Woodstock CT Café

From John

Sally Koln’s Commentary

“…to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold (for his lies).

The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.

Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.

Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush . Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.

Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn’t what the president said. Period.

Fact: Though Paul Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates (which, incidentally, save Medicare recipients out-of-pocket costs, too) and Ryan himself embraced these savings in his budget plan.

Elections should be about competing based on your record in the past and your vision for the future, not competing to see who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing or bother to care. Both parties should hold themselves to that standard. Republicans should be ashamed that there was even one misrepresentation in Ryan’s speech but sadly, there were many.”

And then there’s what Ryan didn’t talk about. Read the rest of this entry »

From John

Monsanto gives Alnylam $29.2 million up front. See here. This could be the harbinger of the settlement mentioned below otherwise Monsanto would hold off. This is the first big deal to acquire this technology for agriculture (non-human therapeutic). Stay tuned.

Both Alnylam’s and Tekmira’s stock has jumped up in the last two weeks (written July 28th). Alnylam went from 8 to 20 a share. I can explain these unique technologies if anyone is interested. It is all covered at the litigation site linked below.

I posted my view of the prospect for settlement of the Tekmira v Alnylam Lawsuit and then posted commentary submitted by Dirk Haussecker (formerly at Stanford under the RNAi Nobel Prize winner Andrew Fire and very knowledgeable in the business of siRNA) and Sherk, a savvy investor. Both have been loyal followers of the RNAi Blog.

They both predict that the case will be settled by a merger between the two. Alnylam being the dominant company would essentially take over Tekmira’s valuable technology for delivery of siRNA as a drug. When this happens and based on the dramatic findings in Alnylam’s phase I clinical trial, it’s my bet that Alnylam’s stock will rise into the high 30s and maybe the 40s. As this happens Big Pharma will jump back in and invest in Alnylam like Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Merck, etc. Sky’s the limit. $$$$

You could hedge your bet on both Tekmira (TMKR on the Toronto Stock Exchange) and Alnylam (ALNY on the Nasdaq) since settlement would involve a stock swap in favor of Tekmira’s stock holders.

See the story at my RNAiLitigation website.

See the post yesterday by Ezra Klein at the Washington Post

Data from the Center on Budget Policy Priorities (cbpp.org) based on Congressional Budget Office estimates.

From Diane

Diane – …no matter what point in the development of a fetus you choose to call it a human being, a mother’s rights never supercede that new person’s rights.

LD – Well, I’m sorry that I have to be the one to tell you this Diane, but in 1973 the Supreme Court of the United States made a decision that counters your assertions about the rights of a fetus.

LD then quoted from that decision the paragraph (Section IX, A, pp2) that includes the words, “…the use of the word [person] is such that it has application only postnatally”.

This paragraph is for background only. It is NOT a conclusion in this decision. Here are the conclusions:

(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician.

(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.

(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life [410 U.S. 113, 165] may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.

“C” above means that a state can prohibit abortions after “viability”. The decision also leaves open the door to prohibiting abortions at an earlier stage of pregnancy with this disclaimer, “The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a “person” within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment… If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, [410 U.S. 113, 157] for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.”

These words are why Paul Ryan, Todd Akin, et al, created the 2009 “personhood” bill. They want to impose by fiat a concept that “those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology” have not yet been able to reconcile.

From LibDem

List of Bills that Republicans have obstructed or voted against:

Bill To Aid Small Businesses
Bill To Extend Unemployment Benefits
Bank Reform Bill
Wall St. Reform Bill
Jobs Bill
Bill Ending Tax Breaks for US Companies who ship Jobs Overseas
Bill To Raise Oil Spill Liability Cap
Campaign Disclosure Bill
Bill To Provide Medical Care for 9/11 First Responders
The Dream Act
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
Fair Pay Act
Benefits for Homeless Veterans
Affordable Health Care Act

This list is very telling as to where the Republican priorities lie. What they did fight tooth and nail for was extension of the Bush Tax cuts for the wealthy.

