Medical/Health

John McCain's Health Care Plan:

1. Taxes your employer provided health care benefits as income.

2. Gives a $5000 check to your health insurance company.

3. Leave families on their own to figure out how to cover the balance of the $12,000 family plan premium.

4. Remove consumer protections by letting health insurance companies sell across state lines.

5.Forces 20 million citizens out of employer provided health insurance which makes them vulnerable to not being able to get coverage at all in the individual market because of pre-existing conditions.

DOES THAT SOUND GOOD TO YOU?

Steve Rubel raises an excellent point. People just don't have enough damage and death behind us to make a decision that cell phones are dangerous. However, if you think about it radioactivity is a known killer. Doesn't the idea of holding a microwave radio transmitter to you ear for hours every day give you a somewhat unsettled feeling? No? Well how about this cell phone video?

Scientists are hailing a new drug to treat aggressive prostate cancer as potentially the most significant advance in the field for 70 years.

I have a happy prostate gland. But this is still good news to me.

The George Bush administration is doing it's best to kill this story but this one has legs, long legs that go deep into the US government bureaucracy. This scandal goes from indifference to lies to fraud. It is systemic and must dug up and ripped out.

The Washington Post has an article poorly named 'It Is Just Not Walter Reed' a better name in the same vein is 'It's not only Walter Reed'. I know it's a nitpick but headlines are there to get attention and poorly worded one's are likely to be missed. BUT, the article is loaded with real world first hand accounts from VA patients in the system that are plainly horrific. It's hard to read but this is your George Bush government in action.

Tomorrow Never Knows: Lyrics, AMG, Wikipedia

Whithin You Without You: Lyrics, AMG, Wikipedia

The Sydney Morning Herald December 26, 2006

A common parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid, an Australian researcher says. About 40 per cent of the world's population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, including about eight million Australians.

Human infection generally occurs when people eat raw or undercooked meat that has cysts containing the parasite, or accidentally ingest some of the parasite's eggs excreted by an infected cat.

The parasite is known to be dangerous to pregnant women as it can cause disability or abortion of the unborn child, and can also kill people whose immune systems are weakened.

Until recently it was thought to be an insignificant disease in healthy people, Sydney University of Technology infectious disease researcher Nicky Boulter said, but new research has revealed its mind-altering properties. "Interestingly, the effect of infection is different between men and women," Dr Boulter writes in the latest issue of Australasian Science magazine.

"Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.

"On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.

"In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women behave like sex kittens".

Dr Boulter said the recent Czech Republic research was not conclusive, but was backed up by animal studies that found infection also changes the behaviour of mice.

The mice were more likely to take risks that increased their chance of being eaten by cats, which would allow the parasite to continue its life cycle.

Rodents treated with drugs that killed the parasites reversed their behaviour, Dr Boulter said.

Another study showed people who were infected but not showing symptoms were 2.7 times more likely than uninfected people to be involved in a car accident as a driver or pedestrian, while other research has linked the parasite to higher incidences of schizophrenia.

"The increasing body of evidence connecting Toxoplasma infection with changes in personality and mental state, combined with the extremely high incidence of human infection in both developing and developed countries, warrants increased government funding and research, in particular to find safe and effective treatments or vaccines," Dr Boulter said.

In his book Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction, Terry Tamminen outlines the direct and indirect impact that petroleum consumption has on millions of Americans every year.

Tamminen, a former secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, spoke with Wired News about how we got into this mess, who is to blame, and his state's current efforts to hold energy providers and the auto industry responsible for their environmental impact.