You won't have to get sick

Dr. David Agus is a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California and co-founder of two personalized medicine companies. Here's what he sees in the near future.

The end of illness is near. 

Today, we mostly wait for the body to break before we treat it. When I picture what it will be like for my two children to stay in good health as independent adults in 10 or 20 years, I see a big shift from our current model. 

I see them being able to monitor and adjust their health in real time with the help of smartphones, wearable gadgets—perhaps like small, invisible stickers—to track the inner workings of their cells, and virtual replicas of their bodies that they will play much like videogames, allowing them to know exactly what they can do to optimize every aspect of their health.What happens when I take drug x at dosage y? How can I change the expression of my genes to stop cancer? Would eating more salmon and dark chocolate boost my metabolism and burn fat? Can red wine really lower my risk of heart attack?

From a drop of their blood, they will be able to upload information onto a personal biochip that can help to create an individualized plan of action, including both preventive measures and therapies for identified ailments or signs of "unhealthiness." (Other body fluids—like tears and saliva—might be routinely tested, too.) They would be on the lookout for problems like imbalances in blood-sugar control, a risk factor for diabetes, and uncontrolled cell growth, which could signal cancer. Their doctors won't just examine them once a year; they will continually monitor the next generation of patients, offering advice along the way.

And there's more. 

What is equally exciting is that this patient data will be added to a universal database that can be aggregated by powerful search engines like Google and constantly fed into new trials and experiments—speeding up our understanding of which drugs work best for which people. The database might show, for example, that people with a particular genetic profile respond to one type of cancer treatment but not another. As more people anonymously add their health data, this database would become more and more effective as a tool for preventive medicine.

Our health care "system" -- which wasn't designed as a system and doesn't operate as one -- is on its last legs.

Today, most people who are concerned about their health follow sweeping, general guidelines. If you want to lose weight, you are likely to pick a diet that advises eating more fibrous vegetables and cutting back on processed sugar. If you want to reduce your risk for cancer, you avoid tobacco smoke, exercise regularly and take early detection seriously.

The problem with health care today is that we don't know enough about the body to practice preventive medicine actively. With limited knowledge, diagnostic medicine makes sense. If we don't know what we're trying to prevent or how best to do it, we have to wait for an obvious symptom to emerge in order to take action. At that point, we're usually treating a disease that has had ample opportunity to progress.

Read this twice and call me in the morning.

Good question

1. Is it good if a vacuum really sucks?

2. Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?

3. If a word is misspelled in the dictionary, how would we ever know?

4. If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?

5. Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?

6. Why does "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing?

7. Why does "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing?

8. Why do "tug" boats push their barges?

9. Why do we sing "Take me out to the ball game" when we are already there?

10. Why are they called " stands" when they are made for sitting?

11. Why is it called "after dark" when it really is "after light"?

12. Doesn't "expecting the unexpected" make the unexpected expected?

13. Why are a "wise man" and a "wise guy" opposites?

14. Why do "overlook" and "oversee" mean opposite things?

15. Why is "phonics" not spelled the way it sounds?

16. If work is so terrific, why do they have to pay you to do it?

17. If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?

18. If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

19. If you are cross-eyed and have dyslexia, can you read all right?

20. Why is bra singular and panties plural?

21. Why do you press harder on the buttons of a remote control when you know the batteries are dead?

22. Why do we put suits in garment bags and garments in a suitcase?

23. How come abbreviated is such a long word? 

 
24. Why do we wash bath towels? Aren't we clean when we use them?

25. Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?

26. Why do they call it a TV set when you only have one?

27. Christmas - What other time of the year do you sit in front of a dead tree and eat candy out of your socks?

28. Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?

(Thanks, Lainey)

James Rippe: exercise and think

"Exercise alone provides psychological and physical benefits. However, if you also adopt a strategy that engages your mind while you exercise, you can get a whole host of psychological benefits fairly quickly."

-- James Rippe, M.D.

