February 2011 archive

Scarlet Letter

Every day, transgender and gender non-conforming people bear the brunt of social and economic marginalization due to discrimination based on their gender identity or expression. Advocates confront this reality regularly working with transgender people who have lost housing, been fired from jobs, experienced mistreatment and violence, or been unable to access the health care they need. Too often, policymakers, service providers, the media and society at large have dismissed or discounted the needs of transgender and gender non-conforming people, and a lack of hard data on the scope of anti-transgender discrimination has hampered the work to make substantive policy changes to address these needs.

So begins the introduction to the report Injustice at Every Turn:  A report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which was jointly released Friday by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality.  At 222 pages and 43 megs, it is unlikely that too many people will investigate more than the Executive Summary, which indeed is where early reporters opted to stop.  But it is Saturday and there is wintry mix expected, so here I am.

This part just is about the numbers…covering about 30 pages of the report.  More will come, especially the conclusions that can be drawn, in the future.

The independence of the judiciary means that the Courts should be free from improper influence from outside interests.  What a great idea for having a transparent, fair judicial system.  It’s a concept that has so much promise.  But in practice the present Supreme Court and its members may be driving it off a cliff. Today’s news about Justice Thomas’s wife’s lobbying business may signal its ultimate demise.

The New York Times reports that Justice Thomas’s wife,

who has raised her political profile in the last year through her outspoken conservative activism, is rebranding herself as a lobbyist and self-appointed “ambassador to the Tea Party movement.”

Virginia Thomas, the justice’s wife, said on libertyinc.co, a Web site for her new political consulting business, that she saw herself as an advocate for “liberty-loving citizens” who favored limited government, free enterprise and other core conservative issues. She promised to use her “experience and connections” to help clients raise money and increase their political impact.

The end of George Bush. The end of the Democrats. The end of Obama. The end of home ownership. The end of Hosni Mubarak. The end of the Amazon. The end of US agriculture. The end of the world food supply. The end of sanity. And the end of Advanced Civilization.

The Kinks. The end of Justice. And everything you always wished you never knew. It’s all here. 😉

The Square That Is The Center Of Their Universe  

CAIRO, Egypt – Dozens of Egyptian women spilled out of a mosque in the Dokki neighborhood Friday, only their eyes visible from black veils that flapped in the breeze.

Marching in formation, they set off for downtown Cairo, where they hoped to join hundreds of thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square who were calling for the removal of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

When pro-Mubarak youths jeered at them from a balcony overhead, the women raised their voices louder. “Go home!” the youths yelled at the women, who replied by chanting, “He’s leaving! We’re not leaving!”

Well, he’s a tax raiser, an amnesty giver, a cut-and-runner, and he negotiated with terrorists. Why is he a hero to conservatives? I don’t think you understand it.

The transcript can be read here at Mike Stark’s web site, The StarkReport

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

HERE & THERE

The Sanyo Hotel in Yamaguchi, which was a favorite of “Japanese royals and high-ranking government officials,” is being torn down. Among the foreign luminaries to have stayed at the century-old inn were Babe Ruth and Helen Keller.

It was reported that a salon in Nagoya is offering a vitamin-rich intravenous drip to salarymen “as a quick way to get rid of work-induced fatigue.”

A company in Kobe has perfected a method of transforming old clothes into a wood-like substance it calls Rifmo. According to the company president, “You can saw and hammer a nail into it just like ordinary wood.”

Sony and Victor announced that they had developed the world’s first “full high-definition digital video cameras capable of taking 3-D moving images.”

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Long story short- Samuelson Economics is science.  It’s predictive and the predictions are confirmed by observation.

Voodoo Economics is just that.  A bunch of rattle shaking shamen dancing around you shouting and chanting in tongues motivated by vanity, greed, and the academic desire for novelty.

Let’s start with Bloomberg shall we?

Conservative Austerity Idea Is Failing: David G. Blanchflower

By David Blanchflower, Bloomberg News

Jan 27, 2011 10:15 PM ET

Fiscal austerity has already been started in Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal, and this seems to be pushing all of them back into recession. Over the last four quarters, growth in Greece was negative and falling, and bond investors are once more demanding sky-high returns to compensate their risk. The excuse in these countries was that they have little choice because they are stuck in the European monetary union and don’t have the ability to depreciate their exchange rate.

The U.K. may be a purer case of the harm austerity at the wrong time can inflict. Britain now looks as if it is headed back into recession on fear about the damage that will be done by massive spending cuts and tax increases, which haven’t even gone into effect yet. Government ministers with their talk of austerity have already smashed confidence.

…

Despite the government’s claims that its intent was to raise confidence, consumer and business confidence tumbled right after the new government took office.

Businesses and consumers know what is coming and have cut back accordingly. Retail spending has flat-lined. The balance of trade is deteriorating. Unemployment is rising, and house prices have started to fall again.

The Great British austerity experiment

With deficit hawks poised in the US, we watch with great interest UK economic policy. It’s not looking an enviable example so far

Dean Baker, The Guardian

Tuesday 1 February 2011 21.00 GMT

The elite media and the politicians whom they promote would love to see the United States follow the austerity path of the UK’s new government. However, if this path takes the UK into dangerous economic waters, it could provide a powerful warning to the public in the United States before we make the same mistake.

