base form. Inept.

Multiple Kill Vehicle Test Successful

This is wicked looking. Congrats to Lockheed Space Systems Company:

In the event of an enemy missile launch, a carrier vehicle would be fired into space to unleash hordes of the weapons, which would then lock on to their targets and destroy them.

A video released by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) shows the MKV-L being tested the device at the National Hover Test Facility at Edwards Air Force Base, in California.

It shows the gadget hovering and shifting from left to right under the power of tiny rockets as it mimics how it would track a missile.

Video at the link.

Malaria Vaccine Promises Success

Good news:

Results from two phase II trials in Africa show that a new malaria vaccine is effective at preventing both infection and the mosquito-borne disease itself in infants and children.

"Malaria is killing almost 1 million people, mostly African children, every year," Dr. Christian Loucq, director of the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, said during a morning teleconference Monday. "Clearly, the world needs a safe and effective malaria vaccine."

Why Wal-Mart is Better than FEMA

In a natural disaster? Go to Wal-Mart. An indepth study on Wal-Mart's response to hurricanes versus that of state and federal agencies.

“In general, the environment of market competition is superior to that of the political process in providing both the knowledge necessary to respond to people’s needs and the profit incentive to act on that knowledge in ways that create value. Within the political process, agencies face different incentives, as they do not operate by profit and loss. Instead, government agencies are more often concerned with pleasing other political actors and finding ways to expand their budgets and power. This often makes them less sensitive to the direct needs of the people who rely on them to get specific tasks accomplished...

“In addition, the absence of a competitive market for their product means that, in general, government agencies face knowledge problems in determining what their output should be and how best to produce it. However, government agencies with a more decentralized structure that puts them in more direct contact with the people they serve may be able to overcome these knowledge problems. Larger, more centralized government agencies will lack the incentives of firms in competitive markets as well as the knowledge provided by true market prices, but more decentralized ones may do better along the latter dimension.

Missile Defense Test Success

Congratulations to Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrupp on this well deserved accomplishment.

The Boeing Company, working with industry teammates and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, today completed the successful intercept of a target warhead in the most challenging test to date of the United States' only long-range ballistic missile defense system.

"This test demonstrated that the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system can defeat a long-range ballistic missile target," said Scott Fancher, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems. "This intercept is further proof that GMD can provide our nation with an effective defense against the threat of long-range ballistic missiles."

One step closer to system success and a much needed victory for continued funding under the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, PM has an in-depth article on the entire system:

To learn more about missile defense, PM visited an Alaskan Army base where soldiers keep defensive missiles locked and loaded in case a rogue nation makes its move. But will the system work?