Grand Rounds 2.47 is put together in a brilliant format: as a letter from a father to his newborn son. Brilliantly entertaining! And it’s full of great medical blogging.
In the spirit of proving we are no safer now than we were before 9/11, and that the GOP response to the attacks has been to shuffle a lot of paper and erode a lot of liberties while doing nothing to help secure us from terrorism, I present this little tidbit: “The government’s new order that all airline passengers put their shoes through X-ray machines won’t help screeners find a liquid or gel that can be used as a bomb. The machines are unable to detect explosives, according to a Homeland Security report on aviation screening recently obtained by The Associated Press.” Again, it’s all a lot of inconvenience for nothing. Running your shoes through the machines will not help find explosives. They best they can come up with would be to identify tampering or concealed weapons. Why can’t they just be honest and admit they have no real interest in security?
And to make sure you don’t think I’m just being partisan on this security thing, the GAO has been reporting on it since the September 11 attacks. “Despite knowing for years that liquid explosives posed a threat to airline safety, security agencies have made little progress in deploying technology that could help defend against such attacks, security experts say. […] Cathleen A. Berrick, director of the Government Accountability Office’s homeland security and justice division, told a Senate committee in February 2005 that the Transportation Security Administration, part of the federal Department of Homeland Security, redirected more than half of the $110 million it had for research and development in 2003 to pay for the personnel costs of screeners, delaying research in areas including detecting liquid explosives. It has continued to redirect some research and development money, she said today.” And we’ve known about this kind of threat more for than a decade: “In late 1994, a plot to bomb 11 American jumbo jets over the Pacific with a liquid explosive was discovered when the bomb makers accidentally set fire to their laboratory in Manila.” The terrorists screwed up; we learned of the plot; we did nothing afterward, and not even the 9/11 attacks could make the government take this threat seriously.
Well I declare! Bush stated boldly that Hezb’Allah “suffered a defeat at the hands of Israel in their monthlong Mideast war.” I’m sure this is similar to when he declared “Mission accomplished!” with regards to Iraq. That was years and thousands of lives ago. [via Daily Kos]
“To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?” See how Dr. Charles answered the question. Just do it.
Thousands of planet-forming discs discovered. “About 2300 planet-forming discs have been found around young stars in a vast complex of gas and dust clouds.” We are rapidly becoming less and less unique in the universe.