Bloodthirsty Liberal

That was then:

This is now:

“Constellation is dead,” the source told AFP on condition of anonymity, referring to a program that envisioned returning to the moon by 2020 and using Earth’s nearest neighbour as a base for manned expeditions to Mars…

Reports added that the US space agency will work on finding a commercial solution to ferrying US astronauts to the International Space Station after the scheduled end of NASA’s shuttle program in September 2010.

Astronauts will be able to hitch rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, but the United States will need a commercial alternative if Congress approves White House plans to scrap development of a successor to the shuttle program.

Put me down as agnostic. We get so much science from unmanned space missions (we’ve found water on Mars and the moon without benefit of humans on hand) that the geometric increase in cost to add people to the missions can hardly be worth it.

I get the value of human missions—the science, the technological advantages of low gravity—I just accept that there’s a valid debate. I think I even questioned President Bush’s doubling-down on human space flight when there was so much to be learned (for so much less money) from unmanned missions.

And there’s nothing wrong with a little competition from the private sector.

But canceling human space flight is one thing. What are they replacing it with? What is the vision?

In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change – and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the solar system possible.

There you go: that’s our mission. From “we choose to go to the moon” to “I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn for sale”.

I would welcome NASA’s free and independent scientific inquiry into the issue, but that’s the last thing it would bring:

The real reason is that liberals have long viewed NASA as a global warming research entity rather than the exploration agency that President John F. Kennedy ably set on a course for the stars. And this is despite the recent discoveries that NASA’s global warming leaders, such as James Hansen, may have been manipulating data to suit their political needs for some time. While exploration enthusiasts wanted to see rockets lift for the heavens, environmentalists wanted to see satellites watching ice caps. President Obama will most likely face stiff congressional opposition from both sides of the aisle if he continues on this path towards charging NASA with a purely Earth science mission.

He’s politicized everything else, why not the Sea of Tranquility?

The most important woman in medical history

A HeLa cell splitting into two new cells. The green spots are chromosomes

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor woman with a middle-school education, made one of the greatest medical contributions ever. Her cells, taken from a cervical-cancer biopsy, became the first immortal human cell line—the cells reproduce infinitely in a lab. Although other immortal lines have since been established, Lacks’s “HeLa” cells are the standard in labs around the world. Together they outweigh 100 Empire State Buildings and could circle the equator three times. This month, PopSci contributor Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, tells the story behind the woman who revolutionized modern medicine. Here, five reasons we should all thank Henrietta Lacks.

1. Before HeLa cells, scientists spent more time trying to keep cells alive than performing actual research on the cells. An endless supply of HeLa cells freed up time for discovery.

2. In 1952, the worst year of the polio epidemic, HeLa cells were used to test the vaccine that protected millions.

3. Some cells in Lacks’s tissue sample behaved differently than others. Scientists learned to isolate one specific cell, multiply it, and start a cell line. Isolating one cell and keeping it alive is the basic technique for cloning and in-vitro fertilization.

4. A scientist accidentally poured a chemical on a HeLa cell that spread out its tangled chromosomes. Later on, scientists used this technique to determine that humans have 46 chromosomes—23 pairs—not 48, which provided the basis for making several types of genetic diagnoses.

5. It was discovered that Lacks’s cancerous cells used an enzyme called telomerase to repair their DNA, allowing them, and other types of cancer cells, to function when normal cells would have died. Anti-cancer drugs that work against this enzyme are currently in early clinical trials.

I will be reading that book!

- Aggie

This will take a minute. Sorry, but bear with me.

Took the Bloodthirsty Bairns to Boston’s Science Museum (me and the rest of humanity), and we took in a couple of live presentations. One was on the Top 10 science stories of the year (science as it effects society, to be specific, which ought to set alarm bells off). To be sure, the Copenhagen Conference was among the stories, even though no science was conducted there (in fact, it was as anti-scientific as you can get), and the presenter cheerfully admitted little of substance was accomplished.