The Mystic's Dream

Loreena McKennitt The Mystic`s Dream Live at the AlHambra

(American Digest)

I am just not amused

Over 279,000 federal workers and retirees owed more than $3.4 billion in back income taxes in 2010 (up from $3.3 billion in 2009, $3.0 billion in 2008, and $2.7 billion in 2007). A partial breakdown:

• U.S. Office of Government Ethics: 6.49%
• Federal Reserve Board: 4.86%
• U.S. House of Representatives: 4.24%
• U.S. Senate: 3.08%
• SEC: 2.50%
• U.S. Tax Court: 2.25%

British lingerie label Agent Provocateur have seen annual sales jump by more than 12 per cent in a year which also saw First Lady Michelle Obama joining their list of elite customers. Mrs Obama, is said to have spent $50,000 (£31,794) in the one shopping trip to the boutique which closed down part of Madison Avenue when she visited with the Queen of Qatar, Sheikha Mozah.

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor running for the U.S. Senate, has a potential deadly political sin in her background. Maybe it is the reason President Obama didn’t nominate her to head up the consumer agency. One of her many well-compensated part-time gigs included consulting for Travelers Insurance. She made it harder for claimants to collect. Warren helped establish the bankruptcy strategy for companies to avoid crushing lawsuits. In short, go bankrupt to avoid paying victims. In court briefings, she supported the effort to protect Travelers Insurance from future lawsuits after agreeing to a $500 million settlement with asbestos plaintiffs. That sort of destroys her image as consumer advocate, doesn’t it?

Bundle up, it's global warming!

Oh no. You might want to cover your eyes while you read this.

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years. 

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century. 

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

And that ain't all.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Yikes!

A painting, dated 1684, by Abraham Hondius depicts one of many frost fairs on the River Thames during the mini ice age

A steadfast man

"There is nothing like a steadfast man, one in whom you can have confidence, one who is found at his post, who arrives punctually, and who can be trusted when you rely on him. He is worth his weight in gold. You can take your bearings from him, because he is sure to be where he ought to be, and nowhere else. The majority of individuals, on the contrary, are sure to be anywhere but where they ought to be. You have only to take them into your calculations to be deceived.

"Some of them are changeable from weakness of character; they cannot resist attacks, insinuations, and, above all, cannot remain faithful to a lost cause. A defeat in their eyes is a demonstration of the fact that their adversary was right and that they were wrong. When they see their side fail, instead of closing up the ranks, they go over to the enemy. These are the men who are always found on the winning side, and not in their hearts would be found the courageous device: Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni."

-- Charles Wagner, 1894

Let's go for a ride

(American Digest)

Is somebody watching you?

It's getting real spooky out there.

Hawaii's legislature is weighing an unprecedented proposal to curb the privacy of Aloha State residents: requiring Internet providers to keep track of every Web site their customers visit.

The FBI has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly.

In a glowing review of the rising prevalence of high-tech big brother surveillance gadgets in police force use, the Associated Press reports that East Orange, New Jersey plans to cut crime by highlighting suspects with a red-beamed spotlight -- before any crime is committed -- a “pre-crime” deterrent to be mounted on nearby street lights or other fixtures.

Joint military training exercises will be held evenings in downtown Los Angeles through Thursday, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD will be providing support for the exercises, which will also be held in other portions of the greater Los Angeles area, police said.

Surveillance cameras already dot the city’s streets, but is the NYPD exploring the use of even more eyes in the skies, in the form of drones? Some evidence points to yes.
Freedom of speech might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what. Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November, Washington has the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms.

J. K. Rowling: choices

"It is our choice that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

-- J. K. Rowling

How about a tax rate of zero?

While everyone is trying to understand the game Obamaman, Warren Buffett and Buffett's secretary are playing, and having trouble understanding it, here's something even I can understand:

A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama's executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven't paid any share, let alone their fair share. 

Previous reports have shown how well-paid Obama's White House staff is, with 457 aides pulling down more than $37 million last year. That's up seven workers and nearly $4 million from the Bush administration's last year. 

Nearly one-third of Obama's aides make more than $100,000 with 21 being paid the top White House salary of $172,200, each.

The work there is pretty easy. You just have to write speeches with startlingly new ideas and load them into a teleprompter.

Flashlight envy

A state trooper told me the other day that a flashlight is a good weapon: it can temporarily blind a bad guy. Just get one that makes 100 lumens or more, he said.

