(no subject)

Accentuate the Positive

The only way to fight such slurs is by hitting back with paid media in the same markets in which the original appeared - in this case the battleground states of Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia, where only a few changed minds could make the difference between defeat and victory.

Such an ad could be produced in an afternoon. It would feature Jim Rassmann, talking straight to camera, mixed with images of him with Kerry in Vietnam, and it would say something like this:

"Some people are spreading lies about the man who saved my life. This man was my swiftboat commander in Vietnam, John Kerry. When I was blown off the boat into the Mekong river, under enemy fire, my skipper risked his life to pull me back to safety. He won the bronze star for that act.

"But some people, who were not there, are saying it did not happen. Well I was there, and I wouldn't be alive today had it not been for his selfless heroism.

"Now, I don't know why these people are spreading these lies, but I do know that the ad is paid for by Republican activists. It's sad to see some people dishonouring those who risked their life for their country just to score political points."

If pride is getting in the way of Kerry giving the go-ahead to such an ad, his advisers are not serving him well. If he is insisting on keeping to the high road on this issue, his advisers need to grab him by the shoulders, look him in the eye and tell him that there's a time for the high road - and this isn't it.

I miss...

the Student Quote of the Day.

The only one I can remember is by Gypsy, who famously said:

"I hate other people."

I remember the context, too.

Rats!

Studies Find Rats Can Get Hooked on Drugs

Rats can become drug addicts. That's important to know, scientists say, and has taken a long time to prove. Now two studies by French and British researchers show the animals exhibit the same compulsive drive for cocaine as people do once they're truly hooked.

[...] Among the ways to know when a rat's hooked: It keeps trying to get cocaine even when each hit comes with an electric shock.

In the French study, rats poked their pointy noses through holes in their cages to trigger injections of cocaine. They were allowed access to the cocaine for three months, much longer than the 10- to 30-day drug-use studies normally done with animals.

Compulsive drug-seeking even in the face of bad consequences is a measure of human addiction. So the researchers devised ways to measure that in animals: routinely cutting off the drug supply and measuring the rats' persistence at poking the supply trigger anyway, seeing how hard they worked to get the drug and noting whether they gave up when their feet were shocked.

Intriguingly, 17 percent of the rats met all three measures and thus were considered addicted — while roughly 15 percent of human cocaine users become addicts, reported lead researcher Pier Vincenzo Piazza of INSERM, France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research.

(no subject)

Eating a Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal bar, I feel something smooth in my mouth.

( Read more... )