But another story was about Titanoboa, with whom I was not familiar. You neither? Let me introduce you:

This big hunk of snake was over 40 feet long over three feet wide. For comparison, the largest modern snake is the reticulated python, which approaches 30 feet, but limply hangs its serpentine head in shame when it comes to thickness:

Anaconda vs. Titanoboa

All very interesting, BTL, but what has a [bleeping] big snake got to do with global warming? Here ya go.

The presenter sweetly informed us that scientists had never believed a snake of that size was possible. They are cold-blooded little buggers, and need an environment warm enough to support their metabolism. Big snake means hot earth—a whole hell of a lot hotter than now, or than we thought it was then. Try 90F+ as an average.

I don’t think she was even aware of the irony of her report that the earth has been far hotter, and that we had no clue about how much hotter until we actually found evidence.

But that’s how science works, or is supposed to. One theory fits the available data, but undergoes revision—or is tossed out entirely—with new discoveries. Whatever “truth” there is in global warming (I’m a skeptic; I don’t know), there is no science. Not according to the process defined above. None. It’s as dead as a dodo, or a titanoboa.

PS: Not that you asked, but the average temperature in Boston for 2009 was 50.9F, 0.8F below normal. The mean temperature was 212 degrees below normal. I’m just sayin’.

Somewhere between the ice caps and the polar bears and the sea levels in the list of things over which to lose sleep come the glaciers.

Bjorn Lomborg does some unconventional thinking:

The lack of water in the shadow of the Himalayas may seem like a strong argument for drastic, short-term reductions in carbon emissions. Indeed, the plight of people like the Bishwokarmas has been used by Al Gore and other campaigners to argue for just such cuts. Climate activists argue that there is a link between melting glaciers in the Himalayas and water shortages elsewhere.

On the surface, this makes sense. But when we dig deeper, we find that the Himalaya glaciers are difficult even for scientists to understand. Most suggestions of rapid melting are based on observations of a small handful of India’s 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers. A comprehensive report in November by senior glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, released by the Indian government, looked more broadly and found that many of these glaciers are stable or have even advanced, and that the rate of retreat for many others has slowed recently.

Jeffrey S. Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona, declared in the Nov. 13 issue of Science that these “extremely provocative” findings were “consistent with what I have learned independently,” while in the same issue of the magazine Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist at Wilfrid Laurier University, agreed that “there is no evidence” to support the suggestion that the glaciers are disappearing quickly.

But what about the water shortage?

When glaciers thicken and expand, the summer runoff into rivers decreases. In other words, when climate change does increase glacial melting, the flow of water to poor people like the Bishwokarmas will increase for several decades.

The reason glacial runoff is decreasing is because the glaciers are not melting, not because they are.

As the Climategate scandal confirms, it’s hard even to have a discussion when we can’t agree on the basic facts—or when the basic facts are buried and deleted.

And our president blunders on, obtusely.

The Global Warming hucksters just followed the wisdom of the great philosopher Liberty Valance: when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Nothing about the revelations surprises me. I have maintained email correspondence with most of these scientists for many years, and I know several personally. I long ago realized that they were faking the whole exercise.

When you enter into a debate with any of them, they always stop cold when you ask an awkward question. This applies even when you write to a government department or a member of Parliament. I and many of my friends have grown accustomed to our failure to publish and to lecture, and to the rejection of our comments submitted prior to every IPCC report.

But only recently did I realize that I had evidence of their fraud in my possession almost from the birth of my interest in the subject.

I had copies of these two papers in 1990:

…

The first paper has been the major evidence presented by Jones in all of the IPCC reports to dismiss the influence of urban change on the temperature measurements, and also has been used as an excuse for the failure to mention most of the unequivocal evidence that such urban effects exist. The paper was even dragged out again for the 2007 IPCC report.

The second paper, which shared authors Wang and Karl from the first paper, used the very same data from China which the first paper used to demonstrate the absence of urban influence — yet instead concluded that same data to be proof of the existence of urban influence.

Anthropogenic global warming is only a theory, and theories last only as long as they are supported by data, facts, observations. The ice caps may or may not be melting, the pine forests may or may not be dying—but what is absolutely indisputable is that the foundation of the theory is eroding like the beaches, melting like the glaciers, evaporating like the oases. It’s back to square one, or it ought to be.

And its proponents have only themselves to blame.

