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It rained a lot in Alaska this summer—even more than usual—and it was a cold summer, too. The sun doesn't set on much of the state between mid-June and mid-July, but the weather was such that if you came from Outside, which is how Alaskans refer to the rest of the United States, and you happened to visit on a day that was fair, people would thank you for bringing the sunshine. If you were there to inquire into the political situation, people thanked you for that, too. They thanked you for coming, for hearing them out, and for not treating their story as a national joke. Many Alaskans enjoy being disconnected from the Lower Forty-eight, which is sometimes referred to as if it were a foreign country. There is pride in this sense of apartness, and that pride has been stung repeatedly since 2006, when the F.B.I. began raiding state lawmakers' offices in an ever-expanding anti-corruption campaign. There have been indictments and guilty pleas. Oil-industry executives who were caught on videotape in the Baranof Hotel, in Juneau, the state capital, giving cash handouts to a state legislator have coöperated in pointing out other state legislators who liked to get paid before voting on oil-industry tax rates. Last year, the F.B.I. hit the home of Ted Stevens, Alaska's six-term senator, and he became a favorite figure of ridicule on "The Daily Show": an angry little man, with an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Magoo, who had once made himself seem even older than his eighty-plus years by describing the Internet as "a series of tubes"; Jon Stewart called him a "coot," and portrayed him as a bully and a crook. As I travelled around Alaska in mid-August, Alaskans wanted me to understand that, sadly, he might well be all of that—and a very good thing for the state, too.
I booked a flight to the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport shortly after Stevens was indicted on, and pleaded not guilty to, seven felony charges for failing to report more than a quarter of a million dollars in gifts from the same oilmen who had bought much of the state legislature. I had to change planes in Las Vegas, but when I got there I was told that my flight to Anchorage had been cancelled, on account of a volcano in the Aleutian Islands that had erupted and "burped"—the technical term—a gigantic cloud of ash into the lower stratosphere. The cloud had drifted in a northeasterly direction and occupied much of the airspace over the Gulf of Alaska. More than five thousand travellers were stranded as a result. The next day, when the cloud moved and I completed my journey, I learned that, after a similar belch of ash choked out all four engines of a K.L.M. flight into Anchorage in 1989, Ted Stevens finagled an earmark on an appropriations bill to secure federal funds for the Alaska Volcano Observatory, whose missions included the monitoring of volcanic activity and its attendant hazards. The Alaska Volcano Observatory became a punch line on "The West Wing," mocked as a ludicrous example of congressional pork, which is how it might sound until you think about your plane crashing.
So Ted Stevens may have saved my life—and that was something a great many Alaskans could say as they looked about at the roads and bridges, the hospitals and flood-control systems, the satellite weather and global-positioning relay stations, the sprawling Army and Air Force bases, the rural landing strips and postal air-cargo flights that sustain existence in Alaska as it enters its fiftieth year of statehood. Much of this infrastructure was the result of Stevens's work on the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees and its Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and he made no apologies for his transactional approach to politics.* On the contrary, as he brought Alaska the highest number of federal dollars per capita in the nation, he boasted that he was doing his job. Still, Stevens's decision to launch a reëlection campaign in the middle of a federal investigation required more than ordinary moxie.
The oilman at the center of the corruption scandal, Bill Allen, had agreed to testify against Stevens. The two men had once shared ownership of a racehorse, and had counted themselves good friends. Allen, a former welder and oilfield superintendent who came to Alaska from Texas and built a billion-dollar oilfield-services company, Veco Corporation, liked to be around other powerful men. He liked them to need him, and he had already claimed under oath that he had bribed Stevens's son, Ben, a former state senator with a reputation for profiteering from government contracts his father had a hand in. For instance, Ben Stevens had received seven hundred and fifteen thousand dollars over three years from the Special Olympics, as the chief executive of the 2001 Winter Games in Anchorage, for which his father had brought millions of dollars in federal aid. Conflicted interests also hung heavily over Ben Stevens's dealings regarding Alaska's fisheries. He has said that he has done nothing illegal, yet the speculation in Alaska was not whether, but when, indictments would drop on him, and how they might affect his father's fate. (Everyone was waiting, too, for charges to be filed against the state's only congressman, Don Young, a man so ornery that he makes Stevens look affable. Young, who is seventy-five and has been in office almost as long as Stevens, was also running for reëlection, and he had so far spent more than a million dollars from his campaign war chest on lawyers, an expense that he would not explain except to say that being investigated gets pricey.)
With so much trouble encompassing Stevens, the desire for a seventh term had a brazen air of unreality about it. At his age? Why not go gently? That would not be the way of Ted Stevens, the dominant figure of Alaska's fifty-year existence as a state. He is a man given to rages—he has said that they are an effective way to get what he wanted, and "I don't lose my temper. I always know where it is." He is also a man used to having enormous clout. On the eve of the millennium, he was named "Alaskan of the century," and he is known as Alaska's Senator-for-Life. Before his last run for office, he told the Anchorage newspaperman Michael Carey, "I just want people to understand the commitment I'm making if I stay on. This is a period I could go out and make a million dollars a year, without any question." Stevens had by then made a lot of people rich. Evidently, he felt underpaid, and Bill Allen had been there to help out. This time around, his humble pitch to voters is: I've always been there for you; now I need you to come through for me.
"It's the most momentous political season I've lived through in Alaska," Pat Dougherty, the editor of the Anchorage Daily News, the state's largest newspaper, told me—and that was three weeks before the governor, Sarah Palin, became the human cannonball of the Presidential campaign and blasted into overlapping orbits of political and tabloid super-celebrity. Just about everyone in Alaska knew that Palin was on John McCain's list of potential running mates, but no one in the state's insular, Republican political world had seen any indication that the campaign was checking her background. That made sense to Dougherty. Palin was forty-four years old and had served only a year and a half as governor, and he said, "The idea of her as Vice-President is ridiculous. She'd be way in over her head."
Then again, two years ago Dougherty hadn't considered Palin ready to be governor, even after she prevailed in the Republican primary against the deeply unpopular incumbent, Frank Murkowski, who had previously spent twenty-two years as Alaska's junior senator. "We endorsed the Democrat in her race," he said. "We didn't think she had the experience." Looking back, Dougherty allowed that he had underestimated Palin. After twenty months in office, she enjoyed an eighty-per-cent approval rating—the highest in the nation—and although he said he wouldn't yet call himself an admirer, he described her performance as "great spectator sport." Dougherty was particularly impressed by her tough, you-deal-with-Alaska-on-Alaska's-terms attitude toward the big oil producers on whom the state's economy largely depends.
Palin was elected governor just as Alaska's political establishment was being realigned by the Veco bribery scandal. She had no role in exposing the corruption, but she was swift to see opportunity in the moment of crisis. The tainted politicians were being held to account, but hostility to the oil companies behind the corruption remained high. Since the nineteen-seventies, and the construction of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, major oil producers had enjoyed extraordinary influence over Alaskan lawmakers, and had pretty much dictated the terms on which they did business with the state. Under Frank Murkowski, the big oil companies had negotiated terms for the construction of a new pipeline that would allow for the extraction and conveyance to market of thirty-five trillion cubic feet of natural gas from Alaska's North Slope; and it was in the context of the legislature's votes on the gas pipeline that the F.B.I. had begun its corruption sting. When Palin arrived on the scene, Murkowski's gas-line deal was dead, and she adopted another approach, cutting out the big oil producers in favor of a Canadian pipeline company. She counted it a great victory when, this summer, the legislature approved a framework for proceeding with the project.
"We're not just gonna concede to three big oil companies of this monopoly—Exxon, B.P., ConocoPhillips—and beg them to do this for Alaska," Palin told me last month in Juneau. "We're gonna say, 'O.K., this is so economic that we don't have to incentivize you to build this. In fact, this has got to be a mutually beneficial partnership here as we build it. We're gonna lay out Alaska's must-haves. Parameters are gonna be set, rules are gonna be laid out, a law will encompass what it is that Alaska needs to protect our sovereignty, to insure it's jobs first for Alaskans, and in-state use of gas' "—her list went on. In the past, she said, "Alaska was conceding too much, and chipping away at our sovereignty. And Alaska—we're set up, unlike other states in the union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs." And she said, "Our state constitution—it lays it out for me, how I'm to conduct business with resource development here as the state C.E.O. It's to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans."
Alaska is sometimes described as America's socialist state, because of its collective ownership of resources—an arrangement that allows permanent residents to collect a dividend on the state's oil royalties. It has been Palin's good fortune to govern the state at a time of record oil prices, which means record dividend checks: two thousand dollars for every Alaskan. And because high oil prices also mean staggering heating bills in such a cold place—and because it's always good politics to give money to voters—Palin got the legislature this year to send an extra twelve hundred dollars to every Alaskan man, woman, and child.
But, even as Palin enjoyed populist acclaim for her grand gestures—sharing the wealth and standing up to Big Oil—it was far from certain that the natural-gas pipeline, which she claimed as her proudest accomplishment, would ever get built. Palin had committed the state to risking half a billion dollars to help move the project forward, but there was no commitment from the producers to ship their gas through the line; without that, no one was willing to finance its construction. As Palin boasted of putting the big boys in their place, it looked increasingly likely that she would have to plead with them to return. In the meantime, Palin the reformer had been caught up in her own scandal, known as Troopergate.