The British economy looks like it is doing its part. The fourth-quarter GDP report showing that the economy went into reverse and shrank at a 2.0% annual rate is exactly the sort of warning that many of us here were expecting. Weather-related factors may have slowed growth some, but you would have to do some serious violence to the data to paint a positive picture. Of course, the austerity in the UK is just beginning. There will likely be much worse pain to come, with a real possibility that the country will experience a double-dip recession, or at least a prolonged period of stagnation.

…

The takeaway lesson should be “austerity does not work; don’t go there.” Unfortunately, in the land of faith-based economics, evidence does not count for much. The UK may pursue a disastrous austerity path and those of us in the United States may still have to follow the same road anyhow. But we opponents of that course all appreciate the willingness of the UK to demonstrate the foolishness of this action.

McCaskill Leads Democratic Rush Toward Austerity

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Wednesday February 2, 2011 11:08 am

You could simply not accomplish the cuts in this proposal without massive reductions to Social Security and Medicare. And the fact that this puts those programs “on-budget,” despite their dedicated funding source, is the real tell here. That means that it would be part of the automatic cuts from OMB.

Harry Reid opposes this bill and will fight efforts to put it into action. But it’s only one of multiple efforts where Democrats are crossing the aisle in a bid for austerity. Mark Udall pledged support for a balanced budget amendment, introducing the bill with Richard Shelby. Kent Conrad – who finds McCaskill-Corker unacceptable because it does nothing on the revenue side, which just shows you how extreme a proposal it is – has been working to revive the Bowles-Simpson cat food plan on the Senate Budget Committee. Jeanne Shaheen and Johnny Isakson’s proposal for a two-year budget cycle is perhaps the most inoffensive of these plans (I’d actually go along with that one).

The point is that, with a struggle over the new budget and the debt limit looming, and with conservative activists rallying their representatives to stand firm, you have multiple Democrats perfectly to cut and cap spending, reduce Social Security benefits, and basically drown the government in the bathtub the way that conservatives have always wanted.

Cross Posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette.

Just recently, Salon columnist and constitutional lawyer, Glenn Greenwald was hospitalized with what he thought was the “flu”. It wasn’t. Mr,. Greenwald found that he was infected with the most common mosquito-born virus in the world, dengue, (pronounced DENgee), which yearly infects 50 to 100 million people causing about 24,000 deaths, primarily children. It is endemic in more than 110 countries with 2.5 billion people living in areas where it is prevalent.

The disease is caused by four closely related viruses, or serotypes, that can manifest in a couple of different ways. The most common is dengue fever, or illness, which presents with high fever, joint pain, severe headache and a a petechial rash (fine, red rash). The severity of the joint pain has given dengue the name “breakbone fever.” Dengue can progress to dengue hemorrhagic fever, which may lead to severe hemorrhage or dengue shock syndrome, where a very low blood pressure can cause organ dysfunction. Both can be fatal but with good medical management mortality can be less than 1%.

While dengue is very similar to other viruses transmitted by mosquitoes like West Nile and malaria, it is classified as a “Neglected Tropical Diseases” by the World Health Organization, meaning it is prevalent in tropics, yet has not received attention commensurate with its burden like other diseases such as malaria. There is no vaccine for prevention. However, an attack of dengue produces immunity for a lifetime to that particular serotype to which the patient was exposed.

What are the symptoms?

From the CDC:

The principal symptoms of dengue are:

   * High fever and at least two of the following:

         o Severe headache

         o Severe eye pain (behind eyes)

         o Joint pain

         o Muscle and/or bone pain

         o Rash

         o Mild bleeding manifestation (e.g., nose or gum bleed, petechiae, or easy bruising)

         o Low white cell count

Generally, younger children and those with their first dengue infection have a milder illness than older children and adults.

Watch for warning signs as temperature declines 3 to 7 days after symptoms began.

Go IMMEDIATELY to an emergency room or the closest health care provider if any of the following warning signs appear:

   * Severe abdominal pain or persistent vomiting

   * Red spots or patches on the skin

   * Bleeding from nose or gums

   * Vomiting blood

   * Black, tarry stools (feces, excrement)

   * Drowsiness or irritability

   * Pale, cold, or clammy skin

   * Difficulty breathing

How is it treated?

Since dengue is caused by a virus, there is no effective antibiotic treatment. For typical dengue, the treatment is the relief of symptoms, rest and hydration. Aspirin and non-steroidal anti-ihttps://www.docudharma.com/newDiary.donflammatory drugs are used cautiously under a doctor’s supervision because of the possibility of worsening hemorrhagic complications. Acetaminophen and codeine may be given for severe headache and for the joint and muscle pain. It may or may not require hospitalization dependent on whether the patient can remain hydrated as other symptoms, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, can increase fluid loss. The more severe manifestations, require hospitalization and may require oxygen and blood transfusions. Most deaths occur in children. Infants under a year of age are especially at risk of dying from the hemorrhagic form.