Gen. Sheehan: "Dutch gays responsible for massacre." Dutch: "WTF?"

WOW really!


Gen. Sheehan: "Dutch gays responsible for massacre." Dutch: "WTF?": "If you didn't see yesterday's prime testimony from retired Gen. Sheehan at the Senate Armed Services hearing on Don't Ask, Don't Tell, it's a doozy. Sheehan said the integration of Dutch gays into the military was partly responsible for the Srebrenica genocide in 1995. Make sure you watch Levin's reaction:

Aside from Levin calling his comments 'off target' (you could tell he was restraining himself from harsher words), the Dutch had a response (several, actually) of their own (h/t Richard Allen Smith):

'It is astonishing that a man of his stature can utter such complete nonsense,' Dutch defence ministry spokesman Roger van de Wetering said in response.

"The Srebrenica massacre and the involvement of UN soldiers was extensively investigated by the Netherlands, international organisations and the United Nations.

"Never was there in any way concluded that the sexual orientation of soldiers played a role."

In a statement, Dutch Ambassador Ren?e Jones-Bos said, 'I take pride in the fact that lesbians and gays have served openly and with distinction in the Dutch military forces for decades, such as in Afghanistan at the moment.'

"The military mission of Dutch U.N. soldiers at Srebrenica has been exhaustively studied and evaluated, nationally and internationally," Jones-Bos said. "There is nothing in these reports that suggests any relationship between gays serving in the military and the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims."

Dutch caretaker Defense Minister Eimert van Middelkoop said Friday the claim was 'damaging' and not worthy of a soldier. 'I don't want to waste any more words on it,' he said.

Gen. Henk van den Breemen, Dutch Chief of Staff at the time of the Srebrenica genocide [note: van den Breemen is the official who Sheehan stated had told him open gay service contributed to the massacre.], called Sheehan's comments "total nonsense."

Given that Sheehan's comments included attacks on 'liberalization', 'social engineering' and even 'unions', you could tell where this guy was coming from.

"

High-fructose corn syrup consumption may push fatty livers to the brink

High-fructose corn syrup consumption may push fatty livers to the brink: "

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is one of the many consequences of obesity, as fat accumulates not only across the body and around the visceral organs, but inside the organ that helps break down fats, filter toxins from the bloodstream and create useable fuel from the food we eat. About 3 in 10 American adults suffer from nonalcoholic fatty liver. But it's a population of patients that's grown so fast, there isn't a lot known about their risks, and what factors aggravate those risks.

Researchers know those with nonalcoholic fatty liver are more likely than those without such fatty deposits to develop cirrhosis, liver cancer and liver failure requiring transplant. Still, a minority of those patients will do so, and doctors wish they could identify what factors may push those with fatty liver toward those outcomes.

The development of tough scar tissue in the liver can be a sign that liver failure may lie ahead. For heavy alcohol consumers, an alcoholic bender can cause scarring, or fibrosis, and lead to trouble. That's why those with signs of alcoholic fatty liver are urged to stop drinking alcohol.

A new study suggests that for those with nonalcoholic fatty liver, drinking a lot of beverages sweetened with fructose may do the same thing as liquor.

The study, published in the journal Hepatology, tracked 427 patients with fatty liver disease to see whether consumption of fructose made a difference in the progression of fatty liver to the organ's failure. The Duke University researchers asked subjects only about how many fructose-sweetened beverages a week they drank, including fruit juices and soft drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup -- yielding a conservative accounting, since the stuff is also used in baking and other processed foods. Though only 19% of the fatty liver patients consumed few or no fructose sweetened beverages, 28% drank at least one a day.

Best represented among the heavy fructose consumers were subjects who were younger, male and Latino, and who had a higher BMI.

