Huckabee, Gingrich, Palin, Romney Dear me, GOP, are they your best? Paul? Gawd! And the rest! Jeepers creepers. You gotta have some better sleepers, or could be a GOP train wreck, 2012.
Huckabee, the Man to Maybe Beat. Sort of. Josh Marshall | January 4, 2011, 5:20PM
When I go down the list, I'm inclined to agree. I don't think Huckabee is a very strong national candidate. By rights, that should be Mitt Romney. Except that the 2012 presidential campaign will be fought over health care reform and Romney's signature accomplishment is having passed reform in Massachusetts that was the blueprint for the one Dems passed last year. Pretty hard to head into a national campaign carrying that big a contradiction. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2011/01/huckabee_the_man_to_maybe_beat_sort_of.php?ref=fpblg
Excerpts Sick Bastards [...] People with pre-existing conditions, he explains, are like houses that have already burned down.
"It sounds so good, and it's such a warm message to say we're not gonna deny anyone from a preexisting condition," Huckabee explained at the Value Voters Summit today. "Look, I think that sounds terrific, but I want to ask you something from a common sense perspective. Suppose we applied that principle [to] our property insurance. And you can call your insurance agent and say, "I'd like to buy some insurance for my house." He'd say, "Tell me about your house." "Well sir, it burned down yesterday, but I'd like to insure it today." And he'll say, "I'm sorry, but we can't insure it after it's already burned." Well, no pre-existing conditions."
(Emphasis added)
Let's look at some numbers, shall we?
According to the American Heart Association, more than 81,000,000 Americans suffer from one or more forms of cardiovascular disease. According to the American Cancer Society, more than 11,000,000 people in America currently suffer from some form of cancer. According to the American Diabetes Association, 23.6 million Americans currently suffer from diabetes, and the Center for Disease Control has estimated as many as half of all Americans will suffer from the disease by the year 2050, thanks to our deplorable dietary habits. According to the National Parkinson's Foundation, between 50,000 and 60,000 new cases of Parkinson's Disease are diagnosed in America each year. According to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, some 400,000 Americans currently suffer from MS.
That's a pretty substantial portion of the population, with more being diagnosed with cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's and MS every day.
All of them, every single one of them, are like a house that has already burned down, according to Mike Huckabee and the sick bastards who cheered his comments. All of them, every single one of them, are not worthy of health insurance because they had the misfortune of getting sick before they got insurance. All of them, every single one of them, therefore, are not worthy of health care in any real form, unless, of course, they are wealthy and able to afford the staggering cost of ill health in America.
All of them, in short, every single one of them, can basically just go die in Mike Huckabee's world. They are not worthy of coverage, treatment or consideration. The five diseases I listed account for well over a third of the American population, and if Mike Huckabee or someone who agrees with him somehow becomes president someday, those millions of people should just dig their own graves and lie down in them.
Yeah, that's why I'm not polite to these people. My wife has multiple sclerosis, and Mr. Huckabee this weekend compared her to a burned-down house. My wife is a vibrant, active woman who deals with a terrible, terrifying disease that costs upwards of $50,000 a year to treat. Thankfully, my wife was already insured through work when she was diagnosed, but there are many thousands of people out there with MS who have no insurance, or who won't have insurance when they get diagnosed. If Huckabee has his way, people with pre-existing conditions will be treated as burned-down houses and essentially left to die.
To hear a man who gets treated like a legitimate voice in American politics basically consign my wife and millions of other Americans to suffering and death is to hear nothing more or less than flat-out hate speech from a presidential candidate. What Mike Huckabee suggested is tantamount to eugenics, to the extermination of "weaker" people simply because they are ill.
If this kind of talk isn't enough to convince Republicans that the fringe of their party is to be avoided at all costs, then nothing in the world will. There have to be at least a few unwell Republicans in the country, right? There have to be some Republicans with heart trouble, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's or MS, right? If so, those people had better start digging that grave for themselves, especially if they are stupid enough to support Mike Huckabee or anyone else who agrees with him.
"By eviscerating public services and reducing them to a network of farmed-out private providers, we have begun to dismantle the fabric of the state. As for the dust and powder of individuality: it resembles nothing so much as Hobbes's war of all against all, in which life for many people has once again become solitary, poor and more than a little nasty. -Tony Judt"
SYDNEY: It is not just shared interests that link friends together, but also their genes, according to researchers interested in the genetic basis of friendships.
The identification of genetic patterns within social networks throws new light on the various factors that influence friend choice.
“This is a first step towards understanding the biology of ‘chemistry’ - that feeling you have about a person that you will like or dislike them. We may choose our friends not just because of the social features we consciously notice about them, but because of the biological features we unconsciously notice”, said lead author James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego.
Birds of a feather
Amongst animals, humans are unusual in that we form long-term, non-reproductive relationships, otherwise known as friendships, with individuals with whom we are not necessarily closely related.
Although we tend to forge friendships with people with similar characteristics to us, the genetic consequences of these associations are largely unknown.
With their latest research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Fowler and his co-authors provide evidence that the formation of non-reproductive unions can result in genetic structuring across a population.
Strong correlation
Utilising data collected in two independent health studies in the U.S., the authors compared variance in six genes across more than one thousand friendship pairs. To control for population stratification - the tendency of people to have similar genotypes because they befriend others in the same geographical area - information on ethnicity and sibling genotype was included in the analysis.
Of the six genes analysed, two exhibited a strong correlation between their expression and the likelihood of individuals to be friends.
