Monthly Archives: January 2013

Baby’s First Mosh Pit

I like going to concerts every once in a while.  It reminds me of how much I dislike going to concerts.  Unless, of course, we’re talking about Osaka Orangeade Concern! Bring them back, bring them back! (Know your audience.)  It’s not because I dislike the music that I hate concerts.  It’s because concerts are mostly just noise.  If you don’t know the lyrics, you’re lost because you can’t hear a word.  I was able to hear one word all night last night and that was “Chicago”.  I just don’t understand paying money for something when the music sounds so much better at home.

Pop quiz, hotshot.  How do you get 4,500 white people to congregate in one place?  Throw a Flogging Molly concert, apparently.  I have never seen a more homogenous mass of humanity since the Tea Party rallies.  What is it about Celtic punk music with its foot stomping beats and its mosh pits filled with shaved headed, jackboot wearing, tattooed, young white kids that keep people of color away?  Oh…

I usually stay as far away from mosh pits as possible when attending a concert.  This time, though, the mosh pit opened up right next to me.  There is a really strange honor code that goes on in a mosh pit.  The goal seems to be to flail around wildly and run into other people as much as possible and as hard as possible.  People on the sides of the mosh pit are responsible for pushing the moshers back into the pit.  And by pushing, I mean elbowing.  When someone inevitably falls down, though, a fellow mosher is usually there in no time flat to help the man up.  Its as if they want to hurt each other as much as possible but only if they are standing.

The concert was also attended by the two year old godson of the lead singer, Dave King.  I can only assume that his parents really don’t want him to hear anything past five years old.

The Streak Is Over

Chicago officially had 1.1″ inches of snow today.  That means the new record for longest number of days without at least an inch of snow will stand at 335 days.  For now.

Since it didn’t make it to an inch of snow where I live, I am going to say that the streak hasn’t been broken.  Who does O’Hare Airport think he is pretending to be the official weather station of Chicago?  I declare the official weather station to be my deck!

What Is In The Drinking Water Of The Southwest?

Strange, horrible things are afoot in our beloved Southwest States.  Politicians are attempting to pass some really poorly written bills or they are trying their best to keep women and atheists down.

First up, New Mexico.  There, a Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would make it illegal for a woman who was raped to get an abortion.  That is, sadly, not surprising.  Stuff like this bill are happening more and more.  What is surprising is the reasoning.  You see, having an abortion would be tampering with evidence.  There’s no other way for the state to know a woman was raped unless she can bring the baby to term apparently.  The representative in question, Cathrynn Brown, claims that the bill is actually meant to deter sex offenders.  Because no rapist wants to have to take care of a rape-baby I guess.  I’m sure they’re totally able to think that far into the future.  She’s doing this to bring men to justice!  This is SO going to protect women!  Look at you women being all protected and stuff!

Next, we have Arizona.  Ah, Arizona, the new place for crazy.  A bill was proposed there by a Republican law maker that would require every graduating high schooler to recite an oath before getting their diploma.  Here’s the oath:

I, _______, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; So help me God.

Yeah, that’s right, under this bill high schoolers will be required to swear an oath to god in order to graduate.  Eff you, atheists!  You probably don’t believe in the Constitution anyway.  As Hemant Mehta mentions in the above link:

It’s bad enough the Republicans are demanding loyalty of the kind normally reserved for members of Congress and beyond — but there’s also no way I would say those last four words, and the current text of the legislation does not allow for any alternatives.

In other words, if this bill were to become a law, atheists would either not be allowed to graduate… or they would be forced to lie so they could graduate. Neither option is acceptable.

Amazing.

Government Spending Is Down Under Obama

Quick, name the presidents who have presided over the lowering of total government spending in the last two decades.  Hint: There’s only one.  Second Hint: His name is in the title of this post.  If you’re Republican, you probably still guessed Ronald Regan.  You would be wrong.  Boy, would you be wrong.  The answer is Barack Obama.

It’s not much.  A measly $80 billion dollar.  But remember, Obama has proposed hundreds of billions of other cuts that Congress (read Republicans) has rejected because he wanted to include tax increases as well.  More proof that Republicans only care about deficit reduction when they’re trying to get people to vote for them.

This Is Why Single Payer Health Care Is So Important

Here are two charts that should be in every health care discussion.  Yet, they are never really talked about by either side.

The United States government spends around 30% more per capita on health care than Canada does.  This despite the fact that the United States government doesn’t cover all of its citizens while Canada does.  For every man, woman, and child in the United States, our government spends close to $4,000 on health care.  For every man, woman, and child in Canada, their government spends close to $3,100 on health care.  The difference is that Canada negotiates for drugs and we do not.  Canada also had a single point of payment for health care bills while we have thousands of them each with their own rules and regulations that providers need to navigate.  There are other savings involved, but these are the big ones.  We’d be wise to implement both of these ideas here.

That’s public spending, but what about private spending?  We in the United States spend around $4,200 per person while Canada spends around $1,300 per person.  We spend over 20% more than Canada on private health care costs!