From Diane

My reference to your being closed minded was not a suggestion that you are unwilling to view new data. It was about your unequivocal rejection of concepts which you feel are not supported by hard facts. One can just as easily take the opposite tack, that because there is no hard proof that God and souls do not exist, that means they do! There are many who do take that approach and in my opinion, they too are closed-minded.

There are many who say these things exist and there are hints that this might be so. Therefore an open-minded person would stand back and say, “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but, *I* don’t have proof of that so I think I’ll wait to see if anything more develops.” They withhold absolute judgement. If you had hard “proof” that God and/or souls do not exist, that would validate your opinion. But you do not. You have no data at all. You are taking the path NC said. You “…dismiss something as foolish simply because you have never experienced it” or because you have no knowlege to support it.

When you can present to us solid evidence that there is no God, at that point, you will be entirely justified in proclaiming that He does not exist. Until then, if you are intellectually honest with us, the best you can say is that you do not think He exists, that for you, there is nowhere near enough evidence to support such a claim. Likewise, until NC can provide equivalent proof of God’s existence, the best NC can do is say that for her, He does exist. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s her fundraising page which has a link to the Natl. Firefighter’s Endowment.

From Mariah

At some point in your life you will probably have to dial 911. Maybe you wake up at 3am to the smell of smoke or your loved one experiences chest pains one evening while you are eating dinner at home. What if you stumble upon a car accident, or are in a car accident, on your way to work one morning. One thing that you know, is if you dial 911 someone will come to help us no matter what time it is or what we need. What happens if they arent there – or they don’t have to tools to help? What if they get hurt trying to help us?

Over the past few years I have spent the majority of my time trying to help those who help us. I have met thousands of firefighters from all different backgrounds that all go to work for us 24 hours a day 365 days a year. I’ve worked with several companies that dedicate themselves to helping our bravest. I’ve spent holidays at the station so that I can cook our firefighters a good meal while they run calls. I’ve seen the engine pull out of the bay at 2am, 3am and 4am in the same night because someone in the community needs help. One of the scariest things I have learned – every firefighter and every fire department needs help, some more then others.

Over 70% of our firefighters across the country are volunteer (which means they depend on charitable donations to STAY OPEN to run calls when anyone dials 911), and in a lot of cases these departments are in dire need of equipment – not only to save your life, but to save theirs. There are also so many municiple departments where the need is just as great.

In many cases the firefighter who comes to your house to help you and your loved ones is using equipment that should have been replaced 10 years ago. Wearing boots that have holes in it and driving an engine that is not working properly. A lot of these firefighters have full time jobs to support their families and do not get a paycheck for helping yours.

Please donate $1, $5 or whatever you can, it will go directly to make sure that the men and women who go to work for us are safe, and that they can help us to the best of their ability. Maybe you cannot donate today – but spread the word. Sharing this page and what it represents with the people you know will help firefighters everywhere. Make a difference and help those who help us.

Thanks for giving back to those who give to us!

From LibDem

I agree with you (to DB) to a certain extent. Everyone had hoped for more change than we got, but I think our expectations were set unrealistically high. I would have loved to have seen a public option. I would have loved to have seen broader financial regulation. I would have appreciated the break up of “too big to fail banks”. I would love to see the unemployment rate fall below 8%.

However, what is under appreciated is the complexity of the problems and the inefficiencies of democracies.

The economic failure was years in the making and the result of deregulatory legislation systematically occuring over a 30 year period. Tying this with steady outsourcing of jobs, globalization of economies, and a false boom created by monetary policy and a housing bubble, the ultimate failure linked many factors into a perfect storm. No matter how strong the rhetoric, Democrat or Republican, it is foolish to think that we could have ever reversed this problem in four years.

