Heard from a chorus of conservative pundits… “It’s a sign of progress in Iraq that Iraqi reporter Muntader al-Zaidi felt safe enough to throw a shoe at President Bush”. Or at least it will be if he survives the reported beatings and torture he is enduring.
Note to movie and TV writers: this would be an appropriate use of the word quantum, as in, “This is a sign of a quantum of progress in Iraq.”
In 2008, members of Congress were paid $169,300. Periodically stories surface about Congressional Reps sleeping in their offices or taking D.C. housing as a bribe (Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman most recently). Atrios mentions it here.
So how much extra does it cost to be a Congressperson? They live away from home in D.C. when Congress is in session. They return to their district on weekends to be with their family or visit the district. They need to keep up appearances. Let’s make a list:
D.C. Apartment: $2,500/month
Clothes & dry cleaning: $1,500/month
Weekly flight home: $500/wk x 40
——————————————
Total: $68,000
So after accounting for the special expenses that come with the job, a Congressperson makes over $100k a year. Not a gold mine, but by itself almost double what the average family makes. And this is, I think, fairly conservative, as some of these expenses get picked up by campaign funds, and from the stories many Congresspeople have much cheaper D.C. digs, have a shared apartment, etc.
The national popular vote shifted +8% for the Democratic candidate compared to 2004 but some counties voted more Republican. I think we are seeing the most racist regions of the country, running in a belt across the Southern and Appalachian states. This map likely minimizes the extent of the belt, as in southern state counties with large black populations there was a high black turnout and Obama got a higher percent of the black vote.
(image from http://nytimes.com/)
On the other side of the coin is Indiana which swung +21% in Obama’s favor–the biggest surprise of the election this year. It looks like Indiana is finally giving up its claim to be the northern-most Southern state and is rejoining the Midwest.
On 60 Minutes today, Andy Rooney talked about unemployment. Mr. Rooney heard that 10 million Americans are unemployed. Andy refuses to believe this–I guess his friends’ kids are working and his powers of observation don’t extend any further than that. He’s the Inspector Clouseau of commentary.
If many people *are* unemployed, Mr. Rooney knows why–people these days won’t work hard. Why, he worked in a paper mill (for a few months when in college) for $0.45/hour. Convert that from 1939 dollars to 2008 dollars and we have $7.08/hr, higher than today’s minimum wage of $6.55/hr. Of course today’s workers have more taken out for Social Security and Medicaid. In 1939 there was no Medicaid and the SS tax was 2% while today they are 15.3% combined, so today’s single worker takes home $5.97. Mr. Rooney’s short term college job is looking pretty good.
Andy Rooney is as out of touch as John McCain, who said in the Republican primary that American workers won’t take jobs picking lettuce for $50/hour, a whole collection of wrong ideas.
Pepper spray has been around for years now, but there is not commonly available antidote. And we know how the active ingredient, capsaicin acts to active, or hold open, the ion channels that transduce pain signals. In fact, a quick Google shows that capsaicin binds and activates a receptor called the vanilloid receptor subtype 1 (VR1), a member of a group of related receptors called TRP ion channels that are activated by temperature changes.
Capsaicin chemical structure (from Wikipedia)
So an antidote would be an inhibitor of the VR1 receptor, and such a thing should be easy to find, or create, and in fact another Google shows that several have been created. Capsazepine was the first inhibitor discovered, way back in 1994. Activators and inhibitors of this receptor have many potential uses as analgesics and anti-inflammation compounds so there is a lot of research interest.
Capsaicin inhibitor capsazepine (from Wikipedia)
A spray containing one of these inhibitors should be an effective antidote for pepper spray. But surprisingly no such inhibitor is available! The small quantities of purified inhibitors are available in small quantities for research purposes (i.e. capsazepine, 50mg for $455 but I can’t find anyone who has made an antidote preparation. This should be safe and fairly easy. Safe, because it would be applied mainly externally, and because pepper spray is itself fairly safe–aside from the pain and shock it is used to cause. It doesn’t have other, non-specific side effects. And relatively easy to make because the literature describes the synthesis of inhibitors from capsaicin itself. So the starting product used to make an inhibitor can be capsaicin, and capsaicin is readily available in large quantities!
Update:
Wikipedia: Discovery and development of TRPV1 antagonists
From way back in 1986, Michael Kinsley reviews David A. Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed (1986). Stockman was President Reagan’s budget director from 1981-85.
The Reagan stories are priceless.