Individuals carrying a gene associated with alcoholism, DDR2, were more likely to befriend other DDR2-positive peers, while DDR2-negative individuals formed friendships with those who lacked the gene.
Opposites attract
Conversely, another gene gave unexpected credence to the adage ‘opposites attract’, with people carrying a gene associated with an open personality type, CYP2A6, tending to make friends with individuals who lacked the gene.
For Fowler, one of the study’s most significant implications is that it suggests our genes not only influence us, but may influence the genes of our friends, which in turn has a feedback effect on us.
“For example, the DRD2 gene variant we studied has been associated with alcoholism, and if you have this gene variant, your friends are likely to have it, too. So you are not only more susceptible to alcoholism yourself, but you are likely to be surrounded by friends who are susceptible too”, Fowler told Cosmos online.
Other factors?
“This is a really interesting study”, said Daniel Blumstein of the University of California, Los Angeles, an evolutionary biologist interested in the evolution of sociality in mammals. “The positive associations do suggest that birds of a feather flock together”.
However, Blumstein observed that further research was needed to assess the statistical importance of the different variables effecting friend choice.
“Ultimately we want to understand the consequences of these non-random associations compared to other potential causal factors”.
Urbana, Ill. — "THE right genes make all the difference." Or so declares an advertisement, as a boy portraying the son of Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf holds his own in a match against Taylor Dent. While neither science, nor this television commercial, can explain much about how the genes of the tennis stars' son might affect his tennis game, people are comfortable linking genes to athletic prowess.
Many people, however, are leery of attributing other components of behavior to genes - personality or intelligence, or social traits like fidelity, for example. They're troubled by the ethical implications of genetic determination; it is as if giving a nod toward the genes automatically diminishes the role of the environment and free will. It is nature versus nurture: a debate that has spawned extremist views on both sides, from Nazism (nature) to Marxism (nurture).
The truth of the matter is that DNA is both inherited and environmentally responsive, and recent findings from animal studies go a long way toward resolving nature versus nurture by upsetting the assumption that the two work differently. The discoveries emphasize what genes do (producing proteins that are the building blocks of life), rather than simply who they are (their fixed DNA sequence).
The results hold the promise of breakthroughs in our understanding of human behavior and what factors might influence it. They also pose challenges for policy makers: new types of genetic profiling to try to predict behavior could produce more debates about balancing personal privacy with the need to protect the public.
The studies show that some genes cause the brain to respond differently depending on inheritance or environmental factors. For example, fruit flies inherit different versions of a gene that helps make them slow- or fast-paced foragers for life. But this very same gene that is fixed forever in these different types of flies can change in the honeybee depending on the needs of the hive, allowing a bee to shift from working inside the hive to collecting food from flowers.
Monogamy is another behavioral trait that is influenced by inherited factors, at least in voles. Some species of voles are more faithful to their mates than others. The genes show inherited differences in activity in the brain, but the activity is dynamic and dependent on the voles' experiences.
Some genes that are affected by environmental conditions even have lifelong consequences. Rat pups that are poorly cared for by their mothers show profound changes in brain gene activity and also prove to be bad moms themselves.
These animal behaviors may be simpler than human behaviors, but they are complex and are performed over days, or weeks, or lifetimes, with learned components. And they all involve molecules known to operate in human brains.
What these studies show is that the genome is responsive over different scales of time. Like the voles and fruit flies, individuals may differ in gene activity because of DNA variations they inherited. These differences evolve over very long periods of time, from generation to generation. This is nature.
Individuals may also differ in gene activity because of variations in their environment, like the rats and honeybees. These differences occur over shorter times, within individual lifetimes. This is nurture. In the past, biological conceptions of behavior that are influenced by genetics tended to be rigid and deterministic, spurring misguided concepts like "a gene for aggression." In contrast, social and behavioral scientists have long emphasized the flexible nature of behavior, and as a result have tended to ignore genes entirely. But as much as people like to divide themselves into nature or nurture camps, what genes actually do in the brain reflects the interaction between hereditary and environmental information.
Both sides could find crucial common ground by appreciating the responsiveness of the genome over different time scales.
Such a rapprochement could help us deal with the questions that arise from these discoveries.
For example, what if genetic profiling - determining the sequence of some or all of an individual's genes - were used to help predict behavior? How would genetic profiling be used, say, in education, insurance, medicine and employment, when it appears that what's especially important for behavior is what genes do, rather than who they are?
And since gene activity varies because of both hereditary and environmental factors, can predictive measures of gene activity ever be developed? This question is further complicated because behaviors are influenced by the activities of many genes in the brain.
Last year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, which opened the door to understanding how traits can be inherited. The concept of "DNA as destiny" has been enormously helpful in diagnosing diseases like Tay-Sachs and in using DNA fingerprinting technology to identify criminals. But it is in appreciating the dual nature of DNA - that it is not just inherited but is also environmentally responsive - that we will understand better how genes influence behavior.
As we all know, the odds are long that young Jaden Agassi, the son of Andre and Ms. Graf, will grow up to be a tennis star, because few children follow so closely in their parents' footsteps in our society, for many reasons. But maybe he will. If so, my bet is that this will be a result, in part, of both his Grand Slam heritage and his parents' (no doubt) dedicated schlepping to tennis lessons with the likes of Taylor Dent, both influences acting on his brain to create connections between gene activity and tennis activity.
Gene E. Robinson is the director of the Neuroscience Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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