I don't know what I lumen is, but I suspect it's those little particles you see floating around when the sun shines through the window. What I discovered is that you can spend $500 or more on a flashlight and get something that makes tens of thousands of lumens.

So I ordered one that does 220 lumens and cost in the neighborhood of $25. Then a friend of mine up and announces that he has one that makes 300 lumens and cost $130. Where'd you get it? I asked. Well, the sneaky guy ordered it from my favorite online store, Extreme Outfitters, which is run by a bunch of former special ops guys down in North Carolina. I thought I, and the CIA, of course, were the only ones who knew about that store.

I can beat 300. Check out this baby. That's one smokin' flashlight. Trouble is, that puppy weighs "only" nine pounds. So that, as you know, is about seven pounds more than a small Glock. I guess you could just throw the flashlight at a bad guy and save on bullets. This bad boy weighs less but costs more and makes a heck of a lot more lumens, which is what counts.

As for price, if your wife asks what it cost, you just say, "Honey, what do you think a flashlight costs?" She's going to remember one she saw at the grocery story. If she says, "Why do you need another flashlight?" you answer, in a low, conspiratorial voice, "For tactical reasons." She'll understand that it's a guy thing.

What I've discovered is there's a whole underworld of flashlight fighting. And you thought the presidential race was entertaining. Let me ask you -- no, I'm begging you -- to watch the following video for an introduction to this world.



Thank you for watching. I want all of my friends -- both of you -- to watch that again and say to yourself, maybe Terry's not so crazy after all.

What, me worry?

Don't worry, be happy.

An advice columnist for PJ Media named Belladonna Rogers says that, contrary to what many believe, worry is a good thing.

This captures her point:

Even the otherwise judicious Roman rhetorician, Marcus Annaeus Seneca, said, “There is nothing so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it in expecting evil before it arrives?” Right. Guess he never had to prepare for a hurricane, a blizzard, a flood, or a child’s college tuition payments.

And this.

Neurotic worry, or obsessive, repetitive thinking about a problem is counterproductive. But wisely directed worry can solve problems and lead to vastly improved outcomes.

Dictionary.com defines worry as: "to torment oneself with or suffer from disturbing thoughts; fret." That's not good.

Here's where I think the middle ground is, at least for me. I just made out a to-do list for today, looking over my lists for the two previous days. Some of the things on the list involve income and expenses; others involve serious matters of health.

All I am able to do is recognize these things and take the next step toward a resolution, whether that's a phone call or reading an article or creating a new spreadsheet only I can decipher and that's probably wrong anyway. I absolutely cannot control the outcome. I have broken these big, major things in my life into small, manageable pieces, and I'll try to get to all of them today, and I know I won't.

There's always tomorrow. And maybe there won't be a tomorrow. That's why I'm not going to worry about any of it.

So I think this all comes down to the word worry. I'll think, plan and do today. Call it what you will, but it's not worry.

How to understand the Republican debates

From The Gumbo Blog Department of Political Analysis:



(American Digest)

Being average won't work anymore

There's your iPad.

"In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

"Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there’s been an acceleration. As Adam Davidson notes in The Atlantic, 'In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.'

"And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Last April, Annie Lowrey of Slate wrote about a start-up called “E la Carte” that is out to shrink the need for waiters and waitresses: The company “has produced a kind of souped-up iPad that lets you order and pay right at your table. The brainchild of a bunch of M.I.T. engineers, the nifty invention, known as the Presto, might be found at a restaurant near you soon. ... You select what you want to eat and add items to a cart. Depending on the restaurant’s preferences, the console could show you nutritional information, ingredients lists and photographs. You can make special requests, like ‘dressing on the side’ or ‘quintuple bacon.’ When you’re done, the order zings over to the kitchen, and the Presto tells you how long it will take for your items to come out.

"What the iPad won’t do in an above average way a Chinese worker will. Consider this paragraph from Sunday’s article in The Times about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China: “Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

-- Thomas Friedman

In the future we won't get fat

At the same that we're turning our health care over to bureaucrats in Washington, our scientists are offering a glimpse of the future of medicine. The future is not anything we know now in our so-called "healthcare system," which was not designed as a system and doesn't work as a system. And it's certainly not anything like what Mr. Obama imagines.

