Isegoria

My recent trip through the Charlotte and Asheville airports led me to research the Percentage of Adults with Obesity in the U.S. by State. North Carolina isn’t too bad:

From Wired News: Anti-HIV Bacterium Isolated?:

Lin Tao, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s dentistry college, has found a strain of lactobacillus — a common bacteria in our bodies — that binds to the sugar envelope on the surface of HIV. The bacterium targets HIV because it uses the sugar as a food source.

Tao and colleagues at Chicago’s Rush University isolated the lactobacilli from the oral and vaginal cavities of healthy human volunteers. The team then tested the bacteria against HIV and found two strains that specifically trap the virus by eating mannose and — in the lab at least — block infection.

“If we can find its natural enemy, we can control the spread of HIV naturally and cost-effectively, just as we use cats to control mice,” Tao said.

Based on the description from Getting Afghans to Talk Without Torture, American soldiers could just as well be stationed in Viking-era Iceland:

American commanders have learned that there are ways to get the locals to talk, and identify the people firing the rocket. The most useful method is to halt reconstruction projects, or shut down the weekly bazaar (where local Afghans can sell goods to the thousands of troops and civilians on the base). Either of these moves costs the local Afghan economy thousands of dollars a week. In a country where $20 a month is a good salary, that kind of loss is felt. It may take weeks, or even months, before the local elders get together and decide that it?s better for all concerned that the guilty guy be turned in. Afghans often settle disputes in terms of money. That?s an ancient tradition that survives in the West in the form of fines levied by judges. For the Afghans, the identity of a guilty Afghan is worth only so much in economic losses. So far, several rocket firing incidents have been cleared up this way. Not just in Bagram, but in other parts of Afghanistan as well. Sometimes, Civil Affairs or Special Forces officers, who have established good relations with the locals, can just go to the elders, or local strongman, and ask for the rocket firing, or sniping, or planting of mines, to stop. Usually, the perpetrator is known to many of the locals. Such a request often gets the attacks to stop, even though the guy responsible does not get turned in. If local attacks have killed or injured American troops, the negotiations are a bit more intense. The Afghans recognize the concept of ?blood feud? and can understand that angry American soldiers, eager to get revenge, might be something to avoid. Sometimes the guilty party is identified, and it is left to the American troops to do the rest. Other times, it turns out that one of the local men has suddenly left the area. And the locals don?t expect to see him return until the local American troops finish their tour of duty.

Saving Ryan’s Privates describes the new kevlarhosen being tested by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory:

Developed by LB Technologies, these Kevlar shorts meet National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Level IIIa protection from fragmentation and small arms fire requirements to an area of the body previously unprotected — the waistline to the knees and the vulnerable femoral artery. Due to increased use by insurgents of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), this protection is especially needed for soldiers in Iraq, in particular for turret gunners.

Bruce Bawer writes about the high cost of living in Scandinavia in We’re Rich, You’re Not. End of Story.:

Dining out is just too pricey in a country where teachers, for example, make about $50,000 a year before taxes. Even the humblest of meals — a large pizza delivered from Oslo’s most popular pizza joint — will run from $34 to $48, including delivery fee and a 25 percent value added tax.

Not that groceries are cheap, either. Every weekend, armies of Norwegians drive to Sweden to stock up at supermarkets that are a bargain only by Norwegian standards. And this isn’t a great solution, either, since gasoline (in this oil-exporting nation) costs more than $6 a gallon.

After dealing with Danish prices for a few days in Copenhagen, we couldn’t figure out how Danes made ends meet. It turns out that the “rich” Northern European nations aren’t so rich:

After adjusting the figures for the different purchasing powers of the dollar and euro, the only European country whose economic output per person was greater than the United States average was the tiny tax haven of Luxembourg, which ranked third, just behind Delaware and slightly ahead of Connecticut.

The next European country on the list was Ireland, down at 41st place out of 66; Sweden was 14th from the bottom (after Alabama), followed by Oklahoma, and then Britain, France, Finland, Germany and Italy. The bottom three spots on the list went to Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi. In short, while Scandinavians are constantly told how much better they have it than Americans, Timbro’s statistics suggest otherwise. So did a paper by a Swedish economics writer, Johan Norberg.

Contrasting “the American dream” with “the European daydream,” Mr. Norberg described the difference: “Economic growth in the last 25 years has been 3 percent per annum in the U.S., compared to 2.2 percent in the E.U. That means that the American economy has almost doubled, whereas the E.U. economy has grown by slightly more than half. The purchasing power in the U.S. is $36,100 per capita, and in the E.U. $26,000 — and the gap is constantly widening.”

The one detail in Timbro’s study that didn’t feel right to me was the placement of Scandinavian countries near the top of the list and Spain near the bottom. My own sense of things is that Spaniards live far better than Scandinavians. In Norwegian pubs, for example, anyone rich or insane enough to order, say, a gin and tonic is charged about $15 for a few teaspoons of gin at the bottom of a glass of tonic; in Spain, the drinks are dirt-cheap and the bartender will pour the gin up to the rim unless you say “stop.”

In late March, another study, this one from KPMG, the international accounting and consulting firm, cast light on this paradox. It indicated that when disposable income was adjusted for cost of living, Scandinavians were the poorest people in Western Europe. Danes had the lowest adjusted income, Norwegians the second lowest, Swedes the third. Spain and Portugal, with two of Europe’s least regulated economies, led the list.