Eideard

We haven’t the time to speak to our little brown brothers

It was billed, in part, as a forum for the 2012 Republican presidential field to speak directly to Hispanics — a replica of the vaunted Conservative Political Action Conference, but tailored to the fastest-growing slice of the electorate.

Yet, when former Gov. Jeb Bush, former Sen. Norm Coleman and former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez open the first Hispanic Leadership Network conference next month in Miami, the only potential presidential candidate confirmed to attend — so far — is Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney declined the invite. So did South Dakota Sen. John Thune, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Texas Gov Rick Perry.

Newt Gingrich is “amenable” to attending but hasn’t committed yet, his spokesman said.

And others in the group, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, didn’t respond to inquiries from POLITICO.

A poor showing could raise doubts about the commitment of Republicans to court Hispanics, one of the open-ended questions of the 2012 presidential cycle.

Jim Landry, spokesman for the American Action Network, which created the Hispanic group, said the organizers extended invites to the entire presidential field, but it was never the main reason for holding the conference…

Yet another “grassroots” organization created, bought and paid for by Republican corporate Anglos. Ready to assume the mantle of “spontaneous” conservative resurgence, an Hispanic Tea Party. Hogwash!

Republicans have no concern about grassroots resentment over bigots who ignore the needs and desires of minority populations. Lip service ain’t gonna cut it on the battlefield of the next presidential election in 2012. Or 2016 for that matter.

Emmanuel celebrates in a Chicago bar

The Chicago elections board underscored an important rule for politicians Thursday when it cleared Rahm Emanuel to run for mayor, which is that it’s fine to rent your house out to a complete stranger, as long as you leave your wife’s wedding dress stuffed under the stairs, or maybe just some old pasta in the refrigerator.

But for all the farce surrounding the question of Mr. Emanuel’s residency, the elections board, whether or not it intended to, also affirmed a serious and more important principle with its ruling — that Washington is in fact an extension of the rest of the country, rather than some alien territory cloistered within it.

This, of course, was not the most obvious issue to surface in the proceedings to decide whether Mr. Emanuel really was or was not a Chicagoan, a sideshow that must have made the former White House chief of staff pine for the relative sanity of Congress. Led by the man who rented Mr. Emanuel’s house from him and who had himself threatened to run for mayor, about 30 citizens questioned Mr. Emanuel, under oath, about whether he had actually left behind any boxes in the basement that might prove his continued residency…

“Were you ever a member of the Communist Party?” one of the interrogators jokingly asked Mr. Emanuel, tacitly acknowledging, it seemed, the ludicrous nature of the entire hearing.

Illustrating the stupidity and core values of populist opposition to this union called the United States, describing teabagger ideology by repeating the ironic question characteristic of paranoid nutballs years back in our poltical history of fear.

And yet there was a serious cultural subtext to the debate, beyond the question of whether Mr. Emanuel, a lifelong Chicagoan, is enough of a Chicagoan to run the city. At issue was also the larger question of whether someone who goes to Washington to serve his community and his country, as Mr. Emanuel did as both a congressman and a presidential aide, can be seen as having left his home to take up residence somewhere else.

This was essentially the argument [countered] by Mr. Emanuel’s lawyer, Kevin Forde, who pointed out that the residency law made allowances for people who were away “on business of the United States,” like soldiers stationed overseas. “If being chief of staff for the president of the United States isn’t in the service of the United States, I don’t know what is,” he said…

As it is, assuming the decision survives an inevitable appeal, Mr. Emanuel, who is leading handily in public polls, can now look forward to the election. After that, perhaps, he can return to his house and unpack the contents of those disputed storage boxes, the accumulated this-and-that of your average American life.

The appeal is guaranteed by sufficient funding for delay by those in high places and low whose singular interpretation of Constitutional Law holds that holy writ supersedes legal precedent, secession remains a viable alternative to federal decision-making, dedication to parochialism in education, religion and jurisprudence is what is lacking in government.

A shipment of nuclear fuel has arrived in Russia after a top-secret international operation to remove it from Serbia, where it was feared terrorists could seize it to make a nuclear or dirty bomb.

In the dead of night, armed men in balaclavas surround a long convoy of trucks in the woods just outside Belgrade. Radios crackle as they prepare for a long journey.

Their mission is to escort a dangerous cargo, the kind terrorists would dearly like to get their hands on.

Inside blue, bomb-proof, fire-proof containers on the trucks are 2.5 tons of radioactive material, including 13kg of highly enriched uranium that could be used for a nuclear weapon.

This is the largest shipment of its type ever made, and will clear Serbia of all its civilian highly enriched uranium…

RTFA. A dark, convoluted tale of an equally dark, circuitous journey.

Meanwhile, enough grunt work remains for decades to clean-up the crap produced to satisfy Cold Warriors and corporate profiteers.