Compared to subjects who drank the least fructose beverages, those who drank the most were significantly more likely to have the hepatic scarring that will more often progress to cirrhosis or liver cancer. And older subjects who regularly consumed fructose beverages showed more signs of liver inflammation. After they stripped out the effects of age, gender and body-mass index, the researchers also found that the heavy fructose drinkers also have lower levels of HDL (or "good") cholesterol.

Duke University hepatologist Dr. Manal Abdelmalek said in a news release that high-fructose corn syrup, which was first introduced into the human diet in the 1970s and has accounted for an average of 10% of Americans' caloric intake over the last decade, "may not be as benign as we previously thought." While researchers have demonstrated clearly that the stuff has "fueled the fire of the obesity epidemic," added Abdelmalek, "untill now, no one has ever suggested it contributes to liver disease and/or liver injury."

--Melissa Healy

"

High-fructose corn syrup consumption may push fatty livers to the brink

High-fructose corn syrup consumption may push fatty livers to the brink: "

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is one of the many consequences of obesity, as fat accumulates not only across the body and around the visceral organs, but inside the organ that helps break down fats, filter toxins from the bloodstream and create useable fuel from the food we eat. About 3 in 10 American adults suffer from nonalcoholic fatty liver. But it's a population of patients that's grown so fast, there isn't a lot known about their risks, and what factors aggravate those risks.

Researchers know those with nonalcoholic fatty liver are more likely than those without such fatty deposits to develop cirrhosis, liver cancer and liver failure requiring transplant. Still, a minority of those patients will do so, and doctors wish they could identify what factors may push those with fatty liver toward those outcomes.

The development of tough scar tissue in the liver can be a sign that liver failure may lie ahead. For heavy alcohol consumers, an alcoholic bender can cause scarring, or fibrosis, and lead to trouble. That's why those with signs of alcoholic fatty liver are urged to stop drinking alcohol.

A new study suggests that for those with nonalcoholic fatty liver, drinking a lot of beverages sweetened with fructose may do the same thing as liquor.

The study, published in the journal Hepatology, tracked 427 patients with fatty liver disease to see whether consumption of fructose made a difference in the progression of fatty liver to the organ's failure. The Duke University researchers asked subjects only about how many fructose-sweetened beverages a week they drank, including fruit juices and soft drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup -- yielding a conservative accounting, since the stuff is also used in baking and other processed foods. Though only 19% of the fatty liver patients consumed few or no fructose sweetened beverages, 28% drank at least one a day.

Best represented among the heavy fructose consumers were subjects who were younger, male and Latino, and who had a higher BMI.

Compared to subjects who drank the least fructose beverages, those who drank the most were significantly more likely to have the hepatic scarring that will more often progress to cirrhosis or liver cancer. And older subjects who regularly consumed fructose beverages showed more signs of liver inflammation. After they stripped out the effects of age, gender and body-mass index, the researchers also found that the heavy fructose drinkers also have lower levels of HDL (or "good") cholesterol.

Duke University hepatologist Dr. Manal Abdelmalek said in a news release that high-fructose corn syrup, which was first introduced into the human diet in the 1970s and has accounted for an average of 10% of Americans' caloric intake over the last decade, "may not be as benign as we previously thought." While researchers have demonstrated clearly that the stuff has "fueled the fire of the obesity epidemic," added Abdelmalek, "untill now, no one has ever suggested it contributes to liver disease and/or liver injury."

--Melissa Healy

"

Private school students' gay-bashing not free speech, court rules

Private school students' gay-bashing not free speech, court rules: "

Students at an elite L.A. private school who posted death threats and antigay messages on the Internet site of a 15-year-old classmate can't claim the constitutional protection of free speech, a California appeals court has ruled.

The parents of the boy targeted by the threatening and derogatory posts on his website withdrew him from Harvard-Westlake School and moved to Northern California to protect him from classmates who had incorrectly labeled him as gay and pronounced him "wanted dead or alive," the boy's father said in a lawsuit brought against six students and their parents.

