Month: June 2011

As if brain cancer wasn't bad enough, Sharon Begley examines a possible risk when the phone is in your pocket:

In a study scheduled for publication in the journal Andrologia but posted online in March, researchers at the Medical University of Graz in Austria reported bad news. They examined the records of 2,110 men treated at the university’s fertility clinic from 1993 to 2007. Remarkably, 1,119 of those men did not use cellphones (mostly from the early years, not surprisingly.) That allowed the researchers to compare users to non-users. Results: in users, an average of 68 percent of the sperm had “a pathological morphology,” such as aberrant heads or tails, compared to 58 percent in non-users. (If the 58 percent seems high, remember that these men had all gone to a fertility clinic.) “Our results showed that cellphone use negatively affects sperm quality in men,” the researchers conclude.

Tara Parker-Pope took on this subject a couple years back:

There are some global concerns about declining male fertility in industrialized countries, but issues like pollutants, exposure to chemicals and smoking are likely far more worrisome culprits than cellphones.

A.N. Devers debunks the myth:

The story goes like this: the scores of cats that have lived over the decades on the property in Key West are direct descendants of Hemingway’s original cats, including Snowball, a six-toed cat who was given to Hemingway as a gift from a sea captain. When I visited in 2008, the Key West guide showed off a picture of Hemingway’s young son Patrick, holding a snow-white kitten in the yard. But in a 1972 Los Angeles Times article by Charles Hillinger, Ernest Hemingway’s last wife and widow, Mary Hemingway, states, “Ernest…never kept animals at the Key West house during the last twenty years of his life. He never stayed at Key West long enough to bother with animals after his divorce from Pauline.”

In a 1994 interview with the Miami Herald, Patrick Hemingway stated the cats in the picture were his neighbors’ who wrote in to the paper to confirm. The cat myth began with Bernice Dickson, who bought the Hemingway house in 1964 and opened the estate as a tourist attraction. At some point she started breeding and selling six-toed cats, even sending them through the mail, and claming, “they are a special Asiatic breed that Mr. Hemingway had when he was here.”

A staggering video from the NYT.

He gets it. Finally, someone gets it:

“I think she could win,” Dean told The Hill in an interview Friday. “She wouldn’t be my first choice if I were a Republican but I think she could win.”

Dean warns the sluggish economy could have more of a political impact than many Washington strategists and pundits assume.

“Any time you have a contest — particularly when unemployment is as high as it is — nobody gets a walkover,” Dean said. “Whoever the Republicans nominate, including people like Sarah Palin, whom the inside-the-Beltway crowd dismisses — my view is if you get the nomination of a major party, you can win the presidency, I don’t care what people write about you inside the Beltway,” Dean said.

Pundits speak of her lack of professional organization. What they don't speak of so often is her willingness to say and do things very few politicians will. She will play the race card powerfully, often and repeatedly. She will run a campaign against Obama as an un-American. She will run on hatred of elites, will turn every sad gaffe, lie or untruth into "truth", she will deploy religious motifs more effectively than any Republican candidate in modern times. In the last campaign she accused Obama of being a friend of terrorists, and was prevented from using Jeremiah Wright in the last few weeks of the campaign. She will make the Willie Horton ad look like happytalk.

Most responsible politicians do not throw gasoline on a cultural tinderwood. But remember Tucson. Even then, she could show no restraint, no regret, no responsibility. Even when a politician was shot in the head, she tried to divide and conquer. And the MSM have no idea how to handle her, how to cope with her, how to expose her. She destroyed them last time and somehow perpetuated the meme that they destroyed her. This is a dangerous, dangerous person.

A Twitter thread that brings it all home. My favorite: "George Jefferson Wore Bell Bottoms To Warn The British."

Well, apart from O'Reilly, he's building higher ratings, according to the Daily Mail.

"It is amazing that being in favor of single-payer, government-controlled, fully socialized healthcare is a completely acceptable position in the public debate, but being in favor of ending Medicare (a position that at least has the virtue of financially viability) means banishment from polite company. When some drone scowls, “You want to end Medicare!” It can’t be that the only acceptable answer is, “How dare you slander me like that! How can you question my deep and abiding commitment to our sacred inter-generational trust?” We ought to be able to say, “You’re damn I want to end it — and why do you favor a politicized pyramid scheme that is bankrupting the country?”" – Andrew McCarthy, NRO.