Isn’t he inspiring? Wow.

Sadly, Ben’s cancer returned and he passed away just shy of his seventeenth birthday.

- Aggie

We live in a sci-fi novel

SEATTLE, Washington (CNN) — A wiry, slightly hunched man presses in a few numbers, the electronic lock gives way with a beep and the group presses into the crowded laboratory, plastered with ominous warnings about toxins and biohazards.
Breathing a small amount of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas put this mouse into a state that looked much like death.

Guiding the visitors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is Mark Roth, a 50-year-old biologist with a tall forehead, thinning red hair and a perpetual wry smile. He asks his assistant, Jennifer Blackwood, if the rat is ready. It is. She turns a dial, and the sealed enclosure starts to fill with poison gas — hydrogen sulfide. An ounce could kill dozens of people.

The rat sniffs the air a few times, and within a minute, his naturally twitchy movements are almost still. On a monitor that shows his rate of breathing, the lines look like a steep mountain slope, going down.

At first glance, that looks bad. We need oxygen to live. If you don’t get it for several minutes — for example, if you suffer cardiac arrest or a bad gunshot wound — you die. But something else is going on inside this rat. He isn’t dead, isn’t dying. The reason why, some people think, is the future of emergency medicine.

You see, Roth thinks he’s figured out the puzzle. “While it’s true we need oxygen to live, it’s also a toxin,” he explains. Scientists are starting to understand that death isn’t caused by oxygen deprivation itself, but by a chain of damaging chemical reactions that are triggered by sharply dropping oxygen levels.

The thing is, those reactions require the presence of some oxygen. Hydrogen sulfide takes the place of oxygen, preventing those reactions from taking place. No chain reaction, no cell death. The patient lives.

Roth’s work was inspired in part by personal tragedy. In 1995, his world was turned upside down when his new daughter, Hannah, died after a year of painful medical problems. After that, he decided to go for broke — to try to tackle something big. “It focuses the mind, when certain things happen to people, and it certainly focused mine.” Read more about ways to cheat death

Wow.

- Aggie

Two Americans and an Israeli

About how it should be.

Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for mapping ribosomes, the protein-producing factories within cells, at the atomic level.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life and has helped researchers develop antibiotic cures for various diseases.

Yonath is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the prize.

This year’s three laureates all generated three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes.

“These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the academy said in its announcement.

“All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome,” the academy said.

Way cool.

- Aggie

Nearly forty-five thousand times (or whatever):

The United States stands alone among industrialized nations in not providing health coverage to all of its citizens. Currently, 46 million Americans lack health coverage.1 Despite repeated attempts to expand health insurance, uninsurance remains commonplace among US adults.

Health insurance facilitates access to health care services and helps protect against the high costs of catastrophic illness. Relative to the uninsured, insured Americans are more likely to obtain recommended screening and care for chronic conditions and are less likely to suffer undiagnosed chronic conditions or to receive substandard medical care. Numerous investigators have found an association between uninsurance and death.

…

Lack of health insurance is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths per year in the United States, more than those caused by kidney disease.

No [bleep], really?

No, [bleep]. Really:

Mr. Milloy, founder and publisher of Junkscience.com and co-founder and portfolio manger for the Free Enterprise Fund, said the study was created to boost President Obama’s health care agenda. Mr. Milloy reminded that Mr. Obama recently told Congress people would die if they didn’t have insurance.

“Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing,” Mr. Obama said in his Sept. 9 address. “Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it most. And more will die as a result. We know these things to be true.”

Mr. Milloy believes the study will give Mr. Obama more specific numbers to use in order to ramp up public support for his plan.

“They are trying to create these factoids that they can beat opponents over the head with,” Mr. Milloy said. “They interviewed 9,000 people between 1988 and 1994 and asked, ‘Do you have health insurance?’ and if you die at some point in the future, they assume your death was caused by the fact you didn’t have insurance during that time you were interviewed.”

“That kind of stuff is classic junk science,” Mr. Milloy added.

John C. Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, agreed that the study was flawed. “The subjects were interviewed only once and the study tries to link their insurance status at that time to mortality a decade later. Yet over the period, the authors have no idea whether subjects were insured or uninsured, what kind of medical care they received, or even cause of death,” he said in a statement.