In their book Transcend, Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD, write:

"We have exactly doubled the amount of the genetic data collected each year since 1990, and this pace has continued since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. The cost of sequencing a base pair of DNA - the building blocks of our genes - has dropped by half each year from $10 per base pair in 1990 to a small fraction of a penny today. Deciphering the first human genome cost a billion dollars. Today, anyone can have it done for $350,000. But, in case that's still out of your budget, just be patient for a little while longer. We are now only a few years away from a $1,000 human genome. Almost every other aspect of our ability to understand biology in information terms is similarly doubling every year.

  

"Our genes are essentially little software programs, and they evolved when conditions were very different than they are today. Take, for example, the fat insulin receptor gene, which essentially says 'hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well.' That gene made a lot of sense tens of thousands of years ago, at a time when food was almost always in short supply and there were no refrigerators. In those days, famines were common and starvation was a real possibility, so it was a good idea to store as many as possible of the calories you could find in your body's fat cells.

"Today, the fat insulin receptor gene underlies an epidemic of weight prob­lems, with two of three American adults now overweight and one in three obese. What would happen if we suddenly turned off this gene in the fat cells? Scientists actually performed this experiment on mice at the Joslin Diabetes Center. The animals whose fat insulin receptor gene was turned off ate as much as they wanted yet remained slim. And it wasn't an unhealthy slimness. They didn't get diabetes or heart disease, and they lived and remained healthy about 20 percent longer than the control mice, which still had their fat insulin receptor gene working. The experimental mice experienced the health benefits of caloric restriction - the only laboratory-proven method of life extension - while doing just the opposite and eating as much as they wanted. Several pharmaceutical companies are now rushing to bring these concepts to the human market."  

Do you have a knack?

Or is it just a trick?

A knack, the linguist Robert Beard writes, is a special, inexplicable skill or talent for carrying out a specific action.

That's the noun. There are other forms, he says, of which I have not been familiar.

The verb knack means "to crack, to make the noise of cracking," reflecting the original meaning of knack, the noun. Knacker "something that makes a sharp cracking sound," bears the same meaning. Knick-knack once meant "clatter," the alternation of knicking and knacking sounds. It followed the noun knack to its second historical meaning, "a trick" before ending up with its current sense, "a trinket, gimcrack, kickshaw."

Well, I knew knick-knack. I've never heard of kickshaw.

Knack has a long and curious past, the good doctor informs. It started out around 1380 meaning a cracking sound. This is confirmed by its cousins in other Germanic languages, knacken "to crack" and Norwegian knake "crack." (We also find Gaelic cnac with the same meaning.) For some unknown reason, by the time it reached the middle of the 16th century that meaning had given way to "deception, trick." Probably along the lines of crack shifting its meaning to "snide remark." The sense of "special talent" was first recorded in the 1580s, showing that "trick" took little time to be interpreted as a "special talent."

Knack, I'm going to suggest, is "woody."

Questions and answers

Questions Nobody Is Asking

• "Ever Wonder What Happens at the Little Gold-Buying Stores?"--headline, Times (Munster, Ind.), Jan. 22
• "What Happened to Breastfeeding on Sesame Street?"--headline, Ragan's Health Care Communication News, Jan. 23
• "Does Newt Own a Beet Farm?"--headline, PowerLineBlog.com, Jan. 22
• "According to one of his ex-wives, Newt Gingrich advocated open marriage as an alternative to monogamy or illicit sex. Of course, this was after he had strayed. Still, if her account is true, was he onto something? If more people considered such openness an option, would marriage become a stronger institution--less susceptible to cheating and divorce, and more attractive than unmarried cohabitation?"--New York Times website, Jan. 20

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking

• "President Newt? Not Likely but Scary to GOP"--headline, NationalJournal.com, Jan. 21
• "Why Cockfighting Persists"--headline, Salon.com, Jan. 22
• "Editorial: Why We Will No Longer Endorse in Elections"--headline, Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 23

-- Best of The Web Today

How we spend in hard times

According to Wagner A. Kamakura of Duke University and Rex Yuxing Du of the University of Houston, who studied purchases by more than 66,000 U.S. households over two decades:

In a recession that shrinks GDP by 2%, consumers increase their charitable expenses by 32%—about the same proportion by which they reduce their expenditures on jewelry and watches (35%). Consumers also increase their tobacco expenditures by 16%. People are more likely to start smoking (and resume smoking after quitting) in recessions than in good times, the researchers say.