The defendants had attempted to deflect the charges by seeking a judgment from Los Angeles County Superior Court that the comments were 1st Amendment-protected speech on an issue of public interest, a motion denied by the lower court and upheld by the 2nd District Court of Appeal in a 2-1 decision Monday.

The Los Angeles Police Department detective who initially investigated the hostile website postings against the student, identified only as D.C., had declined to pursue charges against the other students, saying their "annoying and immature Internet communications did not meet the criteria for criminal prosecution."

The Los Angeles County district attorney likewise declined to prosecute.

The appeals court decision separating cyber-bullying from free speech will allow the boy and his parents to move forward with their suit against the students for alleged hate crimes.

--Carol J. Williams

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2012: The Year The World Will Not End

2012: The Year The World Will Not End: "

Even if there were some apocalyptic event coming up, the Mayans would have no way of knowing. (istockphoto.com)

By Marcelo Gleiser

Everywhere you look it's a deluge of horrendous predictions, a cataclysmic apotheosis marking the end of the world: all happening on December 21st, 2012. (Or is it the 23rd?) Across the world, people are blogging, writing, praying, believing that these predictions are actually true, that this is for real, not like the Y2K bug or countless other failed apocalyptic predictions that people have an amazing ability to forget. I'd like to counter this absurd wave of apocalyptic fear with, yes, the light of reason and science. Even though many of the 'predictions' are supposedly based on science, the fact is they are all bogus, as are all non-scientific apocalyptic predictions. (The Sun will explode in some 5 billon years.) Perhaps the best way to proceed, given the relatively short space of a blog post, is to list the most popular disasters, and discuss them one by one. Here it goes:

1. The Mayan Calendar ends. Where does this come from? For the sake of argument, let's leave aside that the Mayans would have no way of predicting the end of the world. A quick examination of the 'evidence' shows that the correlation between the end of their calendar and the end of the world is an invention. Mayan scholars Linda Schele and David Freidel have found references of events dated after the doomsday event. Others scholars claim that the notion of 'apocalypse,' so common in Jewish-Christian biblical texts, is foreign to Mayan culture. The source often quoted for the 'prophecy' comes from a site in Mexico called the Tortuguero Site. The world's foremost experts can hardly make sense of the fragmentary inscription:

The Thirteenth [b'ak'tun] will end (on) 4 Ajaw, the 3rd of Uniiw [3 K'ank'in]. Black ... will occur. (It will be) the descent(?) of Bolon Yookte' K'uh to the great (or red?)...

From this to the end of the world 'prediction' based on the Mayan deep understanding of the cosmos is an enormous and shameless jump. There are four possible apocalyptic events that are often associated with the Mayan prophecy, all astronomical in nature:

2. Galactic alignment: Some claim that the Mayan knew of the periodic alignment of the Earth, Sun and the galactic center. The same people claim that this alignment will bring the end of time. Well, it turns out that this approximate alignment happens every year each December. And Earth has been doing just fine for about 4 billion years. Even if all the planets were to align--a striking astronomical phenomenon (it won't happen in 2012 or for decades)--the effects on Earth are negligible. Remember that the strength of the gravitational force drops with the square of the distance. Also, if you sum the masses of all the planets, it comes to about 440 Earth masses. In contrast, the mass of the Sun alone is about 332,000 Earth masses! That is, the kind of perturbation created by all planets pulling together on the Earth is absolutely negligible. Also, the galactic center is so far away that the same reasoning applies.

3. Planet Nibiru (or Planet X): Supposedly, the Sumerians knew of a planet that is going to collide with the Earth in 2012, planet Nibiru. There is no such planet! If there were, astronomers would have tracked it long ago. Also, to hit Earth by 2012, the object would be visible with the naked eye by now. Any object this large would cause perturbations in other planetary orbits and asteroids, causing small effects that would be easily detectable.