And how are things going to change under Obamacare?  As Ezra Klein says:

Obamacare will mostly fix the universal coverage problem, but it won’t fix the cost problem. The reason other countries spend less is that their governments set the prices, and they set them low. The reason we spend so much more is largely because our prices are higher, and by leaving private insurers and medical providers in charge of deciding prices, we’re not doing anything about that in Obamacare.

As I have always said, Obamacare is a bag of crap left on your doorstep.  It’s still better than the flaming bag of crap that is our health care system without Obamacare.  Here’s to hoping we get the purchasing power of the Canadian government and its fantastic savings in the United States soon!

Still Classy, Virginia

When last we left Virginia, the Republicans were passing a redistricting bill under cover of Presidential inauguration.  Looks like that was just step one of their plan to disenfranchise voters who are not white males.

The party of John Calhoun‘s (Ta-Nehisi Coates link!) next step is to make sure someone like President Obama can never be elected in Virginia again.  You see, Obama had the gall of winning Virginia twice.  He did this by winning the popular vote in Virginia.  And that just won’t do.  No sir, not at all.  Now that they have gerrymandered the district boundaries to all but guarantee a Republican majority, they need to guarantee a Republican president too.  To do this, they plan on splitting their electoral votes by whoever wins the district instead of a winner-takes-all electoral system.  Ta da!  Virginia now will give more electoral votes to a Republican instead of a Democrat even though the Democrat had a lot more votes.  As Ta-Nehisi Coates says,  “If the GOP can’t convince enough people to win, it will rig the rules so that certain people matter less than others.”

And by “certain people”, we, of course, mean non-whites.  More Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Efforts to disenfranchise black people, have always been most successful when they worked indirectly. After the initial post-war Black Codes were repealed, white supremacists turned to less obvious modes of discrimination — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests.
These were cloaked under a colorblind argument — “We don’t discriminate against black people, we discriminate against people who can’t read the Constitution.” By “read the Constitution,” they meant “recite the Bill of Rights by heart.” And they’d ask you to do this after reducing your school funding to a pittance. I say this to point that this is not a “new” racism. This is how it scheme went before the civil-rights movement, and this is how the scheme works today.
To see the only other major political party in the country effectively giving up on convincing voters, and instead embarking on a strategy of disenfranchisement is bad sign for American democracy. There is nothing gleeful in this.

Nothing gleeful, indeed.

South Carolina kneels and kisses the hand of the new master.

Bas-Relief Great Lakes

Weather can often provide us with images of striking beauty.  Often, the most beautiful pictures come from the deadliest of storms.  Here, though, we have an image of the Great Lakes in the middle of a cold snap.  That is just gorgeous.  Notice how the lakes appear almost hollow.  The other cool thing is how the clouds look like streamers being blown by the wind.  That phenomenon is called “cloud streets”.  Follow the link for a great explanation of what is going on to make those clouds.

All those clouds are producing large amounts of lake effect snow.  How large?  Up to 38″ in some parts!  After the hottest year on record, the Great Lakes are unusually warm.  Cold air blowing over warm water is a recipe for even more broken records.  More broken records equals more extreme weather.  More extreme weather means more global warming.

OMG! Vaccines Are Eviiiiiiiiillllllll!

Back in the heyday of the Swine Flu pandemic when there was a very distinct possibility that we would have a pandemic of Spanish Flu proportions on our hands, Sweeden and Finland made the choice to speed up approval of an H1N1 vaccine called Pandemrix.  Soon afterwards, they saw a marked increase of narcolepsy cases in children under the age of 20.  Narcolepsy is a pretty rare condition so even a slight increase is noticeable.  It is looking likely that Pandemrix is responsible for this increase.

In hindsight, it was a pretty bad idea to rush Pandemrix.  Remember, though, the 2009 Swine Flu was a pretty scary event.  It had many of the same features of the Spanish Flu.  It attacked and killed healthy young adults, whereas regular flu mainly kills only the elderly and immune suppressed.  It just happened that, for whatever combination of reasons, the Swine Flu never really spread that much.  Only 18,000 or so confirmed deaths were reported.  Compare this to the 250,000 deaths annually from the regular flu.  Sweden and Finland made an educated decision based on the information they had at the time.  That decision just happened to be wrong.

That would be the end of the story if it weren’t for the narcolepsy increase.  Despite the headlines, this increase isn’t that big of a deal.  We are talking about one incident in every 27,800 vaccines administered.  That’s a 0.0036% chance of narcolepsy.  Pandemrix was also used in other European countries, but there isn’t enough data yet to tell if there was also an increase of narcolepsy there as well.

Scientists are now trying to find out how the narcoleptic events occurred.  It could be that Scandinavians have genetics that are more predisposed to narcolepsy.  It could be some environmental factors are in play.  We just don’t know.  All we know is that there is a causal link between narcolepsy onset and the Pandemrix vaccine in children.

Yes, it’s unfortunate that some children are getting narcolepsy from vaccines.  No, that doesn’t mean that vaccines are unsafe.  Vaccines do, sometimes, have severe side effects, though.  The chances of those side effects occurring are exponentially less than the chances of severe side effects from the disease they inoculate against.

Vaccines are safer.  Vaccines work.  Get your vaccines updated today.  You may not be saving your life, but you could be saving someone else’s.