Sounds good to me, except the charitable giving part.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery: a step

"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it."

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Mark your calendar

This year both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address will occur on the same day.

This is an ironic juxtaposition of events.

One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to an insignificant creature of little intelligence for prognostication.

The other involves a groundhog ...

(Boned Jello)

Vespers: Hear my prayer

In 1837, Adrien de Gasparin, the Minister of the Interior of France, asked Hector Berlioz to compose a Requiem Mass to remember soldiers who died in the Revolution of July 1830.

The premiere was conducted by François Antoine Habeneck in 1837. According to Berlioz himself, Habeneck put down his baton during the dramatic Tuba mirum (part of the Dies irae movement), and took a pinch of snuff. Berlioz rushed to the podium to conduct himself, saving the performance from disaster.

 

Hector Berlioz

Requiem-Grande messe des morts, H.75 Op. 5

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Sir Colin Davis, director
Keith Lewis, tenor

The instrumental forces alone demand that we step back and look at Hector Berlioz Grand Messe des morts, Op. 5 (Requiem) a little differently than we might look at another composition -- even another large-scale, theatrical composition -- from the 1830s: in addition to the usual large orchestra and chorus, Berlioz calls for no fewer than 16 timpani and four extra brass choirs!

When the French ministry of the interior commissioned a requiem mass from Berlioz in 1837 and decreed that the conservative conductor Francois-Antoine Habeneck would lead the December 5 first performance of the work, they can hardly have had such a thing in mind (nobody had yet ever even conceived of an instrumentation like that before, certainly not for indoor use); but Berlioz, through all his many ups and downs as a composer, was never one to suppress his fiery sense of the dramatic (as fiery as his bright red hair, so the stories go), and, in the end, even Habeneck -- who, according to a not impartial Berlioz, tried his best to ruin the Requiem's premiere -- had to admire the spark of genius and the sheer spunk that it took to put that thing on paper.

Today the Requiem is Berlioz's second-most famous work, behind the Symphony Fantastique, though, as one might imagine from its performance requirements, it is not his second-most frequent visitor to the concerthall (or the cathedral, as the case might be).

Text here. History here.

(Thanks, Peter)

Just bow out, Obama

This is not an endorsement of Newt Gingrich but rather of what he said after winning the South Carolina primary yesterday.

“I want America to become so energy independent that no American president ever again bows to the Saudi king.”

A reminder:

And, in reference to Obama's block of the pipeline from Canada, which the Canadians say will lead to selling the oil to China:

“An American president who can create a Chinese-Canadian partnership is truly a danger to this country.”

I remember being fascinated with Newt in the mid 90s when he was talking about soldiers on battlefields in the Mideast talking to their families at home via cell phone. The Web was barely with us back then, and Newt had visions that turned out to be true. Interesting guy.

On your knees, infidel

Religion insight of the day, via Glenn Reynolds:

BECAUSE IT’S ONLY SAFE TO PICK ON CHRISTIANS: University atheist society president forced to resign after cartoon of Muhammad having a drink with Jesus is posted on Facebook. 

And the lesson to Christians (and other religions) is that if you want respect, make people physically afraid. But if that’s the incentive system you create — and it is absolutely the one that’s been created — don’t be surprised if people pick up on it.

 Think about it.

C.S. Lewis: God whispers

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains."

-- C.S. Lewis

Learning how exercise works

Exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection. How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter.

Dr. Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.

Dr. Levine reckons that manipulating autophagy may offer a new approach to treating diabetes. And their research is also suggestive in other ways. 

Autophagy is a hot topic in medicine, as biologists have come to realise that it helps protect the body from all kinds of ailments. 

Autophagy is an ancient mechanism, shared by all eukaryotic organisms (those which, unlike bacteria, keep their DNA in a membrane-bound nucleus within their cells). It probably arose as an adaptation to scarcity of nutrients. Critters that can recycle parts of themselves for fuel are better able to cope with lean times than those that cannot. But over the past couple of decades, autophagy has also been shown to be involved in things as diverse as fighting bacterial infections and slowing the onset of neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases.