Further, there is a general lack of understanding and appreciation for how a democracy works. For better or worse, it is a function of many compromises, starts and stops, and an imperfect process largely dependent on regional and special interest groups. The presidency is not a dictatorship. He cannot legislate by will. Despite that the Democrats held the Presidency, the Senate, and the House, there never was, and perhaps never will be, a unanimous conformity in the party’s motivations. We saw this particularly in the heath care debates. So while the process is sloppy and the outcome based on mediocre compromise, unless you are willing to forgo a democratic process, this is the best we can hope for.

The economic challenges we are living in are unprecedented and there are many driving factors that cannot be steered There are no easy solutions, but the course the Obama administration took, while not perfect, certainly should be commended. I think he navigated the country on a course as best as he could considering the complexity and weight of the boat. And there were many successes:

Healthcare reform that helps millions of people
Wall St. Reform
Ended the Iraq War
Downsizing Afghan War
Killed Bin Laden
Turned US auto industry around
Recapitalized and stabilized the banks
Repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
Improved America’s Image abroad
Kicked the banks out of student loan program
Expanded Pell Grants for education
Education reform- Race to the Top
Passed Credit Card Reform
Established a Consumer Protection Agency
Made huge strides in developing alternate and
renewable energy technology
Improved food safety- strengthening the FDA
Expanded Stem Cell Research

And DB- you must note, that the Republican party opposed all of these measures every.step.of.the.way.

The Republican agenda was made very clear: Oppose anything that could improve the economy and protect tax breaks for the wealthy.

From John

The committee drafting the Republican Town Committee’s platform before next week’s kick off of the campaign season included a proposal to establish a commission exploring Woodstock’s return to a Manure Standard. Let’s face it, our prosperity is closely tied to the previous year’s production of manure. The success of the next year’s crops are closely tied to last year’s manure production which is in turn tied to the number of cows in town.

Republicans in Woodstock , citing President Ronald Reagan’s commission “to consider the feasibility of a manure basis for currency,” this week included the creation of “a similar commission to investigate possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar in Woodstock to the gross town production of manure (GTPM),” according to language of the proposal provided by a Republican Town Committee spokeswoman.

Chairman Ben Barroom has warned frequently of the perils of the manure standard, in which the dollar is valued at a fixed price per unit of manure. In the 1800s, for example, the U.S. was prone to frequent booms and farts in part because the manure standard left no discretion in the budgeting process over interest rates or the money supply, Mr. Barroom said this spring during a lecture at the Academy.

Presumptive GOP First Selectman Mitt Walker gave the idea pisswarm support in January when asked if he were looking at returning to a link between manure and the dollar in establishing the 2012/2013 budget.

“I’m happy to look at a whole range of ideas on how to have greater stability in our budget and in our taxation policies,” Mr. Walker said on WINY, but added, “I know that in the past when we had a manure standard, the idea that somehow it was detached from or free from any interference by the Manure Mafia was simply wrong because even with the manure standard someone has to decide what is the conversion rate between the manure and the tax dollar.”

Wait! Why are we discussing this? We already have the manure standard in Prop 46!

From JTO

Reading through the Ryan Medicare plan it seems clear to me it is actually a plan to get the federal government out of the elderly medical insurance business. It is wrapped in the marketing language used by large employers in the 1980′s and 1990′s as they shifted their health insurance benefit packages from traditional indemnity plans to managed care systems. Like that transition in the private sector, this one emphasizes the “choice” based system which actually reduced rather than expanded choice. Ryan is betting that the younger generation, which is pessimistic about the likelihood that they will benefit from Medicare when they retire, would rather reduce their cost of supporting the health care costs of the elderly currently. He is also making the highly probable bet that the USG will not increase the value of the vouchers to keep up with rising costs. What the voucher proposal boils down to is a phasing out of USG support for the most needy, who will not be able to afford the differential between the voucher and the market premiums. The vouchers would remain a benefit for those who could afford the differential, I.e., those with additional wealth or income. So as the program evolved, it would cut off health care for the poor elderly, and maintain it for the middle and upper income elderly, a perverse result.