The allegation was that Palin had dismissed her public-safety commissioner, a respected and well-liked officer named Walter Monegan, because Monegan had resisted pressure from her office to fire a state trooper named Michael Wooten. Wooten was Palin's ex-brother-in-law, and his divorce from Palin's sister Molly had involved an ugly custody battle that was not entirely resolved; it appeared that Palin had used her public office to settle a private family score. On July 28th, a bipartisan vote in the state legislature commissioned an investigation into the matter, at a cost of up to a hundred thousand dollars. Palin had invited it. "Hold me accountable," she said. She promised full coöperation: "We would never prohibit, or be less than enthusiastic about, any kind of investigation. Let's deal in the facts."
On the day I stopped by Palin's office in Juneau, she did not seem bothered that Alaska's newspapers were filled with stories about Troopergate. Palin had just called a press conference to discuss the latest twist—a tape-recorded phone call from Frank Bailey, one of her closest aides, who could be heard trying to influence an officer to sack Trooper Wooten. "Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads, you know," Bailey said, referring to the Governor and her husband, Todd Palin. "Why on earth hasn't—why is this guy still representing the department? He's a horrible recruiting tool. And, from their perspective, everybody's protecting him." Bailey, Palin's director of boards and commissions, went on to convey the Governor's displeasure, and urged action against Wooten. "She really likes Walt a lot," Bailey said on the tape, referring to Monegan. "But on this issue she feels like it's—she doesn't know why there's absolutely no action for a year on this issue. It's very troubling to her and the family. I can definitely relay that." At her press conference, Palin said she realized that the recording could be regarded as a "smoking gun." She claimed that she had never asked Bailey or anyone else to make such calls on her behalf. "However," she said, "the serial nature of the contacts understandably could be perceived as some kind of pressure, presumably at my direction."
Palin, who studied journalism in college and worked for a time as a sportscaster, has an informal manner of speech, simultaneously chatty and urgent, and she reinforces her words with winks and nods and wrinklings of her nose that seem meant to telegraph intimacy and ease. Speaking recently at her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, she said, "It was so cool growing up in this church and getting saved here, getting baptized by Pastor Riley in Little Beaver Lake Camp, freezing-cold summer days that we had at camp—my whole family getting baptized when we were little." She sounded the same when we met, high-spirited, irrepressible, and not in the least self-conscious. On the contrary, she is supremely self-confident, in the way of someone who believes that there is nothing she can't talk her way into, or out of, or around or through. There was never a hesitation before speaking, or between phrases, no time for thought or reflection. The words kept coming—engaging, lulling, distracting—a commanding flow, but without weight. Yet, for all the cozy colloquialism, she cannot be called relaxed. She's on—full on.
She said that one of her goals had been to combat alcohol abuse in rural Alaska, and she blamed Commissioner Monegan for failing to address the problem. That, she said, was a big reason that she'd let him go—only, by her account, she didn't fire him, exactly. Rather, she asked him to drop everything else and single-mindedly take on the state's drinking problem, as the director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. "It was a job that was open, commensurate in salary pretty much—ten thousand dollars less"—but, she added, Monegan hadn't wanted the job, so he left state service; he quit.
As for Frank Bailey's phone call, Palin professed not to understand what it had to do with anything. "We just found out about it a couple of days ago," she said. "And yeah, it's very disturbing, and it's an issue, and"—she began to speak as if Bailey were in the room and she were having it out with him: "You blundered, Bailey, and you know you did." She said, "I'll be talking to him," and the next week she put Bailey on paid leave and ordered him to coöperate with the investigation. But that did not explain Bailey's phone call. After all, Palin told me, "my husband made a call also. But, you know, there were death threats against a member of my family." She said, "About my husband, his First Amendment rights, even—was that taken away once his spouse was elected governor?"
Palin continued, "Our security detail, when I first got elected, met with us and said, 'Do you guys got any issues with any threats?' " To which Palin replied, " 'Yeah, well, by the way, there happens to be—the only threat that I knew of was one of your own troopers.' And they're, like, 'Geez, this doesn't sound good, you need to go tell your commissioner that.' So I did. I shared that with the commissioner. So did Todd, and then Todd followed up to say"—at this point, Palin seemed to be quoting her husband: " 'We were interviewed back in '05 before Sarah was even a candidate—what ever happened to that investigation, that interview? We know that the trooper' "—Wooten—" 'got to see the interview notes; well, we never have, and that's kind of a scary position for us to be in. We complied with your request to bring you information on this trooper forward, and did we put our family in jeopardy by letting him see the interview notes about the illegal activities?' "
Palin insisted that Wooten "did have illegal activities. We witnessed them, and people have come to us with complaints. He Tasered his eleven-year-old stepson. This trooper, he was pulled over for drinking and driving and a witnessed open container in his car, and he did threaten to kill my dad—I heard him—and illegally shot a moose, which is a big darned deal here in Alaska."
Trooper Wooten has admitted to Tasering the boy and shooting the moose, and he was disciplined for these things within the department, but, under the union contract, he could not be fired at the Governor's whim. (He had been cleared of the threat to Palin's father, but disciplined for drinking and driving, which he still denies.) It was obvious that this continued to frustrate Palin. She also seemed to forget that you should not talk about your affairs when they're under investigation. Troopergate was the one subject about which she seemed keen to explicate the details. She wanted to persuade me that firing Walt Monegan had nothing to do with Trooper Wooten; that it was in no way a conflict of interest or an abuse of power. But, as she spoke, she seemed to be saying something else—that her vendetta against Wooten was wholly justified.
Compared with Ted Stevens's impending criminal trial, the Troopergate investigation seemed like a sideshow—an added dash of intrigue in Alaska's sensational political summer—except for the fact that Palin had always liked to present herself as a new kind of Alaskan politician, the kind who cleaned up after others' shenanigans, not the kind who needed to be cleaned up after.
Palin's record as the mayor of Wasilla, a town forty miles north of Anchorage, told a somewhat different story. According to "Sarah," a biography by Kaylene Johnson, Palin had got into politics after she befriended the man who was then mayor and his police chief at a step-aerobics class. She made them her allies and ran for City Council. Then she challenged them for control of City Hall, and drove them out. As she purged her former friends and patrons, she denounced them as "good ol' boys," although her takeover of Wasilla had been aided from the start by Alaska's Republican Party establishment.
Palin's style of governing was unorthodox and at times impulsive. Although she boasts of a record as a fiscal conservative, she raised the sales tax while she was in office. She left the town saddled with millions of dollars in debt from the building of a new sports complex, and with legal fees, because she had failed to secure title to the land on which the complex was built. Casting herself in the Ted Stevens mold, however, she had proved herself skilled at collecting federal earmarks for Wasilla, bringing in twenty-seven million dollars for her small town in three years.
Palin's biggest difference with Alaska's Republican establishment, then, was not so much fiscal as it was social. Ted Stevens is one of the last of the Rockefeller Republicans—the real thing, as he supported Nelson Rockefeller over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential race. He is essentially secular and skeptical of government, and favors abortion rights—a common profile in Alaska, a state that attracts a strong streak of libertarians and rugged individualists. By contrast, Palin belongs to the state's small evangelical community, which is centered in the Mat-Su Valley, around Wasilla. She thinks that creationism should be taught in the public schools alongside Darwinian evolution, she was called the town's "first Christian mayor" by a local TV station, and she asked the town librarian about banning books, but did not follow through.
As governor, Palin has done nothing to impose her religious or social views. Alaska has no death penalty, and during the campaign she said that she would support one, but never made an issue of it; she opposed abortion even for pregnancies caused by rape, but this was a personal opinion, not a legislative cause. In fact, she refused requests to put abortion bills on the agenda during a special legislative session this summer, preferring to discuss the natural-gas pipeline, which she pursued in such a bipartisan manner that she ultimately won more solid support for it from Democrats than from Republicans. While Republicans hold most of the state's top political posts, only twenty-five per cent of Alaskan voters are registered Republicans. Fifteen per cent are Democrats, and three per cent belong to the Alaska Independence Party—the extremist states' rights, quasi-secessionist faction to which Todd Palin once pledged his allegiance. A solid majority of Alaska's electorate claims no party affiliation. Alaskans kept telling me that Alaskans vote for the person, not the party.
So it was startling to see Palin emerge in the last days of August as an icon of the evangelical base of the Republican Party, and as a fierce—often vituperative—partisan scourge, mocking Barack Obama's character and positions. It was startling, too, to hear her, in her début speech to the Republican National Convention, reading a script that consistently distorted her own record. She said that she had put her predecessor's jet for sale on eBay, which was true, except that this is how government property was often disposed of in Alaska, and the plane didn't sell online; it had to be unloaded through a private deal, at a loss of half a million dollars.
Palin also said that she told Congress "thanks but no thanks" for the notorious Bridge to Nowhere—a Ted Stevens and Don Young earmark project that had long been a target of John McCain's ridicule. (The bridge, which would have cost nearly four hundred million dollars, was intended to provide access from one island to an airport on a smaller island, with a population of fifty people.) In reality, Palin had supported the bridge in her gubernatorial race, even after Congress revoked the earmark, but abandoned it following the election and directed the money Alaska had received to other projects.
And, of course, Palin touted her gas-pipeline project. "I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history," she said. "And, when that deal was struck, we began a nearly forty-billion-dollar natural-gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence." That was not entirely accurate. She was still waiting for the state legislature to release the five hundred million dollars she'd promised the pipeline company to help pay for administrative costs. But the crowd loved it. Many of the delegates wore lapel buttons that said, "Coldest State, Hottest Governor."