NPCA noted that a “more careful study” completed by the Congressional Budget Office found that low-income people without insurance had a 3 percent higher chance of death, but found no difference among higher income earners.

It’s not even junk science; it’s just plain lies. Which didn’t stop the media from reporting it without question.

This kind of crap is just constant from this administration. Charles Krauthammer doesn’t think President Obama is a liar, but I can’t say I see much of a difference:

Obama doesn’t lie. He merely elides, gliding from one dubious assertion to another. … He implies, he misdirects, he misleads — so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness. … The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot.

When we describe liberal fascism, this is what we mean

This is taken from a book, written by Barack Obama’s science czar, back in 1977 (with two other authors). The “climate scare” in those days was overpopulation. I want readers to know that I first became aware of this information via Little Green Footballs. Since I assume our readers scan a lot of websites, I usually avoid linking to anything that I found on their main page, but this is just too important to neglect. Everyone should read and understand this. Go to the link to see scans from the original book, “Ecoscience”.

Page 837: Compulsory abortions would be legal
Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
As noted in the FrontPage article cited above, Holdren “hides behind the passive voice” in this passage, by saying “it has been concluded.” Really? By whom? By the authors of the book, that’s whom. What Holdren’s really saying here is, “I have determined that there’s nothing unconstitutional about laws which would force women to abort their babies.” And as we will see later, although Holdren bemoans the fact that most people think there’s no need for such laws, he and his co-authors believe that the population crisis is so severe that the time has indeed come for “compulsory population-control laws.” In fact, they spend the entire book arguing that “the population crisis” has already become “sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Page 786: Single mothers should have their babies taken away by the government; or they could be forced to have abortions
One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.
Holdren and his co-authors once again speculate about unbelievably draconian solutions to what they feel is an overpopulation crisis. But what’s especially disturbing is not that Holdren has merely made these proposals — wrenching babies from their mothers’ arms and giving them away; compelling single mothers to prove in court that they would be good parents; and forcing women to have abortions, whether they wanted to or not — but that he does so in such a dispassionate, bureaucratic way. Don’t be fooled by the innocuous and “level-headed” tone he takes: the proposals are nightmarish, however euphemistically they are expressed.

Holdren seems to have no grasp of the emotional bond between mother and child, and the soul-crushing trauma many women have felt throughout history when their babies were taken away from them involuntarily.

This kind of clinical, almost robotic discussion of laws that would affect millions of people at the most personal possible level is deeply unsettling, and the kind of attitude that gives scientists a bad name. I’m reminded of the phrase “banality of evil.”

Not that it matters, but I myself am “pro-choice” — i.e. I think that abortion should not be illegal. But that doesn’t mean I’m pro-abortion — I don’t particularly like abortions, but I do believe women should be allowed the choice to have them. But John Holdren here proposes to take away that choice — to force women to have abortions. One doesn’t need to be a “pro-life” activist to see the horror of this proposal — people on all sides of the political spectrum should be outraged. My objection to forced abortion is not so much to protect the embryo, but rather to protect the mother from undergoing a medical procedure against her will. And not just any medical procedure, but one which she herself (regardless of my views) may find particularly immoral or traumatic.

There’s a bumper sticker that’s popular in liberal areas which says: “Against abortion? Then don’t have one.” Well, John Holdren wants to MAKE you have one, whether you’re against it or not.

Page 787-8: Mass sterilization of humans though drugs in the water supply is OK as long as it doesn’t harm livestock
Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

There’s more. Seriously, go to the link. It is important to understand that this sort of disregard for human life is as much a Left-wing problem as it is a Right-wing problem. In fact, the Nazis took most of their ideas from the communist party. These ideas - forced sterilization, etc. - were practiced in the early part of the 20th century and encouraged by social workers as well as academics, judges, etc. This puts Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent remark about Roe v. Wade into context, doesn’t it? Furthermore, this book was published in 1977, just 30 years, give or take, after the Holocaust. It demonstrates that people believe that they are so much smarter than everyone else, so superior, that they can make life or death decisions.

- Aggie