Most intriguingly of all, it seems that it can slow the process of ageing. Biologists have known for decades that feeding animals near-starvation diets can boost their lifespans dramatically.

A few anti-ageing zealots already subsist on near-starvation diets, but Dr Levine’s results suggest a similar effect might be gained in a much more agreeable way, via vigorous exercise. The team’s next step is to test whether boosted autophagy can indeed explain the life-extending effects of exercise. That will take a while. Even in animals as short-lived as mice, she points out, studying ageing is a long-winded process. 

But she is sufficiently confident about the outcome that she has, in the meantime, bought herself a treadmill.

I am so incredibly with it

Which do you think I should wear?

Today I'm wearing an old flannel shirt and some old blue jeans. I have no idea when I got them or where or even whether I bought them or just found them in the house one day, as often happens in a house where three kids grew up.

I'm dressed this way because nobody but Crazy Lab and the neurotic (in one case, psychotic) cats will see me. And I have to go out and shovel snow occasionally, because it's snowing.

Later on today I'll switch over to some gray pants that look like pajama bottoms but are technically pants, a college tee shirt my son outgrew, and a shirt that is flannel I guess -- it's green and black plaid and may be the top part of a pair of pajamas or may just be a shirt. I don't care. Later on tonight, I'll sleep in this.

I would wear this all day every day, except that I like to look nice when I go into Stop & Shop to buy more ice cream.

You can imagine how thrilled I was to read this in The Wall Street Journal:

Trend-conscious teens look as if they just rolled out of bed, wearing layers of loungewear to class at schools across the country. The trend goes way beyond "Pajama Day," the once- or twice-a-year special event that many schools hold to raise funds or promote spirit. Sales of "activewear" to girls ages 13 to 17, including sweatpants and sweatshirts but not pajama pants, rose 21% last year over the prior year—much faster than the 7.8% rise of apparel sales overall to that shopper segment, according market-research firm NPD Group.
Retailers are jumping on the pajamas-every-day trend, with stores like Abercrombie & Fitch, Aeropostale and Pink, a sub-brand of Victoria's Secret, giving loungewear prominent display.

And you know how authoritative The Wall Street Journal is. Proof enough for me that I am trendy. We fashion horses pay a price for our trendiness, however.

In Louisiana's Caddo Parish, which encompasses Shreveport, Commissioner Michael Williams is getting national attention for taking a stand. He plans to propose an ordinance outlawing the wearing of pajamas in public. "The moral fiber in America is dwindling away," Mr. Williams says. "It's pajamas today; what is it going to be tomorrow? Walking around in your underwear?"

I can see it.

Whose environment is it?

It's not about you, boys.

"In turning down [the Keystone XL Pipeline] the President has uncovered an ugly little secret that has always lurked beneath the surface of environmentalism. Its basic appeal is to the affluent. Despite all the professions of being "liberal" and "against big business," environmentalism's main appeal is that it promises to slow the progress of industrial progress. People who are already comfortable with the present state of affairs—who are established in the environment, so to speak—are happy to go along with this. 

"It is not that they have any greater insight into the mysteries and workings of nature. They are happier with the way things are. In fact, environmentalism works to their advantage. The main danger to the affluent is not that they will be denied from improving their estate but that too many other people will achieve what they already have. As the Forest Service used to say, the person who built his mountain cabin last year is an environmentalist. The person who wants to build one this year is a developer.

"Environmentalism has spent three decades trying to hide this simple truth. How can environmentalists be motivated by self-interest when they are anti-business? Doesn't that align them with the working classes? Well, not quite. You can be anti-business as a union member trying to claim higher wages but you can also be anti-business as a member of the aristocracy who believes "trade" and "commercialism" are crass and not attuned to the higher things in life. Environmentalism is born from the latter, not the former. It has spent decades trying to pretend it has common cause with the working people. With the defeat of the Keystone Pipeline, this is no longer possible. Too many blue-collar and middle-class jobs have been sacrificed on the altar of carbon emissions and global warming."