That same week, Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, announced, "This election is not about issues." What mattered, he said, was the "composite view" that voters would form of the candidates. On a talk show, the Washington bureau chief of Time told Nicole Wallace, a McCain spokesperson, that it was still unclear whether Palin was ready "to answer tough questions about domestic policy, foreign policy." Wallace laughed. "Like from who? From you?" And she asked, "Who cares if she can talk to Time magazine?"
Attacking the press is nothing new in the playbook of political defense, but it took a bold twist when the McCain campaign contrived to transform a family problem—the pregnancy of Palin's unmarried seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol—into a vindication of Palin's Christian family values. Surely, it had not been part of McCain's plan for his untested Vice-Presidential pick to start Day Four of her rollout by announcing Bristol's plans to marry the baby's father, Levi Johnston, who, as the Times reported, recently dropped out of high school. The campaign said that it was going public in order to quash offensive rumors that were circulating on the Internet: that Sarah Palin's five-month-old baby, Trig, who has Down syndrome, was not really hers but Bristol's, and that the Governor had faked her pregnancy in order to cover for her unwed daughter. This Faulknerian story had been making the rounds in Alaska for months—I heard versions of it in Anchorage and Juneau within twenty-four hours of arriving in each city—and it derived from the peculiar circumstances surrounding Trig's birth.
Sarah Palin had not announced her pregnancy until she was seven months along. A month later, she was in Texas to address a conference when her water broke. She decided to give the speech and then return to Wasilla to deliver the child. By way of explaining this all-day odyssey (most obstetricians advise against air travel in the eighth month, never mind during labor, and most airlines forbid it), Todd Palin later remarked, "You can't have a fish picker"—a commercial fisherman—"from Texas."
The Palin family's press release, congratulating Bristol and welcoming their prospective son-in-law to the family, was a way for the McCain campaign to suggest that the gutter press had so violated this family's privacy with its calumnies that it was necessary to violate the girl's privacy to set the record straight. By castigating the press, the campaign was able to broadcast the family melodrama in a self-righteous manner. Even better, the story of the troubled teens of Wasilla, Alaska, managed to change the subject from a debate about John McCain's seemingly impulsive abandonment of what had been the premise of his campaign: experience and national security.
Sarah Palin's makeover was just beginning, but the campaign had scored a critical victory: the press, in asking about the least-known potential President in recent memory, had been made to look contemptible. When, at last, Palin appeared at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, most of the forty million Americans who watched her on TV were seeing her for the first time.
The control of Palin by the McCain campaign was one of many ways in which it transformed her into someone largely unrecognizable to people who knew her in Alaska, where she hadn't shown a great interest in national economic issues other than energy policy, or in international affairs, and where she was viewed as more often seeking the attention of the press than avoiding it. For her first two weeks on the Presidential ticket, Palin was kept cocooned by handlers, except at rallies, where she read an adumbrated version of her Convention speech over and over, even as many of its claims were being debunked. When a Fox News anchor demanded to know when she could be interviewed, Rick Davis explained that he would allow access only to reporters who showed "deference."
A few weeks earlier, when I telephoned Palin's office in Juneau and asked for a press officer, I was invited to meet the Governor the next day. The state legislature was in recess at the time, and I found Palin sitting sidesaddle on her receptionist's desk, studying the receptionist's family photographs. She wore slacks and a belted sweater-jacket, and her hair was piled and pinned atop her head in her trademark upsweep. She kept up the family chitchat as she led me to her office. Her press person had told me that I could have twenty minutes of the Governor's time, but, once we were alone, she was in no hurry. We talked for about an hour before an aide poked her head in to announce that someone else was waiting.
Palin wanted to be seen as someone eager to change things fast. "I'm halfway through my term," she said. "Maybe you saw the clock as you walk in. It tells me how many days we have to make a difference. I've got, like, eight hundred and forty-three days to make a difference left? Halfway through!"
As a public speaker, Palin was known for expressing goals and voicing good intentions with gusto, if with few specifics. As she talked about her hopes for Alaska, she often seemed to skip from slogan to slogan without ever touching solid ground. I mentioned at one point that I had met several Alaskans who described the state's relationship to Washington as that of a colony—rich in resources, governed from afar, and dependent on that distant power to sustain it—and I asked how the state could survive without the sort of federal appropriations that Ted Stevens had fought for relentlessly and that John McCain has made a cause of denouncing.
"I see us as the most unique state in the union," Palin replied. "I sure wish that we could be recognized as the head and not the tail of the U.S., because we should be the head—literally and figuratively." She continued, "Alaska could lead with the energy policy, we should be the head. So I don't see us as a colony but just extremely unique, and I say Alaskans, too, we have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we've got up here and we want to protect that, so we're gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don't want development if there's going to be that threat to harming our environment."
She paused for a moment and said that her administration had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in an ongoing lawsuit related to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in 1989. "We're putting our money where our mouth is to prove that we're committed to the safe, responsible, environmentally friendly developments that must take place," she said. "Otherwise, we're never gonna convince Congress and the rest of the nation, especially people on the East Coast, who seem to make a lot of decisions for us—we'll never convince them that we are willing and able to develop to get in that position of being producers and contributors for the rest of the U.S. So we have to prove that. That answers the colonist type of question."
Palin likes to talk about the environment, but her view on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the opposite of the one held by Congress and by McCain, who said, early in his campaign, "As far as ANWR is concerned, I don't want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I don't want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world." Palin suggested that McCain might change his mind on the issue, as he has on the subject of offshore drilling. When it came to offshore drilling, she said, "McCain now is evolved."
At one point, she said, "We love our polar bears." She had just got through explaining why she opposed a ban on aerial wolf shooting. In the past decade or so, Alaska's voters have twice rejected this practice—the chasing and gunning down of wolves from small planes—and on both occasions the state reauthorized it. Now the anti-wolf-shooting crowd had forced a third referendum on the issue, and Palin, who kept a pair of wolf pelts hanging on her office wall, behind a cradle swing for Trig, was keen to see the initiative fail.
"It's not aerial hunting," she claimed. "What the state has been engaged in for the past four to six years—and I support—is predator control." Shoot the wolves, she said, and moose and caribou herds will increase, providing more food for Alaskans. That was the argument: "Let the people who live off those herds not buy and import meat." In Alaska, a state that is equivalent in size to a fifth of the continental United States and doesn't have much agriculture, such self-reliance—hunting or fishing to feed yourself and your family—is known as subsistence, and subsistence is widely held by Alaskans to be a fundamental right. "It's an emotional issue," Palin said.
Polar bears were more of a pocketbook issue. Even as she professed her affection for them, Palin had, in early August, filed suit against Dirk Kempthorne, the United States Secretary of the Interior, seeking to reverse his decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The animals were on the list because scientists—working for the federal government—had found that the effects of global warming on arctic ice made it possible that polar bears would become endangered in the foreseeable future. Palin takes a wary view of such science. She has doubts that global warming is caused by human activity. She called the dire polar-bear population projections "just not credible."
The Interior Department had already allowed for oil and gas exploration in the polar bears' habitat, but Palin saw the listing of the polar bear as an intolerable precedent. "Then where do we go?" she asked. "It'll be another species and then another. Next it's a seal, or next it's a bird, or it's a fish, and the next thing you know that would certainly lock up Alaska's ability to live by its statehood pact to develop its resources and contribute to the rest of the United States."
In her inaugural address as governor, Palin pledged to put "Alaska first"—and now she is running in a Presidential campaign whose slogan is "Country first." For a governor from another state, this might be an easy rhetorical adjustment, but Alaska is more like another country—and its most popular politicians, shady as some might otherwise be, are like patriots, Alaska patriots, who navigate the choppy narrows between the fear that the federal government will restrict Alaskans' freedom and the fear that the federal government will cut them loose.
Ralph Seekins, a former state senator who runs the Ford dealership in Fairbanks and serves on the Republican National Committee, told me, "There's a natural suspicion among most Alaskans of the federal government, and the leader of the resistance against that federal government is Ted Stevens." It was a curious description of a man who had done more than any other to wring from the federal budget the funds to make Alaska thrive and grow toward self-sufficiency. But it made sense. Confronted with the choice between subsistence and subsidy, the Alaska patriot has traditionally favored the pragmatic compromise: subsidized subsistence.
Sarah Palin seemed to understand this. Earlier this year, she wrote in a newspaper column, "The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship." And, for all her talk of Alaska fending for itself, she told me, "There isn't a need to aspire to live without any earmarks. The writing on the wall, though, is that times are changing. Presidential candidates have promised earmark reform, so we gotta deal with it, we gotta live with it, understanding that our senior senator, especially—he's eighty-four years old, he is not gonna be able to serve in the Senate forever. We will not have that seniority back there anymore." Suddenly she called out, "Alaskans, wake up!" Then she went on, "That means we have got to get ourselves in a position of seizing opportunities to develop and pay our own bills. 'Cause we're not gonna see that largesse coming to our state as we had in all these years. Whether we like that or not or support that or not, that's reality."