…
Cabinet members take skillful advantage of the Commander in Chief’s capacity for befuddlement. Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis convinces him that quotas on Japanese cars are not a violation of free trade because Government regulations have hampered American producers. (Japanese cars must meet the same regulations, of course.) Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger shows up for a meeting intended to settle whether the defense buildup should be $1.46 trillion over five years or only $1.33 trillion. His chief prop is a cartoon of three soldiers – one, a pygmy without a rifle, representing the Carter budget; one, ”a four-eyed wimp . . . carrying a tiny rifle,” representing $1.33 trillion, Mr. Stockman’s defense budget; and one, ”G.I. Joe himself . . . all decked out in helmet and flak jacket and pointing an M-60 machine gun,” representing $1.46 trillion. This is how Presidential decisions are made. Mr. Stockman makes clear that Mr. Weinberger himself had absolutely no idea how to spend all this money at the time he argued it was essential to our national security. He would get as much as he could, then go back to the Pentagon and figure out what to do with it.
And this was before the Alzheimer’s disease was noticeable in Reagan’s second term. Government by cartoon. I wonder if this is the budget process they teach in political science classes. A $130 billion dollar cartoon.
The 60 Minutes TV show has joined the push to deploy the Active Denial System (ADS), a millimeter-wave transmitter that causes intense pain but doesn’t kill or cause burns with short exposures.
60 Minutes has covered the pain ray several times, but today aired a complete endorsement and argument for its immediate deployment. A parade of military, government, and ex-military police officers lauded the pain gun, said it was safe, harmless, and would save lives.
It was so over the top it got creepy. An assistant secretary of the Air Force, the woman in charge of buying the weapon, said the pain ray works so good that anyone that doesn’t run away is a ‘determined adversary’ and can be considered a ‘hostile’, a ‘terrorist’. The direct implication of that is anyone who doesn’t run away can be shot dead. Of course it has a range of half a mile, so if a person doesn’t see where it is coming from and runs the wrong way he or she will get killed. The weapon looks to have a small focus area, so if used on a crowd it would need to be waved around or several pain rays used. This also makes it hard to know the expected or ‘safe’ direction to run. And of course, the use of an intermittent pain ray in a crowd is likely to start a panic, with people trapped in the crowd running every which way.
Also creepy was the military’s test footage provided to 60 Minutes. People carrying anti-war and peace signs in English walking around peacefully were the targets of the pain ray. Err, so why exactly does the military think a demonstration on how the pain ray can disperse peace rallys is a great demonstration? The US does have a long history of peaceful demonstrations disrupted by illegal police actions, but doesn’t seem to suffer from a lack technology…
So what’s the plan? The 60 Minutes episode pushed the pain ray as a US/Iraq War weapon. This is no doubt mostly hype–every new weapon being pushed today is no doubt sold as an Iraq War weapon. But exactly why would the US Army be called out to disperse political protests in Iraq? Isn’t that exactly the role the US has been training the Iraqi police to handle for the last five years?
No doubt the end game has US police departments equipped with the pain ray and using it mainly on peaceful protests. Of course after the police starts firing the pain ray, I’m sure people will be running around screaming–a ready made riot for TV news condemnation.
After a few years to accommodate the US public to the pain ray it will likely get shopped out to foreign governments and used primarily for suppressing protests.
Of course the pain ray is just the most prominent of the anti-democracy technologies in the pipeline. There are many ways being developed to monitor and disrupt democracy activists and their efforts.
Funniest political blog, http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com.
Things younger than John McCain include the chocolate chip cookie, the shopping cart, nylons, velcro, Cheerios, the Cobb salad (whatever that is), Spam, Kodachrome, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Slinky.
Before the Slinky, kids played in the mud. And before that, John McCain was born.
In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol agreement to reduce green gases was signed by 30+ nations including (as best I can tell) all the Western countries except the US. So it was clear in 1997 that the world was warming and green house gas emissions needed to be reduced, but *when* exactly did scientists figure this out?
My memory of the issue with a little proding stretches back to the 1992 climate agreement signed by George HW Bush, officially called the U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change. It called on countries to cut green house gas emissions but didn’t set binding targets. So global warming was understood back in ’92, and must have been known about years earlier for political action to have been taken then. I didn’t know about research earlier than the 1970s modeling research.
She lays out a number of landmarks. She gives an interesting talk–I’ve pared it away and just list the landmarks here:
Here’s a video that describes what Republicans mean when they call for bipartisanship:
This is not what all Republicans want from bipartisanship. Grover Norquist, a leader of the conservative movement, thinks of it this way: “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape.” (May, 2003)
