Post-Menopausal women less bitchy

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Women rate attractiveness differently after menopause
Scientists have discovered yet another change that happens with the menopause - the way women judge attractiveness. Benedict Jones and his team at the University of Aberdeen found that post- menopausal women rate young women's faces as more feminine, and therefore more attractive, than pre-menopausal women. The research, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, points to changes in hormone levels as the cause of these differences.

Post Prop 8

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While Obama was winning the US presidential election something else was going on in California. A state ballot on "Proposition 8" intended to exclude the possibility of gay marriage.

Almost 12 million votes were cast and Prop 8 was passed by a majority of almost 0.5 million. This has unleashed a debate in the US at least as vigorous as the one surrounding Obama's election.

Here is an excellent selection of blogposts and articles covering the subject, with an emphasis on the position of alleged racism in all of this:

 Powens Preposterous Posterous


Doctor in the house

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From The New England Journal of Medicine comes an interesting discussion about what the US can learn from the UK approach to primary medical care.

Lessons from the U.K.
It is hard to discuss U.K. medical care without mentioning universal coverage. Although it may not be politically achievable in the United States, universal access to care is probably the key factor behind findings that U.K. citizens have better health outcomes than their U.S. counterparts despite having health care costs that are a fraction of those in the United States

Think of the children...

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Just Can't Quit: How far will smoking bans go?
California became the first state to ban smoking in bars a decade ago. Since then, smoking bans have flourished in bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, universities—you name it.  Recently, the Bay Area city of Belmont passed a law that targets people who smoke in their own homes.

Smoking is one of the worst things you can do to your body, but how dangerous is second-hand smoke? Are banners saving lives or battering science? Are they progressive champions or plunderers of property rights?

Watch The Video

And then, if you have the time, watch this 25min 2002 film TALKING BUTTS: A SMOKING DOCUMENTARY.

The film features classic cigarette television ads, a cameo appearance by John Waters and interviews with authors, journalists, scholars, activists, several state attorneys general and one governor.


The real Iraq Body Count

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The Iraq Math War
Why the Centers For Disease Control and the Pentagon sought to discredit the first scientific tally of Iraq's civilian death toll carried out by Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham

The White House struck back with its own basic message: The study was bunk. Never mind that Roberts and Burnham had used methods similar to those employed for the Kosovo survey and others approvingly cited by the Bush administration. With the notable exception of This American Life producer Alex Blumberg, most reporters dutifully slapped Roberts' research with the "controversial" label. And when asked about the study directly, President Bush declared that it had been "pretty well discredited."

"By whom? By him and his political staff?" snaps Bradley Woodruff, who retired last year from his job as a senior cdc epidemiologist. Woodruff has conducted mortality surveys himself, and considers Roberts' research solid. But when cbs's 60 Minutes sought to interview Woodruff about the Lancet study in 2007, the cdc wouldn't allow it. And when Rep. Dennis Kucinich invited Woodruff to Washington to discuss the study, his bosses nixed that, too. "I never had this kind of censorship under previous administrations," he says.

But I don't WANT you to like us. Bah!

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Victor Davis Hanson is upset that we might stumble on peace one day.

Hanson is “a blood-and-guts classicist and one of Vice President Dick Cheney's favorite dinner guests". Oh dear! And "a 2007 recipient of the National Humanities Medal" (sic) Oh dear, oh dear!

He also has terrible dress sense as you can see.
Hanson maintains a blog called “Works and Days” on pajamasmedia.com. (natch -MrP) In an entry shortly after Obama’s presidential win, Hanson briefly praised the president-elect for waging an “often brilliant (if not shrewdly stealthy) campaign.”

Regarding the support Obama received from abroad, Hanson wrote, “why would we wish governments currently composed of radical Palestinians, Iranians, Venezuelans, North Koreans, Syrians, or Russians to like or admire us? While we would wish not to gratuitously excite their ire, their empathy toward us should make us worried not relieved.

The Wedding Present

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Tom Engelhardt: No Breathing Space in Washington
On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, a record was set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since December 2001.

American planes have, in fact, taken out two brides in the last seven months. And don't try to bury your dead or mark their deaths ceremonially either, because funerals have been hit as well. Mind you, those planes, which have conducted 31% more air strikes in Afghanistan in support of U.S. troops this year, and the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now making almost daily strikes across the border in Pakistan, remain part of George W. Bush's Air Force, but only until January 21, 2009. Then, they -- and all the brides and grooms of Afghanistan and in the Pakistani borderlands who care to have something more than the smallest of private weddings -- officially become the property of President Barack Obama.

“Voices from the New World of Journalism.”

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The journalism 'priesthood' destroyed?
“I think we’re fooling ourselves a little bit in how much change is needed,” Michael Skoler of American Public Media said. The needed transformation lies well beyond the use of new tools. “People expect to share information.” But that goes against our ethos – getting the scoop, keeping it exclusive. Nor does allowing people to participate in, not just respond to, our work come naturally. “Deep in our souls we feel like that’s dumbing down our journalism. I would argue that it’s smartening it up.”
Well said.


Remember the survivors

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The public prefers their war heroes to be dead
If war is a commonplace human activity, so too is compassion: yet true, enduring, adult compassion towards the maimed of war is one of the most strikingly absent features about how British society has responded to the aftermath of war.

After all, the original purpose of the artificial poppies was to give employment to men who had been maimed in battle. These broken men were still made to work to survive. The British never even had the French tradition of reserving seats in public transport for veterans mutiles par la guerre.
My father wasn't a front line soldier in the second world war. He volunteered in spite of the fact that both his appallingly bad eyesight and his status as an Irish citizen meant he didn't have to enlist. He served behind the lines as the company tailor and travelled with the 8th Army to north Africa and Italy.

He survived the experience, just. He contracted malaria in southern Italy from what was the only biological warfare attack during the war. 

After nine months in hospital he returned home a shadow of his former self and suffered recurring attacks for the next 20+ years.  He might have got a medal had he been wounded or even a pension but you get nothing for contracting a deadly tropical disease, even one used as a weapon by the enemy. 

But he survived, unlike many of his comrades and remembrance is about the survivors of war keeping their promise to never forget the fallen.

Still a little pension would have come in handy :)