By speaking only of Stevens's age, Palin had skated around the possibility that his legal troubles might end his career in the Senate. She had not hesitated to call for state legislators to resign when they were indicted for corruption, and she had said that it was time for Don Young to go, even though he has not been indicted. But with Stevens she was uncharacteristically cautious. She said, "I feel like I would be kind of stepping out of bounds, being extremely and prematurely judgmental of Senator Stevens when I don't know as much as I do know about our state lawmakers who, yes, once they were indicted, I said, 'You guys gotta step aside.' "
Stevens has long been a favorite target of John McCain's anti-pork campaign, so it must have been strange for McCain to see Stevens get a sizable boost in his prospects for reëlection after Palin joined the Presidential ticket. But that may not matter. Stevens is due to go to trial in Washington, D.C., between now and Election Day, and, if the case against him remains strong, he is not likely to return to the Senate in January. If Stevens loses, it will be as an Alaska patriot to the end, whereas if Sarah Palin finds herself on the winning ticket it will require her to have shifted her loyalty away from Alaska first.
One day, I flew due west from Anchorage to the town of Bethel, on the flat, drab sprawl of waterlogged tundra that reaches between the deltas of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers to the shore of the Bering Sea. Bethel, a town of some six thousand souls, is the mercantile and administrative hub for fifty-six Alaska Native villages staggered through the surrounding bush. There are no roads to Bethel; it can be reached only by sea and air, and the prices of goods for sale there reflect the journey—nine dollars and ninety-nine cents for a gallon of milk, seven dollars or more for a gallon of gasoline. When the economy is weak in Bethel, as it has been of late, the population drops—some people move to Anchorage or Fairbanks and others head upriver to their ancestral villages to live on fish and game and berries and bird eggs.
I travelled an hour by boat up the Kuskokwim to the village of Kwethluk, a collection of rough wood shacks and a couple of Russian Orthodox churches, without plumbing or running water. There I met Max Olick, the local law-enforcement officer, a huge man with a wad of snuff under his lip and a cap that read "Sheriff*.*" "Pretty soon it's moose season," Olick said. "One moose will carry me one year. We don't have pork chops and chicken. I hate chicken. My boy is different. He prefers something more than the native foods we've been having all our life. I don't know where I went wrong with him." He said, "I told my wife we live in the Third World. She laughed. She said we have TV. I said what about water and sewer." Then he laughed. I asked him what he thought about Ted Stevens. "Long as I can remember—forty years—I've known his name," Olick said. "Forty years, I voted for him. He was doing great for Alaska." He explained, "Here in Kwethluk, there's about nine hundred and twenty people. We like Stevens because he knows what we want. What we care about is subsistence." He replenished his snuff and said, "Stevens has been a great supporter of subsistence life style, economic development. He's been in there so many years he deserves a chance to go at it one more term. But I don't think anyone can condone corruption in Washington, D.C." Olick thought about that awhile, and said, "I'm an old traditional guy that still believes in old traditional ways. But things change."
Back in Bethel, I met a dentist, a man who ran a janitorial-supplies service, and a man who ran a fuel service. I asked them how they thought Bethel and the villages it supported would fare without Ted Stevens in the Senate, in a time without earmarks. The dentist said, "We're fucked," and the janitorial-supplies man said, "There will be ghost towns." The fuel-oil man pointed to a hard black, jagged, wedge-shaped object on his desk, and asked if I knew what kind of tooth it was. "Mastodon," he said. ♦
*Correction, December 12, 2008: Stevens was not a member of the Armed Services Committee, as previously stated.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
- Font:
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LYON, France, May 25, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EDAP TMS SA (Nasdaq:EDAP), the global leader in therapeutic ultrasound, today announced two abstracts supporting the Ablatherm® High Intensity Focused Ultrasound's (HIFU) efficacy for the treatment of localized prostate cancer will be featured at the 4th International Symposium on Focal Therapy & Imaging in Prostate & Kidney Cancer, held on May 25 – 27, 2011 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. EDAP will feature its Ablatherm-HIFU technology at its booth.
Marc Oczachowski, Chief Executive Officer of EDAP TMS, stated, "We are pleased that two poster presentations by leading European urologists that pertain to Ablatherm-HIFU will be presented in Session 5 moderated by Drs. Stefan Thuroff and Ulrich Witzsch. We believe our robotic ultrasound technology is well positioned to address the promising focal approach of prostate cancer. Ablatherm-HIFU offers the required flexibility, repeatability, multimodality and reproducibility in the treatment of localized prostate cancer while actively controlling the disease and preserving patient quality of life.
"The conference will be a major platform to address the advantages of focal therapy in the treatment of prostate patients which are being diagnosed earlier and seek a less invasive treatment that allows them to maintain their lifestyle."
|Scientific Session Highlights:
|Date/Time: Thursday, May, 26, 4:15 PM
|Abstract: Hemi-ablation with HIFU
|Author: Dr. Sebastin Crouzet, Edouard Herriott Hospital, Lyon, France
|Date/Time: Thursday, May, 26, 4:30 PM
|Abstract: How to interpret PSA changes after Focal Therapy?
|Author: Dr. Roman Ganzer, Regensburg University, Regensburg, Germany
About EDAP TMS SA
EDAP TMS SA develops and markets Ablatherm, the most advanced and clinically proven choice for high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) treatment of localized prostate cancer. HIFU treatment is shown to be a minimally invasive and effective treatment option with a low occurrence of side effects. Ablatherm-HIFU is generally recommended for patients with localized prostate cancer (stages T1-T2) who are not candidates for surgery or who prefer an alternative option, or for patients who failed radiotherapy treatment. Approved in Europe as a treatment for prostate cancer, Ablatherm-HIFU (High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) is currently undergoing evaluation in a multi-center U.S. Phase II/III clinical trial under an Investigational Device Exemption granted by the FDA, the ENLIGHT U.S. clinical study. The Company also is developing this technology for the potential treatment of certain other types of tumors. EDAP TMS SA also produces and commercializes medical equipment for treatment of urinary tract stones using extra-corporeal shockwave lithotripsy (ESWL). For more information on the Company, please visit http://www.edap-tms.com , and http://www.hifu-planet.com .
Forward-Looking Statements
In addition to historical information, this press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These include statements regarding the Company's growth and expansion plans, the conclusiveness of the results of and success of its Ablatherm-HIFU clinical trials and expectations regarding the IDE submission to and approval by the FDA of the Ablatherm-HIFU device. Such statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to a number of uncertainties, including the uncertainties of the regulatory process, and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause such a difference include, but are not limited to, those described in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and in particular, in the sections "Cautionary Statement on Forward-Looking Information" and "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 20-F. Ablatherm-HIFU treatment is in clinical trials, but not FDA-approved or marketed in the United States.
CONTACT: Company Contact: Blandine Confort Investor Relations / Legal Affairs +33 4 72 15 31 72 firstname.lastname@example.com Media/Investors: Kim Muscara/Stephanie Carrington 646-536-7011/7017 email@example.com email@example.com
© Copyright 2012, GlobeNewswire, Inc. All Rights Reserved


text:
I'm reasonably sure I'm still alive because if I were dead I couldn't possibly be in this much pain. The liquid hydrocodone can only do so much.
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
My Tonsils and Adenoids Are Living on Borrowed Time
I'm having surgery in six hours or so, or I'm reporting to the hospital in less than six hours, anyway. God alone knows how long I'll have to wait around after arriving. I'm supposed to be first after the children, diabetics, and emergencies, and the most dire of emergencies will be serviced elsewhere, although my anesthesiologist could be taken away by a crisis of some sort. I will wait around for my anesthesiologist if he's called away. It's not actually your surgeon who will usually kill you but rather, sloppy work on the part of your anesthesiologist. It pays to know who the best anesthesiologists are and to use any connections you may have to obtain their services.
My dad was in Utah with my grandmother, who is being treated for sepsis. He flew home unexpectedly earlier this evening because of my tonsillectomy / possible adenoidectomy. I was a bit insulted. He was needed in Utah, and if I cannot at the age of 21 handle a simple tonsillectomy without my dad lurking outside the O.R., it would appear that there will never be much hope for me to function as an adult. My dad, my brother, and two of my uncles have already donated blood for the unlikely event that I need it. I'm not sure exactly what my dad thinks his presence will accomplish. He said that he left my Uncle Michael, who is also a physician, in Utah to keep an eye on things there, and that he'll fly back to Utah in three days or so once I'm past the highest-risk period for complications. I'm less than thrilled, but what can I do?
On an entirely unrelated note, I looked at the traffic sources on my blog's information page. One of the search terms that allegedly led a reader to my blog was "my grandfather's existence angers me." I'm the first to admit that I'm far from being my grandfather's biggest fan, but never have I said or written anything to the effect that his very existence angers me. Hell, if he had not existed, I would not exist, or at least not exactly in my present form. (It's conceivable that I would exist in a better form were it not for the existence of my grandfather, but that is entirely beside the point.) I don't know how in the world Google and Blogspot conspired to link that search term to me. Perhaps Google is now reading my mind.
I'm not sure when I will return, but I will return.
Monday, March 28, 2016
A Change in the Blog
It has come to my attention that some of my readers are uncomfortable with some comments made in response to my blog. Most blog authors, I would assume, wish for the reading of their blogs to be light-minded experiences, or, at the very least, certainly not something that would increase anyone's level of concern or anxiety. If comments by any given person have caused others to avoid visiting my blog site, the time has come to make a change of some sort.