-- William Tucker

More dog stuff

Because I don't have anything to say.

Seneca: equanimity

“Happy the man who can endure the highest and the lowest fortune. He, who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity, has deprived misfortune of its power.”

-- Seneca 

Jumpin' Jack Flash

Shut 'er down

Stuart Butler, writing in National Affairs:

In recent decades, key sectors of the American economy have experienced huge and disruptive transformations — shifts that have ultimately yielded beneficial changes to the way producers and customers do business together. From the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T's "Ma Bell" system, to the way entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs forever changed the computer world once dominated by IBM, to the way the internet and bloggers have upended the business model of traditional newspapers, we have seen industries completely remade — often in wholly unexpected ways. In hindsight, such transformations seem to have been inevitable; at the time, however, most leaders in these fields never saw the changes coming. 

The higher-education industry is on the verge of such a transformative re-alignment. Many Americans agree that a four-year degree is vastly overpriced — keeping many people out of the market — and are increasingly questioning the value of what many colleges teach. Nevertheless, for those who seek a certain level of economic security or advancement, a four-year degree is absolutely necessary. Clearly, this is a situation primed for change. In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms — with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises.
If this transformation does come to pass, it could have profound and beneficial implications. 

It could significantly increase the international competitiveness of American workers in a world in which we need higher skills and productivity to compete. It could sharply improve the employability of those on the bottom rungs of America's income ladder, giving them the tools they need to move up. And it could do much to restore the American Dream for those who have begun to believe that opportunity in this country is disappearing. In other words, such a change could hardly come too soon.

Management guru Peter Drucker wrote this in 1997:

Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book. Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? And for the middle-class family, college education for their children is as much of a necessity as is medical care—without it the kids have no future. Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis.

Already, as I have noted, MIT is offering its courses for free.

Our Potemkin presidency

President Obama, who has increased the national debt more than any other president ever, is now pretending that he wants efficiency in the federal government. He's bragging that he's going to consolidate some federal agencies.

Except:

Contrary to what the New York Times was reporting, President Obama’s plan to consolidate six agencies into one isn’t “an aggressive campaign to shrink the size of the federal government.” After all, we are talking about $300 million over ten years, which is 0.0081 percent of the government’s 2012 budget of $3,700,000,000,000.

In the aftermath of the Solyndra scandal and the attention that it brought to crony capitalism, the president’s plan seems like an attempt to give a new lease on life to corporate welfare. 

Think about it: the thing these agencies have in common is that their main goal is to deliver taxpayer dollars to the private sector. The Small Business Administration, one of the agencies in the plan, is a good example of that. First, the agency guarantees loans to undeserving small businesses (one criterion for getting an SBA loan is that the business can’t get credit elsewhere). Unsurprisingly, these businesses end up defaulting at a higher rate than small businesses that do not rely on the guarantee to access capital. Second, the SBA’s loan program is little more than a corporate-welfare program for the big banks issuing the loans.

And Obamaman has discovered natural gas.

Last week the White House issued its latest report on jobs and it includes a section on "America's Natural Resource Boom." The report avers that a few years ago there were widespread "fears of a looming natural gas shortage," but that "the discovery of new natural gas reserves, such as the Marcellus Shale, and the development of hydraulic fracturing techniques to extract natural gas from these reserves has led to rapidly growing domestic production and relatively low domestic prices for households and downstream industrial users."

The catch is that this endorsement runs against every energy policy pursued by the Obama Administration for three years. 

The Institute for Energy Research reports that royalties from oil and gas drilling have fallen more than 90% since 2008 because of Interior Department permitting delays and rejections. 

The EPA recently issued a flawed report on groundwater contamination that could shut down the fracking process the President is now touting as a jobs producer. EPA's political goal is to grab power to supercede state drilling regulation. The industry regards new EPA authority as a real threat to its future. 

Each year Mr. Obama has also supported a $40 billion tax hike on the oil and gas industry because, as he put it in 2009, the tax code "encourages overproduction of oil and gas" and "is detrimental to long-term energy security." Even the Securities and Exchange Commission has imposed extensive new reporting requirements on oil and gas fracking companies.

 The man is a fraud. He insults our intelligence.