4. Giant solar storm: It is true that the Sun is expected to reach a maximum of activity in 2012-2014. This happens every eleven years, when many dark spots appear on the solar surface, due to erupting blobs of plasma that carry with them magnetic fields. Sometimes, debris from these solar storms do hit the Earth, causing beautiful auroras. More violent ones can disrupt satellites and even cause blackouts. However, there is nothing unusual predicted about the next solar max. If the Sun does misbehave it could indeed impact the Earth. But we don't expect anything significant happening for hundreds of millions of years. Even if there were something coming up, certainly the Mayans would have no way of knowing.

5. Asteroid collision: No question that asteroids can hit the Earth and have done it in the past. In my book The Prophet and the Astronomer I analyzed the interesting history of apocalyptic doom and fear of the celestial phenomena: asteroids and comets figure prominently. Fortunately, the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago marks the last huge impact. It is possible to monitor the skies for the big, doomsday-causing rocks and there is nothing on the radar screen. Sure, smaller ones can fall at short notice, as the one that fell in 1908 in Siberia. But these smaller rocks (10-30 meters across) will not end the world as we know it, although they could cause horrible devastation on a heavily populated area.

There are other doomsday scenarios out there, but the story is always the same. A lot of media hype, catalyzed by people's irrational fear of the unknown. The notion of celestial apocalypse is very old indeed, and will probably stay with us for a while. We see a transposition of language, from the skies falling on our heads to more precise, science-inspired scenarios. Those who believe this kind of apocalyptic hype are simply refusing to learn from 400 years of modern science, preferring to live their lives with their eyes wide shut.

But I don't want to end on a bad note. There is some good to this movement, in particular when it asks for a new 'global spiritual awakening,' a move toward the betterment of humanity. How could anyone not want this? What saddens me is that it seems that only fear can mobilize people to make a change, be it for the worse or for the better.

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Drop the chitchat and get serious

Drop the chitchat and get serious: "

Small talk may be common, but it doesn't do much to nourish our sense of well-being. Compared with people who rated themselves as more unhappy, people who were happiest spent 70% more time talking, had one-third as much small talk and twice as many substantive conversations.

Researchers came to their conclusions by having a group of 79 college students wear a tape recorder for four days and eavesdropping on their conversations. The students also were given tests to measure happiness and personality.

The findings "demonstrate that the happy life is social rather than solitary, and conversationally deep rather than superficial," the authors, from the University of Arizona and Washington University in St. Louis, wrote.

It's not clear, however, whether happy people attract others for deep conversation or whether deep conversation makes people happier. Further research should be done, they said, to see if having more substantive conversations helps unhappy people become happier.

The study is published online in the journal Psychological Science.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Wong Maye-e / Associated Press

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California's prison population falls for the third straight year

California's prison population falls for the third straight year: "The state had the greatest drop among the states, a survey finds, with a drop of 4,257 inmates. Among the factors: a federal court order to cut the prison population, and lawmakers trimming budgets.





California's prison population declined in 2009 for the third straight year as the number of state prisoners fell nationally for the first time in nearly four decades, according to a new survey from the Pew Center on the States.

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Catholics Split Over Abortion Language

Catholics Split Over Abortion Language: "

By Maggie Mertens

Legislative attempts in the health overhaul process to ensure that federal funding is not used for abortions has only succeeded in dividing the very House Democrats needed to pass that bill. And Catholic groups are facing the same divide.

Cardinal Francis George and his group, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, did not give their blessing to the abortion language in the Senate health care bill the House will vote on this week. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

This weekend the Catholic Health Association, a group that represents several hundred Catholic hospitals, came out in support of the less-restrictive Senate version of abortion language. This is key because the House must pass the Senate bill to move the process forward at this point.

And Catholics United has been calling on Catholics to lobby the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to support the Senate language. But it seems that even the 5,000 Catholics who e-mailed the bishops in the last 72 hours have not swayed them. The bishops said Monday they oppose the whole Senate bill because of the abortion language.