I considered making my blog private, but that would in some ways defeat the purpose of my even having a blog. One reasons for which this blog exists is so that I might have a wider audience. If readers had to request my permission, most would not bother doing so. Furthermore, some people I want to read my blog are not registered at google or blogspot or anywhere else that would gain them access to this blog.
I have decided instead to moderate comments and have changed my settings to include moderation of comments.
I didn't make this choice in order to hurt anyone's feelings, and I'm very sorry if I do hurt anyone's feelings in the process. if former readers avoid me blog because of a single reader's comments, however, there's little point for me to have a blog.
Thank you in advance for you understanding.
I considered making my blog private, but that would in some ways defeat the purpose of my even having a blog. One reasons for which this blog exists is so that I might have a wider audience. If readers had to request my permission, most would not bother doing so. Furthermore, some people I want to read my blog are not registered at google or blogspot or anywhere else that would gain them access to this blog.
I have decided instead to moderate comments and have changed my settings to include moderation of comments.
I didn't make this choice in order to hurt anyone's feelings, and I'm very sorry if I do hurt anyone's feelings in the process. if former readers avoid me blog because of a single reader's comments, however, there's little point for me to have a blog.
Thank you in advance for you understanding.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Mormon Christmas on April 6 and Other Aberrations
|This is probably further even than Mahonri's family takes their Mormon Christmas holiday/
I don't know how I made it so far in life with my parents still withholding this little gem from me, but it finally occurred to them to spill it, so now I of course have to share it with all of you . . .
Some of you may remember my Uncle Mahonri. He's my uncle by virtue of his being married to my father's sister Marthalene. The most noteworthy thing about Uncle Mahonri is his proclivity toward theft. My mother holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, and even she cannot determine whether Mahonri is a common thief, a kleptomaniac, or even something much worse. It probably doesn't matter. The bottom line is that he habitually helps himself to things that do not belong to him. This little idiosyncrasy very nearly cost Mahonri his job with the church educational system when he was caught stealing a crate or large carton of disposable douches from the loading zone of a big box store somewhere in Utah County.
Now i have learned that Mahonri may not be alone in his predilection for accessing the property of others. Mahonri's family of birth has a rather strange holiday tradition, about which I feel obligated to enrich the lives of my readers.
A bit of backstory is needed here in order that most of you may put what has been to me a veritable bonanza of information into its proper context. Mormons believe that Jesus was born on April 6. I asked my dad a couple of years ago when the LDS church will back away from of this particular teaching, as they have done with so many things they once taught. ("I don't know that we teach that" was how Gordon W. Hinckley disavowed a particular teaching when confronted with it in a televised interview.) My dad said they'll probably never drop the myth of April 6, as scientific or historical information will never pop up to debunk it as the birthday of Jesus. For that matter, there's approximately 1 chance in 365.25 that Jesus was born on April 6 -- and an even greater chance if you rule out any time in the bleakest part of winter for logistical reasons, as some historians have done, as the likely date of Jesus' birth.
Mormons celebrate Christmas on December 25 along with most of the rest of Christendom. No one else who actually thinks about it really believes December 25 to be the actual date of Jesus' birth, either; it's just that no one else has settled on an actual date, arbitrarily or otherwise. Leave it to the Mormons to be different.
Some Mormons actually commemorate April 6 with a celebration of sorts. One family to whom I'm related draws names and gets together to exchange homemade gifts and to sing carols about Jesus being born in the dead of winter every April 6. Some of them send out homemade cards, though only to other Mormons. On some level they have to know it's just too bizarre an idea to try to foist upon the rest of the world.
My Uncle Mahonri's family has its own peculiar take on the quasi-holiday, to which they refer as "Mormon Christmas" (italics added by me). Each nuclear family buys Dollar Tree-calibre gifts for each individual member of each family unit. Before you reach the conclusion that Mahonri and his siblings and their spouses must be incredible cheapskates (which is true), I should explain that Mahonri is one of twelve children. He and Marthalene have thirteen children, and most of his siblings have families as large as his if not larger. (They really should have their own reality show. The premise would fall somewhere between the Honey Boo Boo fiasco, the disaster otherwise known as the Duggars, and the debacle featuring Todd Chrisley's family.) The nuclear families have to come up with an average of 156 gifts each. (The number of gifts would be higher now, as Mahonri and some of his siblings are grandparents.) They would all be in serious debt for the remainder of the calendar year if the gifts were anything more extravagant than Dollar Tree purchases.
As if what I have already explained is not bizarre enough, I'll now get into Mahonri's family's even more peculiar take on the already peculiar enough holiday of Real Christmas. Each April 6 after Mormon Christmas gifts have been distributed and opened, after carols have been sung, after the Christmas story as told in the gospel of St. Luke has been read, and after massive quantities of ham and turkey have been consumed, Mahonri and his siblings all draw small folded squares of paper from a rather hideous bowl made to look like the detached head of Baby Jesus. Eleven of these squares are blank. The twelfth square displays an X. The lucky sibling who draws the slip of paper bearing the X is not required to buy gifts for his or her parents, siblings, siblings-in-law, and nieces and nephews. Instead, he or she must, with the help of his or her spouse and offspring, steal something that belongs to every single member of the family throughout the next year. Even the babies are stolen from in this most warped version of a holiday tradition. Then, on the next April 6, the stolen items are presented, gift-wrapped, to the people from whom they were stolen, along with all the rest of the gifts.
The person who draws the X and is obligated to pilfer goods from the rest of the family is known as The Jester. Some joke, huh? My dad said that Mahonri tried to get the tradition started in our family as well, but my grandmother said it was the most batshit-crazy idea she had ever heard of in her entire life (though probably not in those exact words) and that her family would have no part in such an aberrant practice.
Could anything positively scream the pure love of Christ and the peace surrounding his birth as much as petty or grand theft among close family members?
Heidi Cruz, Melania Trump, Their Husbands, PACs and SuperPACs, and Other Players in the Most Recent Drama
|The contest is a bit more balanced
|when Donald Trump doesn't choose the pictures.
I will go on record as saying that releasing the ad featuring a nude Melania Trump was not a strategically well-planned tactic. The Mormons already didn't like Donald Trump. Cruz already had the Mormon republican vote. There was little to gain and a lot to lose by releasing the pro-Cruz anti-Trump endorsement, since it isn't 1896, and word of what is released to the Facebook feeds of people living in Utah usually makes it to the rest of the population, some of whom may be put off by sexist implications of the endorsement.
The add was not distributed by Cruz's campaign but, instead, as was noted earlier, by a super PAC opposing Trump. While the super PAC's role in releasing this ad diminishes the culpability Cruz and those operating his campaign perhaps slightly, neither can Cruz accept the benefit of the super PAC's involvement while simultaneously denying all responsibility for what the group does when the group's actions appear to have crossed lines that shouldn't have been crossed. If he's unwilling to categorically distance himself from all tactics and maneuverings of a super PAC, he'll be linked with anything said or done with the presumed intent of disposing of Donald Trump as the republican candidate for president.
Cruz claims that spouses are off-limits. Will he cling to that mantra if he eventually wins the republican nomination and finds himself running against Hillary Clinton? I'd be very surprised. Perhaps spouses should be off-limits, but if there's anything about a spouse that is interesting enough to be used against a candidate in a political campaign, in all probability it can and will be used.
Trump's tweet juxtaposing the photo of Heidi Cruz's face caught in an awkward pose next to a glamour shot of his wife was asinine beyond belief. Melania Cruz would have to be considered to be more physically attractive than Heidi Cruz would be. At the same time, it's far from a level playing field to select a flattering photo of one person, then to place it, for purposes of comparison, next to a picture snapped while another person is speaking. Depending upon the particular dialect of a given U.S. region, there are between forty-eight and fifty phonemes used to produce the American dialect of English. A list of these phonemes is probably available on Wikipedia or at some similar site. A curious person might download the list, them take a selfie while producing each of these sounds. When the person viewed the selfies, the person would probably discover that he or she looked quite silly when articulating certain phonemes. If you think I'm exaggerating, look at yourself in a mirror while you are making a /v/, /f/, /r/, /p/, /b/, /m/, or /w/ sound.
Any major disparity between the perceived levels of attractiveness possessed by Melania Trump and Heidi Cruz can probably be explained with the rationale that
Melania Trump is a former supermodel while Heidi Cruz is not. When I think about it, the very idea of Ted Cruz being married to a supermodel is ludicrous. He's most fortunate to have found a wife as attractive as Heidi Cruz is. The idea of Donald Trump being married to a former supermodel would be even more outrageous were it not for the fact that Trump is in possession of an almost insane amount of money. That sort of money can be a motivating factor in marriage. Sometimes a person who is leaps and bounds above another in physical attractiveness may be persuaded by money to tie the knot with a person as aesthetically challenged even as is Donald Trump.
That Donald Trump is posting his wife-comparison tweets is inane. That Ted Cruz is responding is equally farcical. That the national media is covering this not-even-schoolyard-worthy dispute is even more preposterous.
It would be funny if it weren't very closely connected to a U.S. presidential election. One of these two men will very likely have the republican nomination in a few short months. God help us all.
Monday, March 21, 2016
USMLE -- I said it aloud and haven't been struck by lightning yet.
|The face pictured here is not mine.
