following politics, pursuing holiness
Jihad Watch: Iran preparing nuke strike on U.S.?
They did “exactly what you would do if you had a nuclear weapon on a Scud or a Shahab-3 or other missile, and you wanted to explode it over the United States.”
Shehab-3… where have I seen that before? Oh, yeah – here. And it’s a very good read, whether you buy Newsmax’s story or not.
Five people in my circle of family, friends and acquaintances have HIV or AIDS. While drug cocktails do help, this may be the breakthrough they’ve been waiting for: Doctors may have found a way to destroy HIV.
“We have found an innovative way to kill the virus by finding this small region of HIV that is unchangeable,” Dr. Sudhir Paul of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston said.
Dr. Paul and Dr. Miguel Escobar aren’t talking about just suppressing HIV – they’re talking about destroying it permanently by arming the immune system with a new weapon lab tests have shown to be effective.
… “The virus needs at least one constant region, and that is the essence of calling it the Achilles heel,” Paul said.
That Achilles heel is the doctors’ way in. They take advantage of it with something called an abzyme.
It’s naturally produced by people, like lupus patients. When they applied that abzyme to the HIV virus, it permanently disarmed it.
“What we already have in our hand are the abzymes that we could be infusing into the human subjects with HIV infection, essentially to move the virus,” Paul said.
Basically, their idea could be used to control the disease for people who already have it and prevent infection for those at risk.
I’m almost afraid to hope, but then, decades ago cancer was pretty much terminal. Only twenty years ago my husband’s doctors told his parents (we were not yet married) that they did not expect him to survive his cancer. The innovations and research at MD Anderson saved his life. America’s medical research and development is second to none.
We still need to focus on prevention, and we need to lose the politically correct restrictions on it that cost lives. But I’ll be very excited to learn how this breakthrough pans out in clinical trials.
h/t Ace
What is it with the gators lately? This poor kid lost his arm:
Devin was swimming with two friends in the canal when they spotted a large alligator swimming toward them around 3 p.m., Sheriff Jack Strain said.
The alligator pulled Devin under water and bit off most of an arm, but the boy poked it in the eye and got free, relatives said.
The two girls who were with him ran for help and called 911. Three sheriff’s deputies who were in the neighborhood on traffic patrol drove as far as they could toward the lake, then ran a final 1 1/2 miles to reach the boy, Strain said.
The deputies helped the boy out of the water, and he was taken by 4-wheeler to a staging area where an ambulance picked him up and transported him to Slidell Memorial Hospital.
And the other day a gator was gumming up traffic:
Staci Nelson, 39, of LaPlace and her 10-year-old daughter sat in traffic for almost an hour, wondering if a cluster of mobile homes they had seen was slowing traffic on the interstate.
“My daughter and I looked at each other and said, ‘An alligator?’ ” said Nelson. “All of this for an alligator.”
Authorities initially thought the alligator was dead but soon found out they were wrong, State Police spokesman Trooper Joseph Piglia said.
“They walked up to it and its mouth opened and it started coming at them, ” Piglia said. “They got back in their cars. It was still feisty.”
I know the alligator is kind of an unofficial symbol for the New Orleans area – well, southeast Louisiana for that matter – but I’ve lived here the majority of my life and two gator stories in a month, much less a week, is strange.
Just wait – someone will blame it on global warming in 5… 4… 3…
Mt. Obamamore – Photo credit: Slublog |
In the postmodern mode of thought, how you feel seems to supersede actual reality. And by postmodern standards (much like magical thinking) he already is President. He’s got the plane, his seal, his motto (although his fondness for possums baffles me; he’s not even from the south!) he’s meeting with foreign leaders, and has a transition team even though the election has not yet taken place. Congress seems to think he’s already got the job as well:
President Obama Continues Victory Tour
The 5:20 TBA turned out to be his adoration session with lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room, where even committee chairmen arrived early, as if for the State of the Union. Capitol Police cleared the halls — just as they do for the actual president. The Secret Service hustled him in through a side door — just as they do for the actual president.
Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”
Good grief. He’s been taking too much hopium. But hey, just ignore me when I say, “It’s the audacity, stupid,” because I’m obviously a racist.