A scientific paper written by British schoolchildren about bees’ ability to recognize colour patterns and spatial characteristics has appeared in a prominent journal. The paper, published Wednesday in Biology Letters, includes handwritten data tables and coloured-pencil diagrams.

“We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from,” the paper said. “We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”

The paper was prepared by 28 boys and girls, ages eight to 10, at Blackawton Primary School in the village of Blackawton, Devon, England, under the direction of their head teacher, Dave Strudwick, and Beau Lotto, a researcher at the University College London’s Institute of Ophthalmology.

“The aim was to get it published because it was an original finding, not because it was written by kids,” Lotto said Wednesday. “I wanted to challenge the idea of science and who can do science and who can make a genuine contribution to science.”

The research found that bumblebees looking for food seem to take into account colour patterns and the placement of food sources representing flowers. It showed that some bees chose the “flowers” based on a familiar colour pattern while others chose them based on where the food sources were located after taking both colour and location into account…

He insisted that because the paper was written by kids, it was something the scientific journals needed to take into account when evaluating it. Unlike other scientific papers, it doesn’t include any detailed statistical analyses or references, but Lotto believes those are not crucial elements.

Finally, he got the paper reviewed by four independent researchers, and submitted the reviews and the paper together to Biology Letters. He suggested publishing the paper with a commentary from two of the reviewers.

Brian Charlesworth, editor of Biology Letters, admitted it was difficult to persuade scientists to review the paper, but he believes the journal’s extra efforts were worthwhile.

“We did feel that it’s something we want to involve people in — seeing that science is something that’s fun to do, not just something you read about in text books,” Charlesworth said. “We feel quite pleased for having done this…”

“The experiments are modest in scope but cleverly and correctly designed and carried out,” it said. “The resulting article is a remarkable demonstration of how natural scientific reasoning is for us.”

Bravo!

East Gallery of the Denisova Cave

A 30,000-year-old finger bone found in a cave in southern Siberia came from a young girl who was neither an early modern human nor a Neanderthal, but belonged to a previously unknown group of human relatives who may have lived throughout much of Asia during the late Pleistocene epoch. Although the fossil evidence consists of just a bone fragment and one tooth, DNA extracted from the bone has yielded a draft genome sequence, enabling scientists to reach some startling conclusions about this extinct branch of the human family tree, called “Denisovans” after the cave where the fossils were found…

By comparing the Denisovan genome sequence with the genomes of Neanderthals and modern humans, the researchers determined that the Denisovans were a sister group to the Neanderthals, descended from the same ancestral population that had separated earlier from the ancestors of present-day humans. The study also found surprising evidence of Denisovan gene sequences in modern-day Melanesians, suggesting that there was interbreeding between Denisovans and the ancestors of Melanesians, just as Neanderthals appear to have interbred with the ancestors of all modern-day non-Africans.

“The story now gets a bit more complicated,” said Richard Green, an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. “Instead of the clean story we used to have of modern humans migrating out of Africa and replacing Neanderthals, we now see these very intertwined story lines with more players and more interactions than we knew of before.”

The Denisovans appear to have been quite different both genetically and morphologically from Neanderthals and modern humans. The tooth found in the same cave as the finger bone shows a morphology that is distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans and resembles much older human ancestors, such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus. DNA analysis showed that the tooth and the finger bone came from different individuals in the same population.

It is not clear why fossil evidence had not already revealed the existence of this group of ancient human relatives. But Green noted that the finger bone was originally thought to be from an early modern human, and the tooth resembles those of other ancient human ancestors. “It could be that other samples are misclassified,” he said. “But now, by analyzing DNA, we can say more definitively what they are. It’s getting easier technically to do this, and it’s a great new way to extract information from fossil remains.”

Fascinating work. Think about this sort of research as a career or at least an avocation. Do your species some good with your spare time.

For most of us, the “placebo effect” is synonymous with the power of positive thinking; it works because you believe you’re taking a real drug. But a new study rattles this assumption.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School’s Osher Research Center and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have found that placebos work even when administered without the seemingly requisite deception…

Placebos—or dummy pills—are typically used in clinical trials as controls for potential new medications. Even though they contain no active ingredients, patients often respond to them. In fact, data on placebos is so compelling that many American physicians (one study estimates 50 percent) secretly give placebos to unsuspecting patients.

Because such “deception” is ethically questionable, HMS associate professor of medicine Ted Kaptchuk teamed up with colleagues at BIDMC to explore whether or not the power of placebos can be harnessed honestly and respectfully.

To do this, 80 patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) were divided into two groups: one group, the controls, received no treatment, while the other group received a regimen of placebos—honestly described as “like sugar pills”—which they were instructed to take twice daily.

“Not only did we make it absolutely clear that these pills had no active ingredient and were made from inert substances, but we actually had ‘placebo’ printed on the bottle,” says Kaptchuk. “We told the patients that they didn’t have to even believe in the placebo effect. Just take the pills.”