I've finished coursework. In just a couple of moths I'll take Step 1 of the USMLE. My initial plan was to pursue hedonistic pleasures this week, to have my tonsils (and possibly my adenoids as well) removed next week, and to recover for a period of ten days to two weeks following the surgery, studying only intermittently. Following my recovery, I would begin a six-to-seven-week period of rather intense study for the first installment of the USMLE, which is said to be the mother****er of all tests.
Old habits die hard, however. I didn't get to my current station in life (which is not all that much about which to boast, though what I have achieved would be even more pathetic by comparison had I gone through life up to this point as a slacker) by waiting until the last possible moment to prepare for any exam.
I began the arduous process of studying for Step 1 of the USMLE this morning. I didn't study for the full the twelve-to-fourteen hours that I plan to devote to test prep once I begin studying truly in earnest, but I gave "the Boards" a solid eight hours and forty minutes of my time. I'll probably do the same for most of the days this week. I'll still manage to knock at least three of the four items off my short-term "bucket list" for this week, but I could not give up studying even were I to try. Studying is such a habit for me that it's not much of a stretch to call it an addiction.
Step 1 of the USMLE contains 280 multiple-choice questions (dropping, as of May 2016, from 322 questions) which are to be completed over an eight-hour span, with forty-five minutes of the eight hours allotted for break time. A person can increase his or her break time by skipping the optional fifteen-minute tutorial at the beginning and/or by finishing each of the seven sections in less than one hour. Unless a person taking the test has highly extenuating circumstances, i.e. lactating or something similarly compelling, it would seem rather foolish either to skip the tutorial or to give any section less that its fully allotted time merely to increase one's break time. Then again, I don't smoke. Perhaps I'd feel differently about breaks if I were a nicotine addict.
Results for Step 1 of the USMLE are reported as scaled scores -- a three-digit score as high as 300, along with a two-digit score that we're told is not a percentile ranking but looks, sounds, and smells eerily like one. The minimum passing score is 190, but anyone whose score skulks anywhere near 190 will be forced to settle for the very dregs of placements in terms of internship or residency. Medical schools vary with regard to the number of attempts allowed. A person may take the test up to six times; my med school allows only three attempts before the candidate's enrollment is terminated. I will not jinx myself by suggesting that there's no way I will fail the test on my first attempt, but I seriously have no intention of taking the Boards three times.
I have a detailed study plan mapped out in writing, borrowing heavily from someone else's plan I found online. I've already deviated from it, though, by having begun my study yesterday. I'd love to take a laid-back approach to this thing, but I can't. Neither can I pretend that my level of obsession is a good thing. On the other hand, were I not stressing out over the USMLE, I'd undoubtedly be stressing out over something else. The USMLE is as worthy as any other cause for stress.
|I''m not depicted in any of these drawings.
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Good-Bye Tonsils (sung to the tune of "Good-Bye, Little Sebastian")
|This is not MY throat, and these are not MY tonsils, by the way.
I made it though finals with minimal stress. All test scores have been reported except for the last one, and I maxed out exam scores. The last one shouldn't be much different than the others. (Thanks for asking, la perla.) Our course grades are pass/fail.
Now it's on to bigger and better things. Our cohort is now de facto disbanded as we individually prep for the mother of all exams. We had a final social event which was attended by a large percentage of us. Some of us will choose to study together for a portion of our USMLE preparation, and we'll continue to see each other from time to time in the hospital and elsewhere as we begin clerkships. Still it will not be the same. The cohort was like being in a self-contained fourth-grade class, and then having the class move en masse the next year to fifth grade. We'll have the rare meeting as well, but it won't be the same. Alas, even good things must come to an end.
After partying with my classmates ( I limited myself to two mixed drinks, light on the alcohol in both), I slept for about twenty-six hours uninterrupted. Then I packed and drove to my parents' place on the central coast. I have nine days to relax, after which my tonsils are being removed. The tonsil removal is not without controversy. My pediatrician does not think the surgery is necessary. Two doctors at my school, however, consider me a walking strep factory as long as my tonsils are in place, and both of them knew that I wouldn't have the surgery done in their location, so they had no financial incentive to push the surgery on me. The ENT I saw for my secondary consultation said that my adenoids may need to come out as well, but it probably won't be known for certain until the surgeon gets a better look.The bottom line is that it's not my uncle's area of specialty, but he's still asserting his opinion. My dad said if I'm really contracting strep on a regular basis, it would be irresponsible to move on to clinical rotations with my tonsils still in place, but it was my decision.
As much as I don't want to go through this procedure, if it must be done, now is the time to do it. I have an extremely accomplished surgeon. I can recuperate in the comfort of my plush room at my parents' home, and I can study when I feel up to it. My dad and uncles can even help me study if I want their help. A couple of weeks following the surgery, I'll head back up north to the condo and will study there.
Meanwhile, I have a short-term list of goals to be accomplished. I need to para-sail at least once, preferably off the coast of Catalina. I want to see at least one musical before my surgery, and I don't yet have any tickets. I would really like to find a viola to buy for a reasonable price. My cousin named a prize heifer after me, and I need to meet this creature. I can knock off my goals one at a time if I skimp on sleep. There will be ample time for sleep after my tonsils (and possibly adenoids) have been unceremoniously ripped from my throat.
Monday, March 14, 2016
Daylight Saving Time Sucks!
Finals are here, or will be in less than seven hours. I'm as prepared as I can ever be. I expect the exams to be tough but no tougher than the previous two terms, and I have no electives and hence fewer exams about which to worry.in a few days, whether good or bad, it will be history.
Almost all of us in the cohort gave up a few hours on Saturday to help someone in the film and media studies department with his project. I can't share the specifics of the project at this time, not that anyone is waiting with bated breath to learn of the details. The timing could have been far better, as we're all facing finals, and the guy's project isn't due until next semester, but he needed the rough footage for his project proposal right now, and almost everyone in the cohort was kind enough to comply. It wasn't such a big deal for me personally, as I've been studying this quarter's material since before the quarter even officially started, but the same cannot be said of all my cohort mates. It was an amazing display of generosity on their part.
I can't remember if I've shared this before, but regardless of whether or not I'm being redundant, I must say that I HATE Daylight Saving Time.*** I know as much as the next person about the historical significance and supposed need for it, but I'm not buying what is said. Why the #%!& does the #%!&ing clock need to change? If the agrarian component of our society is so adversely affected by the times in which the sun rises and sets, couldn't farmers and their employees set their alarm clocks and begin their days an hour earlier in the times of the year that they need to maximize their daylight hours? If an entire community is adversely affected, couldn't that community adjust its business hours? Why must the rest of us be dragged along for the ride?
Things were bad enough when half the year was spent in standard time and the remaining half in Daylight Saving Time. Since President George W. Bush reduced the portion of the year to be spent in standard time, however, it's even more noticeably stupid. In my present area, several school districts adjust their start and end times based on Daylight Saving Time. If enough institutions adopt this practice, isn't it more or less a de facto negation of Daylight Saving Time? The rest of the school systems have students, teachers, or employees who are zombies for a portion of the start or the end of the day, based on whether they're morning or evening people, for a month or so into any transition period. DST has also been cited as a major contributing factor in accidents.
Is the degree to which daylight hours are supposedly being maximized under Daylight Saving Time genuinely benefiting the economy and the nation as a whole? I find it quite hard to believe that it is, and I say this as an industrious student who makes it to class on time every day, Daylight Saving Time notwithstanding. It's just that my head often hurts and I feel lousy each time the clock springs forward one hour.
*** It's technically "Daylight Saving Time", as opposed to the more commonly heard "Daylight Savings Time."
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Close Encounters of the Odd Kind
|This is a picture not of me but of the Man in Black, Johnny Cash.
Raptor Jesus and his study group crashed one of my study groups at my condo tonight. It made for a rather strange dynamic. It was almost like being paid a visit by a gang leader or a mafia don. He sent a flunkie in first to ensure that it was OK if they came in. I said it was fine. as study sessions go, it was fine. we'd been through the meatiest of the material we would study for the evening before Raptor Jesus and his group arrived. They didn't seem utterly clueless on the other stuff we covered.
I could tell right away that the visit really wasn't about studying. I thought initially that it might be because they had heard we usually have good food, which we do. Tonight was no exception, but Raptor Jesus and his people didn't make pigs of themselves. He even handed someone a couple of twenties and sent the person out for more food. They didn't try to take over the most comfortable seating in the place, either.
Then, as the study session was wrapping up, I learned the true nature of the visit. Raptor Jesus sent someone to his car to get his guitar out of the trunk. He made the comment that as nice as "In the Ghetto" had sounded on the viola, he suspected it would sound even better on the cello, and he asked me to play it for him. I retrieved my cello from the office, tuned it, and played through it as he strummed along. Matthew asked him if he -- Matthew -- should get his guitar out as well. Raptor Jesus said yes. Matthew's quite a bit more skilled at guitar than Raptor Jesus is, so he mostly just sang after that. He also wanted to sing "Ring of Fire,"The Battle of New Orleans," American Pie," and "Lola" by the Kinks.
It was interesting encounter though not an unpleasant one. I had no idea the guy was interested in music.
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Obnoxious Use of Twitter, Obnoxious Term of "Concert Pianist," and Obnoxiousness in General
|I'm not the bluebird in this picture.
This is a bit lengthy and probably boring. Read at your own risk.