I read an article in the WSJ today about Ryan’s dealings with the Simpson Bowles commission, in particular Alice Rivlin, and economist and legendary long term head of the Congressional Budget Office. They negotiated a deal where Medicare increases would be capped at GDP growth plus 1% (similar to what Massachusetts just passed). After the agreement, Ryan unilaterally reduced the cap to 0.5%, and added the voucher program for the 55 and under demographic set, so the deal fell apart. Ryan subsequently went through a
similar negotiation with a Democratic member of the House budget committee, came to agreement, then unilaterally added more fiscally conservative requirements, thus ending the negotiation.

This is a serious problem for our country and i agree with the fiscal conservatives that it needs to be addressed lest we commit generational grand larceny. Unfortunately, it sounds like Ryan prefers living in his Ayn Rand libertarian dream world to democratic politics the old fashioned way which requires compromise so the country can move forward.

From Diane

I’ve often said you have to be careful or you’ll learn something new every day. Well, yesterday was a red letter day! I learned that if a woman gets raped, she has “ways to try and shut that whole thing down” and not get pregnant. Thanks to Rep Todd Akin, R-Missouri, I now know women don’t have to worry about getting pregnant should they be raped. In fact, if you DO get pregnant, well, that is proof you weren’t really raped! Wow!

My only question is this. Men have been getting charged with rape for a long time. How come the attorneys of accused rapists don’t require the alleged victims to be tested so if they are pregnant, all charges against their clients can be summarily dismissed?

It is comforting that our next Vice President, Rep Paul Ryan, also must know this secret about women. Together with Rep Akin, he co-sponsored a brilliant piece of legislation that will stop the wantonly criminal act by women of alleging rape when they didn’t get beaten up. And now that the cat is out of the bag about women being able to prevent conception, and this fact is getting the full publicity it deserves, we can all rest easier in the knowledge that innocent men won’t be incarcerated unjustly. If the bitch got pregnant, well clearly she must have been asking for it and not need an abortion.

From Diane

While “genetic memory” is a possibility, I think I’ll wait till they find the right gene. In the meanwhile, since we are talking waaaay outside the box, y’all y’all are overlooking another possibility. This oversight is, I think, directly traceable to a fear that *we* must surely cease to exist when *we* die. This would be especially true for those who abhor religions, per se, for it is religion that has usurped the concept of a soul and claimed it for its own. One can hardly accept the existence of a soul without also accepting a religion, usually God-based. Perhaps this is an error.

We humans are animals. We are born, develop, degenerate and die. Dust to dust. However, at least if we believe Longfellow et al, dust to dust does not refer to the soul. What if, as proposed in some Eastern religions, our lives are like training grounds for that part of us that is not flesh, our souls, if you will, where we slowly learn to be more perfect? Thus, while the shell/body our souls occupy day to day dies, its abilities and memories wiped away forever, our souls might transcend the death of the physical organism and retain not the specifics of time and place but rather a deeper understanding of who we are. If what we call “genetic memory” isn’t physical at all, then that opens a plethora of possible explanations for things like déjà vu and the sense that some of us have that we are older or wiser than our parents.

It would help explain the enduring nature of religions since they HAVE appropriated the concept of soul for their own, getting “it” at least partially right. It would also explain why we, with no discernable guidance, can know/believe in concepts not shared by our parents. And how many of us have known children who were “wise beyond their years”.

About 10 years ago I visited my cousin in Phoenix and he took my daughter and I to a quaint restaurant that had once been a glass factory. Surrounding the majority of tables, raised several feet above the main floor, were large kilns in which parties could dine in relative privacy. After lunch, we walked about looking at exhibits of the fine glasswork this small factory had produced. I wandered into one of those kilns.