For a three-week period, the patients were monitored. By the end of the trial, nearly twice as many patients treated with the placebo reported adequate symptom relief as compared to the control group (59 percent vs. 35 percent). Also, on other outcome measures, patients taking the placebo doubled their rates of improvement to a degree roughly equivalent to the effects of the most powerful IBS medications…

The authors caution that this study is small and limited in scope and simply opens the door to the notion that placebos are effective even for the fully informed patient—a hypothesis that will need to be confirmed in larger trials.

Har!

I may take up the practice of psychosomatic medicine after all.

Father Christmas had a bad surprise in store on Thursday for a suspected Sicilian mafia member – an arrest for racketeering.

A policeman dressed as Father Christmas arrested the man in a sting operation as he was coming out of a shop where he had extracted some protection money.

“Father Christmas” dropped the bag of sweets that he was giving out and arrested 37-year-old Salvatore Politini, alleged to be a member of the Santapaola mafia clan in police footage shown on Italian television…

The shopkeeper had been allegedly forced to pay the mafia a protection racket of around 260 euros every month for 10 years.

The man arrested was carrying a ceramic plate and a panettone cake – believed to be payment in kind from other extortion victims.

I hope the shop owner was giving him the stale panettone.

Don’t forget a little grits and grease on the side!

Umm, no, at least not according to the latest results of a study on fish consumption and stroke. The survey found that people who live in the so-called “stroke belt” of the United States, which stretches from the Carolinas to Arkansas and Louisiana and where stroke rates are among the highest in the country, are less likely to eat the recommended two servings of fish per week. And when residents in these states do eat fish, they are more likely to have it in fried form.

That’s not a surprise, says the study’s lead author, Dr. Fadi Nahab, director of the stroke program at Emory University Hospital, given the popularity of fried foods in the South. But the results highlight one of the major contributors to the higher rates of stroke in the region, and that involves diet…

It turns out that most of the fish being consumed was fried, which negated its potential stroke-preventing benefits on several levels. First, as studies by researchers in Spain have found, the act of frying fish can cause fatty fish such as salmon, which is rich in healthy omega-3 fatty acids, to lose its beneficial oils; those oils get replaced with the often unhealthier oil in which the fish is fried. In addition, the types of fish that are normally fried, such as cod and other white fish, tend to be less dense in omega-3 fats.

“What we hope to highlight with our study is that it’s not just about having fish, but about how you prepare that fish,” says Nahab. “And it’s not about any kind of fish whatsoever, but having certain fish species that have more omega-3 fats, so if you’re going to have fish, it’s better to have fish like salmon, herring and mackerel that are much higher in omega-3 fats…”

Until then, the current study suggests that it’s not enough to simply eat fish, but to make sure that it’s cooked any way but fried. That may not be so easy to do in the South, but it could potentially shrink the girth of the stroke belt.

Shrinking any part of the average American girth is praiseworthy. Yes, including my own.

There are better – and worse – methods for deep-frying than are usually practiced at retail. But, the point made in general about just using healthier techniques makes the most sense.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

More than a quarter of the electricity generated in Scotland last year was produced from wind, hydro and other renewable sources.

Official figures showed the amount of renewable power increased by a fifth, while the total power generated in Scotland went up by 3%.

Scotland exported nearly a quarter of the total power produced…

Roseanna Cunningham, the environment and climate change minister, commented: “As Scotland faces a white Christmas, we are greening up our energy supply.

“Scotland is blessed with abundant natural energy sources, particularly in our seas, and today’s figures follow a steady trend towards Scotland’s energy becoming greener and cleaner”. She said 2010 had also been a “tremendous year” for the renewable power sector, with more wind power developments in the planning and construction pipeline.

She said Scotland was on course to meet its 2011 target of sourcing 31% of its electricity from renewable sources. The Scottish government recently uprated its targets to hit 80% by 2020.

Hand out a little credit where due. Brian Wilson got all this rolling when he was Cabinet Minister for Energy.

Whatever you may think of Brian’s dedication to Blair and Blairite politics, he got the Green direction in UK power production off the ground. Something that Blair probably wouldn’t have pressed for on his own.

IBM has been tapped by NATO to build a new cloud-based computing system designed to help the 28 member nations better use and share data.

Selected for the project by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT), Big Blue will be called upon to design and demonstrate a cloud-computing environment that would help the North Atlantic Treaty Organization plan and implement critical tasks, such as intelligence gathering, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

The goal is to see if NATO members can use a collaborative cloud to access data faster and make decisions more quickly…

The system will also need to be more secure, more scalable, and more cost-effective than the hodgepodge of systems used in the past…

That’s the bit that makes me chuckle over pundits who are heartsick and offended to death over cloud computing – because it may break down or be insecure. You mean like every other system already in use?

IBM will design and manage the system at NATO’s ACT command headquarters in Norfolk, Va. The project is part of NATO’s goal to modernize its technologies for the 21st century…