I don't use Facebook. I didn't start on it as a teen because my mom didn't want my brother or me to be involved with it. She offered a significant financial incentive to us for not using it until we were twenty-one. I could have signed up since then, but I've seen little reason to do so. Most of my friends use Facebook. Some are able to make what I would consider to be good use of it in keeping up with friends. For many others, it seems to be more of a source of headaches and drama than it would seem to be worth. It could ultimately be used against me in securing an internship or residency, so I'll probably stay away at least until I'm well into a residency, and probably longer since interns and residents have little time for such frivolity.
I do, however, use Twitter on a very limited basis. Initially it was for me as a young adolescent an outlet to express my rage at being kept down by The Man and his representatives. My parents allowed it because they didn't have to listen to my venomous outpourings while I was venting on Twitter. It's now almost entirely a source of amusement for me, though I do use the Direct Message feature as a shortcut to email. With Twitter itself, there's a limit to how much trouble can be stirred up when one is limited to a combination of one-hundred-forty characters and spaces. Nevertheless, if one is sufficiently resourceful, some trouble can still be stirred up even within the constraints of the Twitter format. If I am to be perfectly honest, I must admit that in the interests of science and entertainment, I've occasionally stirred up a bit of trouble there. I did so yesterday.
That was just my perspective, however. Another follower of Judge Ferrer took exception to my response. (For the record, I don't believe she's a particularly frequent commenter to Judge Ferrer's postings. I don't think I had come across a response from her to one of Judge Ferrer's postings before or have since then, though I haven't been terribly vigilant in watching for comments from her. She may be a personal acquaintance of his, as she lives in south Florida, though it's a large and heavily populated region. Assuming they know each other personally would be the rough equivalent of assuming that your friend Steve knows my friend Olivia because they both live in the Greater Chicago Metropolitan Area.) She directed a reply to my response, stating, and I quote, "That's terrible! I can't believe you said that." I didn't respond to her reply, but I made a mental note of it and have, for my own enjoyment, periodically checked in on the woman's Twitter activity since then.
I shall not name the other follower of Judge Ferrer, as it wouldn't seem to be too much of a stretch that she might be a litigious sort of person. While what I have said or will say would be defensible against any charge of libel because everything I've said about the situation is either factual or is clearly a matter of opinion, neither do I desire to devote any time to defending myself against such a charge. The person of whom I write is a business person. She claims to have earned a bachelor's degree and to have had past employment in an allied health field, and she also claims to be a concert pianist. I'll address the concert pianist issue later. The person is heavily invested in the national political scene. She's a Donald Trump supporter and is an Obama and Hillary Clinton hater. Of late, she's also become a Rubio hater (she has suggested that Rubio is a drug user or abuser and refers to him as "Narco Rubio") and even a Ted Cruz hater. I'm unclear as to the nature of her enmity toward Cruz other than his status as an opponent of Donald Trump, as it would appear that his platform wouldn't be all that ideologically dissimilar from her own at least as I've observed it to be, but politics have been known to create both strange bedfellows and strange enemies. This person was a strong supporter of Fox News until Donald Trump had his parting of the ways with the "fair and balanced" flagship. She now writes most derisively about the network and its mouthpieces.
The person of whom I write has, as I see it, rather intense misconceptions concerning the closeness of relationship or familiarity afforded by Twitter acquaintanceship between celebrities and their Twitter followers. My mother would say that I am the proverbial pot calling the kettle black in this regard. My mom has for several years been bothered by what she refers to as my continual harassment of Judge Ferrer through the medium of Twitter. For whatever reason, Judge Ferrer has been most generous with the time and attention he devotes to fans. I now, much to my mother's chagrin, consider the judge to be a friend, though I respect the boundaries that need to be maintained in such a friendship.
I've concluded that the person of whom I write does not make the distinction between social media relationships not otherwise linked in real life and bona fide in-the-flesh connections. On nights when I've studied so much that I can't bear to read about another white blood cell or diseased organ, it's a nice diversion to me to read her comments to celebrities and media personalities, then to read the comments from among her non-famous peers. I get the impression that these people really believe that they're not just civic-minded and concerned voters but major players in the presidential primary. Taking pleasure in what I perceive as their delusional commentary does not present me or my character in an especially positive light, I concede, but I'm human. I have to do something to keep myself sane during stressful times.
As I'm making a long story even longer, I'll attempt to cut to the chase. While I've sent the occasional tweet with a benign interjection or question to this person or to one of the others in her circles, I've mostly been a bit of a voyeur. Last night I chose to send a rather obnoxious tweet to the woman. It was an immature thing to have done -- revenge of sorts for what I considered the rude tweet she sent me long ago. She would likely have no memory of the tweet she sent to me so long ago that irked me. What I wrote was petty and pointless. Still, as the mean-spirited person that I sometimes am, sending the tweet gave me pleasure.
The person made a comment and then conceded that the subject in question was not her " forte' ." I typed the single quotation mark here as she used it. The single quotation mark was presumably used as a makeshift accent (presumably the French accent ague, which is tough to access in English in the Twitter format). This would indicate that the word was to be pronounced /for-TAY/. This is a mispronunciation of the word in the sense that it was used. Some dictionaries now list /for-TAY/ as a secondary pronunciation for forte meaning "a thing at which someone excels." The secondary pronunciation acceptability status came about from continual misuse. Repeated misuse leads to an error being considered standard English language usage over time. (I fear that in my lifetime, "I seen him" will achieve "standard English language usage" status just because of its pervasive misuse among the Jerry Springer/Judge Judy clientele of our society.) The correct pronunciation of the word is /fort/, just like the word fort. Forte pronounce /for-TAY/ should be reserved for the musical term meaning loud.
Disagreeable soul that I can be, I shared my knowledge with the person in question. I should note that while I dislike the very idea of pet peeves, as we tend to make far too much of little things that vex us, if I were to have a pet peeve, it would probably be related to the pervasiveness of Grammar, English Language Usage, and Pronunciation Police. We all need to get over ourselves by policing our own grammar, English language usage, and pronunciation, and allowing others the same privilege. Still, I enjoyed the pedantically obnoxious act of correcting the woman's pronunciation far more than a mentally healthy person should have. (That's my defense! I'll claim insanity.)
The woman first responded by telling me that she knows what "forte' " means and how to pronounce it, again using the makeshift accent, which would indicate that she didn't know how to pronounce it. Then she must have looked it up and found that I was correct, because she posted another response, this time without the makeshift accent, telling me that she knows how to pronounce the word because she speaks French. She also said she didn't recall "verbalizing" the word. She was correct in that she didn't pronounce it out loud, of course. She didn't have to because she used the quotation mark as an accent. Then she told me that she is a concert pianist. Then she disparaged my status as a medical school student. Then she probably blocked me. I don't know. I blocked her, as I need not to obsess on her anymore. It was fun while it lasted, though.
Someday I'll devote a blog to the topic of the term concert pianist. What makes a person a concert pianist, anyway? It's not a protected term. Anyone can claim without repercussion to be a concert pianist. Technically there are probably two definitions. One definition would encompass anyone who has every played piano in a concert. By this definition, a rock musician could be a concert pianist. So could a person who held a concert in his living room, during which he played "Chopsticks" [the one song that he knows] on the piano. The other definition would be "a classical pianist who regularly performs as a soloist in concert performances." While I cannot know for certain, I highly doubt that Judge Ferrer's other follower meets this criterion. Perhaps she means that she's a classically trained pianist. I can only surmise.
My behavior yesterday was so rude that I'm not proud of myself. Nevertheless, it got me through another day.
I have to have my tonsils out soon. I'm not sure when. Other than one ulcerative colitis flare and several minor bouts with strep, this has been a good year in terms of health. I was disappointed to learn that my tonsils have to go. I don't know for sure if the surgery will happen here or at home. It would be more convenient to have it done here, but I might have more control in who performs it if I have the surgery at home. My doctor says it needs to happen soon enough that I'll be 100% recovered before I begin clerkships, which will start in late June.
One small consolation is that I'm not a singer, so I don't have to worry excessively about my vocal cords being damaged.It's not that I want to sustain damage to my vocal cords. It's just that the stakes are less high since I'm not a singer.
|Neither person in this image is me.
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One of the more amusing comments about my recent "Baby Mama" rant (or at least amusing to me, anyway), came from over on Daily Kos, when someone there wondered whether if I was on their side, politically speaking. Because, I guess, if I'm not, then it's not okay to enjoy the snark for its own sake. Or whatever.
Well, I don't want my political proclivities to be in doubt, so let me be absolutely crystal clear where I stand:
I support the right of same-sex married couples to carry concealed weapons.
I hope this explains everything.
Thank you for reading.


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Amritsar Junction railway station is a main and important railhead of the Northern Railways in India. There are many express and mail trains come to the Amritsar Junction railway station from different parts of the country. Few Important trains which pass through this station their names are Amritsar – Katihar Express, Howrah Express, New Delhi Express and Shatabdi Express.
Amritsar is well connected with daily trains from Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Indore, Bhopal, Gwalior, Agra, Ujjain, Jabalpur, Ahmedabad, Pune and other main Indian cities. There are also three straight trains from Amritsar to Mumbai. While travelling south of this station, the main railhead is at Gurdaspur, which is 71 km from here.
The Sind, Punjab and Delhi Railway completed the Multan-Lahore-Amritsar line in 1865.Amritsar-Attari section was completed on the route to Lahore in 1862.
