The Patient’s Bill of Rights is one of the important steps in the recently passed health care reform legislation.
This post is my effort to help spread the word. If we don’t spread the word, people are unlikely to find out about the benefits of the bill that will be affecting them this fall.
As I said in yesterday’s post, The Real Russian Spy Story, I had been wondering about the media’s flogging of this story.
It has been getting clearer in recent days, but today was the final clarification if we need any more.
There was hardly if any real spying going. The FBI has been onto these people for almost 10 years. Suddenly the government decides to close these people down.
We now know that the purpose was to generate some trading currency to get our own spies out of Russia. There was no real threat to our own country.
If I could smell a phony story in this one, you would have suspected that the professional news reporters could also have smelled the same smell.
So we are left to conjecture how much collaboration between the news media and our government was going on to get this story hyped beyond all relation to its value as news. I guess the story was hyped about as much as it was worth for forwarding the government’s interest with respect to trading spies.
After CBS News’ report tonight about the confessions and deportations of the “spies”, I expected at least a confession on their part of how they blew this all out of proportion at the government’s request. Of course, no such confession was forthcoming. As I watched the rest of the news, I kept saying to Katie Couric, “And you expect us to believe what you are telling us now given how you have been deceiving us over the past week?”
If it was not collusion between the government and the media, it is surprising that the people in the media don’t admit how badly they were taken in.
To one of my friends who thought the Russian “spies” should have been shot, I ask, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I know that the answer is “No I am not ashamed. I was not taken in by this story. The crimes these people committed are much worse than our government is letting on. Glenn Beck told me so. And I can tell the difference between a lie and the truth.”
Unfortunately, I am at a disadvantage with this friend because I do not believe I can always tell what is a lie and what is the truth.
In her 7 July 2010 post to the NYT blog, Well, Gretchen Reynolds writes “Your Brain on Exercise.”
Some of the most reverberant recent studies were performed at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. There, scientists have been manipulating the levels of bone-morphogenetic protein or BMP in the brains of laboratory mice. BMP, which is found in tissues throughout the body, affects cellular development in various ways, some of them deleterious. In the brain, BMP has been found to contribute to the control of stem cell divisions. Your brain, you will be pleased to learn, is packed with adult stem cells, which, given the right impetus, divide and differentiate into either additional stem cells or baby neurons. As we age, these stem cells tend to become less responsive. They don’t divide as readily and can slump into a kind of cellular sleep. It’s BMP that acts as the soporific. … The more active BMP and its various signals are in your brain, the more inactive your stem cells become and the less neurogenesis you undergo. Your brain grows slower, less nimble, older.
But exercise countermands some of the numbing effects of BMP, Dr. Kessler says. In work at his lab, mice given access to running wheels had about 50 percent less BMP-related brain activity within a week. They also showed a notable increase in Noggin, a beautifully named brain protein that acts as a BMP antagonist. The more Noggin in your brain, the less BMP activity exists and the more stem cell divisions and neurogenesis you experience. Mice at Northwestern whose brains were infused directly with large doses of Noggin became, Dr. Kessler says, “little mouse geniuses, if there is such a thing.” They aced the mazes and other tests.
I guess there is still a chance that you and I can become “little mouse geniuses.” Hooray!
-RichardH
“Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?” is a (very) long article by Robert F. Worth in the 11 July 2010 issue of the New York Times Magazine about tribal politics, insurgency, and struggle in this desperately poor and factionalized country.
-RichardH
Olufemi Terry wins 2010 Caine Prize for his short story, ‘Stickfighting Days (PDF).’ The Caine Prize, awarded annually, is described as Africa’s leading literary award.
-RichardH