The President of the Conference, Cardinal Francis George , said promises that abortion language could be tweaked in future bills was like 'asking us, in Midwestern parlance, to buy a pig in a poke.'

Though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. who identifies herself as a Catholic, recently put the kibosh on the issue of future tweaks, it doesn't mean she's stopped talking about it. At a news conference yesterday, Pelosi confirmed that the bill is 'a bill about health care, health insurance reform. It's not about abortion,' according to the New York Times. And like the Catholic Health Association, she believes that the Senate abortion language is enough to keep federal money from funding abortions. 'If you believe that ... the law of the land is no federal funding for abortion, there's none in this bill.'

Pelosi's argument and some Catholic support might be enough for some Congressmen to support the bill even if they supported the more restrictive House abortion language in the past. Minnesota Democrat Jim Oberstar's been moved.

Though the fight for the right balance of votes will continue: Three House Democrats who originally supported the House bill, which contained more restrictive language, have reported they will not vote for a bill without it, according to Politico.

Maggie Mertens is a reporter at Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit news service.

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U.S. Chamber of Commerce gains in power, redoubles attacks on climate science and law

U.S. Chamber of Commerce gains in power, redoubles attacks on climate science and law: "

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – a significant and strident voice in opposition to anything that our government might possibly do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – is using its considerable financial resources to dramatically increase its constituent base through “grass-roots organizing,” and that its influence is rising. This development should concern anyone who believes that climate change is a problem worth addressing (and has motivated several large corporations, including Exelon and Apple, to leave the Chamber, though others have apparently joined anew, according to the L.A. Times article).

And the U.S. Chamber just filed another in a series of challenges to every serious effort our government has made to combat the causes of climate change. The Chamber’s basic approach has been to attack everything: government policy, the laws that require the government to act, and the science behind government decisions. (Here’s the Chamber’s blog on environmental issues, if anyone’s interested in what they have to say.)

The Chamber filed its latest attack today. Its petition to EPA to reconsider its “endangerment finding” follows on the heels of a court challenge against that same finding (see Holly’s post about that here), a demand last summer for an unprecedented “on-the-record” rulemaking proceeding that the U.S. Chamber’s policy director – in an ill-considered remark that he later regretted – compared to the Scopes monkey trial (see thoughts by Holly and by me about this), and – during the Bush administration – pleas not to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act at all. (Here are some general thoughts by Jonathan about the Chamber’s approach.)

Although the proper policy choices for dealing with climate change are open to debate, the Chamber has been dead wrong on the law and on the science. There’s no serious question that the endangerment finding, and EPA’s other preparation to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, are legally correct. And there’s no serious question about the damage that greenhouse gases are doing and will do to our world. Unfortunately, the Chamber’s rhetoric and tactics – especially in light of its efforts at grass-roots organizing – surely will help to spread disinformation about climate change and to promote skepticism about our government’s legitimate efforts to deal effectively with climate change’s causes.

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Climate-Change Deniers: Here's What the World's Scientific Societies Say

Climate-Change Deniers: Here's What the World's Scientific Societies Say: "

Dr. Peter Gleick's recent post is a wonderful summary of some of the world's most prestigious scientific societies - AGU, GSA, AAAS, ESA, ACS, EPS, IUGG, APS, et al. - and their statements on climate change. He also includes positions of the national science academies of the G8 + 5 nations.

And, as he says, don't take his word for it - go to the societies' WWW sites and see for yourself.

Thanks to John Fleck for alerting me to this, and most of all, thanks to Peter Gleick.

"...the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." -- Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), referring to human-induced global warming

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Scientist at Work: Dr. Thomas R. Frieden: At C.D.C., Obama’s Appointee Wields a Big Broom

Scientist at Work: Dr. Thomas R. Frieden: At C.D.C., Obama’s Appointee Wields a Big Broom: "The former New York City health commissioner has rapidly reversed many of the Bush administration’s policies at one of the world’s top health agencies.

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