The 78 km (48 mi) long Amritsar–Khem Karan railway line runs through Tarn Taran and Patti. A 54 km (34 mi) long line links Amritsar to Dera Baba Nanak on the bank of the Ravi.
The 107 km (66 mi) Amritsar–Pathankot route runs through Batala and Gurdaspur.[4] The 1,676 mm (5 ft 6 in) wide broad gauge Amritsar-Pathankot line was opened in 1884
Railway station holds the facilities of waiting room, retiring room. There is a computerized reservation office. Tourist information centre is also available there. One can get vegetarian and non-vegetarian food depending on their choice from the station itself. It also had the availability of tea stall, books and magazines stall, telephone booth, medical and general shops, Wheel Chairs and Stretchers, Internet browsing centres and G.R.P Office
Tourist places like Durgiana temple is 2 km, Golden temple is 3.2 km, Jallianwala Bagh is 3.6 km and Maharaja Palace is 4.4 km and Wagah border is 25 km from the railway station.
Amritsar is a famous and pleasant city. This city is situated in Punjab state in northern part of India. It is the largest city of Punjab. Amritsar's main commercial activities are tourism, carpets and fabrics, handicrafts, farm produce, service trades etc.. It is a business place for Punjab state.
Amritsar is also a historical place. Amritsar's literal meaning is 'pool of nectar'. This place has its own religious importance. Those who follows Sikh religion, Amritsar is a holy place for them.
Some Trains passes through Amritsar:
11057 / 11058 Amritsar Lokmanya Tilak Terminus Express
12013 / 12014 New Delhi Shatabdi Express
12029 / 12030 Amritsar New Delhi Swarna Shatabdi Express
12031 / 12032 Amritsar New Delhi Shatabdi Express
12053 / 12054 Amritsar Haridwar Jan Shatabdi Express
12203 / 12204 Amritsar Saharsa Garib Rath Express
12241 / 12242 Amritsar Chandigarh Superfast Express
12317 / 12318 Akal Takht Express
12411 / 12412 Amritsar Chandigarh Intercity Express
12459 / 12460 Amritsar New Delhi Express
12497 / 12498 Shan-e-Punjab Express
12715 / 12716 Sachkhand Express
12903 / 12904 Golden Temple Mail
12925 / 12926 Paschim Express
13005 / 13006 Punjab Mail
13049 / 13050 Amritsar Howrah Express
14631 / 14632 Amritsar Dehradun Express
14673 / 14674 Shaheed Express
15707 / 15708 Amrapali Express
18237 / 18238 Chhattisgarh Express
18507 / 18508 Hirakud Express
19325 / 19326 Amritsar–Indore Express
15933 / 15934 Amritsar-Dibrugarh Express


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Unified Communications
Integrates various technologies, such as data, voice, video, e-mail, and text, and makes them all accessible from a single platform to give end users a consistent user experience.
Digital Signage
Add new depth to formerly static information via scheduled content delivery or on-the-fly message changes.
Security Deployment
Optimize video and access control into one central location.
IT Consultancy
Provide business with integrated technology infrastructure solutions, personalized to company requirements, budget, and environment.
Marketing Solution
Deliver customer-centric marketing assets to help your company succeed.
POS Upscale
Upsell products and accept payments on any device while automatically updating inventory and orders.
Workforce Solution
Delivers immediate and measurable results by providing real-time visibility into performance and accountability.
Push Ads Telephony
Communicate with the end users about news or other useful information while being a functional phone system.


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Posted: Jan 29, 2019
MONT ALTO, Pa. – Senior guard Kevin Holston (Fort Washington, Md. / Friendly) scored a season-high 25 points and finished with a double-double to lead Mont Alto to an 83-63 PSUAC victory on Tuesday evening. Fellow senior Jalen Smith (Ranson, W.Va. / Jefferson) chipped in 20 points and converted on 2-of-4 attempts from downtown. Mont Alto improved to 14-6 overall and 11-3 in the PSUAC.
Inside the Boxscore
- Holston shot 9-of-13 from the field and drained a pair of 3-pointers to go along with his 10 rebounds.
- Freshman forward John Teague (Hagerstown, Md. / North Hagerstown) finished with his first career double-double with 15 boards and 10 points.
- Quintyn Flemister (Harrisburg, Pa. / Harrisburg) and Drew Pitzer (Bunker Hill, W.Va. / Musselman) provided a scoring punch off the bench with a combined 17 points.
- PSUMA shot 46.9 percent from the field and were 9-of-22 as a team from 3-point range. The Lions also held the 48-36 advantage on the boards.
- London Hoxie scored 18 as Iman Young and Marvin Sidon both finished with 11 points. Sidon also dished out 11 assists.
How it Happened
- Mont Alto opened the game on a 7-0, which eventually turned into a 15-6 lead that was capped off by a Jalen Smith (Ranson, W. Va. / Jefferson) 3-pointer. Hot shooting and another trey off the hands of Drew Pitzer (Bunker Hill, W.Va. / Musselman) put the home team up 21-8 with just over 12 minutes left in the first half.
- A mini Fayette run made it 34-19 and forced a PSUMA timeout at the 7:23 mark. Another 8-0 run to close the half put the Roaring Lions in striking distance, trailing 40-32.
- Mont Alto committed nine turnovers, most of which happened over last five minutes of the first half.
- Fayette opened the second half on a 10-1 run and took their one and only lead of the game at 42-41.
- Kevin Holston (Fort Washington, Md. / Friendly) forced a turnover and converted on a fast break layup that put his team back up 46-42.
- Mont Alto tightened up their defense and led 64-49 after a Holston trey. They iced Fayette down the stretch, maintaining a double-digit advantage for the better part of the final 10-minutes of the game.
Penn State Mont Alto squares off against the first-place team in the PSUAC East in Wilkes-Barre (15-3, 13-0 PSUAC) on Friday, February 1. Game time is slated for 8 p.m.


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As distasteful as you may find Cabela's Big Buck Hunt - or indeed the people who play it - you've got admit there's something shamefully satisfying about the game's plastic peripherals.
So it's nice to see that with the game making its way to the 360, PS3 and Wii next month, special attention has been made to the plastic gun that comes in the box. The 360 and PS3 version of the game, they just ship in a regular box and you make do, but the Wii version, it comes with a gun.
A large, Elmer Fudd-like shotgun. Really, it's amazing. Nintendo, this is what the Wii Zapper should have looked like.


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Today's Top News
Sberbank launches blockchain laboratory
The laboratory will hire specialists with experience in working with blockchain and cooperating with businesses for the purpose of creating and implementing ideas related to existing products and generating new approaches to business tasks ......
Other News in Brief
The Current Edition. January, Issue 7, Vol. № 1
Putin and Abe search for compromise on Peace Treaty
The Russian President and Japanese Prime Minister have entrusted their foreign affairs ministries to continue the search for ways to sign an acceptable peace treaty between their countries. Putin and Abe also discussed the ways and means to further develop their countries' robust bilateral trade and economic ties, noting that the gross trade turnover between the two countries from January to November 2018 totaled almost USD 20bn


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There are three main factors for success on the lanes: ball performance, lane conditions and knowing your style. The first two are easily quantified, but the last has been more difficult.
Determining a bowler's stats has been an inaccurate science at best; pro shops have had to rely on videography and perception before calculation. Essentially, it's been a guess.
Until now.
Ebonite International brings you Bowler ID, a revolutionary device that provides true data to each individual bowler on their specific stats.
A sensor, small enough to fit under a finger insert, is placed inside the ball and measures the bowler's rev rate, ball speed, axis tilt and rotation and computes the positive axis point. Accuracy of the device is unprecedented, with less than 1% margin of error when determining rev rate and approximately 1.2% for ball speed. Tilt and rotation is accurate to within two degrees.
Bowler ID represents a fundamental change in bowling knowledge, helping with proper ball selection which leads to greater success on the lanes.


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Science policy news: weekly roundup: October 23, 2015
The roundup is formatted with the title of the story, followed by the news source in parentheses and a brief summary. If you find a particularly interesting article, please send it to firstname.lastname@example.com for inclusion in next week's roundup.
Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., has expressed hesitation on providing mandatory funding for the National Institutes of Health but has not ruled it out.
Mandatory Spending for NIH Could Mar Senate Medical Bill (Morning Consult)
How NIH Funding Got Caught in a Budget Battle (National Journal)
Academia, big pharma find collaboration fruitful (Philly.com) With diminishing federal funding available to support biomedical research, academic researchers strengthen partnerships with industry.
NIH-built toolset helps researchers share and compare data (GCN) The NIH has developed a system called the Biomedical Research Informatics Computing System. BRICS is a set of software computing tools which facilitate sharing and comparison analysis of data.
Congress must commit to science funding in budget talks (AL.com) University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers, Louis Justement and Mary-Ann Bjornsti, call for commitment to scientific research from policymakers.
Korea, U.S. to launch precision medicine cohort (Korea Herald) The Korean National Cancer Center joined efforts with the NIH to cooperate on U.S. President Barack Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative.
Chinese researchers used CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to produce heavily muscled dogs.
Genetically Engineered Dogs (The Scientist)
First Gene-Edited Dogs Reported in China (Technology Reviews)
Researchers create dogs with double muscle mass (Digital Journal)
Ethics debate on gene-editing (Standard-Times)
Researchers identify potential alternative to CRISPR-Cas genome editing tools (Phys.org)