I have never experienced emotions as I did then. Fear, anguish, panic hit me with almost violent force. I couldn’t think; I couldn’t breathe. I was flooded with horrible sadness and sense of loss. I started crying and desperately scrabbled backwards trying to escape. Once on the platform outside the kiln, I bolted for the parking lot. All this stunned my daughter and cousin who quickly followed me to find out what was wrong. But I couldn’t tell them. I had no words to describe what had happened, what I felt.

The only remotely similar construct my physical brain could provide was the ovens of the German consentration camps. But if that is right, if I was at some level “remembering”, there is a problem. Although my father’s grandparents left Germany as Jews and arrived on Ellis Island Episcopalians, that happened decades before the Final Solution. None of my forebears experienced the Holocaust. But I might have.

From John

There was a very interesting essay by Doreen Carvajal in the Science section of the NYTimes yesterday entitled “On the Trail of Inherited Memories.” Her account of her visit to Andalusian Spain struck a familiar chord with me as I had made a similar trip from Seville down to Cadiz (Ca-deth) on a third class train and then from Cadiz to Algeciras on a bus carrying Spaniards with their chickens and goats. I wanted to go to Algeciras, a small city across the bay from Gibraltar, because I had been told that my paternal grandfather was in the Consulate there sometime before 1913 when my father was born in Constantinople. Why was I doing this?

More recently in late June 2010 Becki and I drove down to Rye NY to find Milton Gardens, a block of homes that my maternal grandfather designed and built in the early 1920s. I hadn’t fully understood my grandfather’s architectural accomplishment and the nature of the community he created with his two hands until I found his marvelous houses. But then came his protracted financial torture in the 1930s as a result of the stock market crash which forced my grandfather to start a new life partly broken from the experience.

I had only just figured out that my mother lived in Milton Gardens for the first 16 years of her life sort of like my growing up in Rowayton in my first 18 years.

I think all of us have at some time wondered why we are the way we are. We usually attribute our beliefs and behaviors to our parents and/or upbringing; but it may not be that simple. With the advent of the Internet many of us have explored our ancestry. I have suggested here at the Cafe that our strong biases may be inherited, in other words genetically programmed. Doreen Carvajal raises the theory of inherited memory in her essay and cites examination of “an unconcious sense of identity” by behavioral psychologists.

This is a form of memory that we are not conscious of – not memories of what we are taught directly by our parents – although our parents have passed this on to us from their ancestors. Doreen uses the example of migrating birds and butterflies – “…migration patterns that birds are born with, which they never learned.” And then, “The Monarch Butterfly makes a trip from Canada to Mexico to a 23-acre spot, and they take three generations to get there.” Read the rest of this entry »

From Con

I didn’t see Romney’s press conference during which he used a white board to explain, but he seems to have forgotten what I thought was a tried-and-true Rule of Campaigns: ‘If you have to use a white board to explain, you have already lost your audience’? Doesn’t he remember Ross Perot and his white board explanations (always pausing to ask “Do ya follow?” in his condescending way)? I don’t think white board presentations work out the way candidates anticipate and I think Romney’s campaign came up with the idea at the last minute and without sleeping on it.

In any event, following these past several days with only average attention to details (so I could easily be wrong), it seems like I’ve heard 2 or 3 separate and inconsistent explanations by Ryan, Romney or their campaign – anyone else get this impression or is it just me?

In any event, history teaches us more about what to expect than current polling numbers and I believe that the smartest analysis involves looking back at previous campaigns and what happened between mid-August and voting day. I’m sure both camps are saving their best for last, so it should be very interesting to see what they believe is their best and what response is like. This is also the time when I always seem be asking “how stupid to these guys think American voters are, asking us to buy into their latest rhetoric”? That goes double for Talk Radio (Left or Right).

I also don’t find all of these news channel’s ‘campaign surrogate debates’ to be helpful analysis at all – there is zero objectivity, a lot of blind advocacy and I don’t find them informative on important issues. Voters are looking for objective and unbiased sources of information about both candidates and their ideas, but I’m at a loss to come up with any source I’d recommend.