Signs and Wonders 06.15

Now, that's ironic. I heard this week that a bear had mauled a man in Alaska. I'm not sure why the bear attacked this man, but I used to live in Alaska, and I spend a fair amount of time in national parks and forests in the lower 48, so I know that one reason bears and human have negative interactions is that bears get used to food handouts. That's why you'll see "Please do not feed the animals" signs in most national parks. Food handouts lead both to dependency and aggression on the part of wild animals. I think about that as I have read a number of stories this year saying that food stamp recipients are at a record high. Causes me to wonder if the Department of the Interior couldn't teach the Department of Agriculture a thing or two.

Dot-porn, dot-sex, dot-adult, oh my! The conservative group Morality in Media (MIM) announced on Wednesday that it would "vigorously oppose the expansion of pornography domains on the internet." MIM's statement said that "more porn domains means more porn on the internet." Also, and this is an important point, non-porn companies, schools, bloggers, and individuals will be forced to buy the .xxx version of their current domain in order to prevent pornographers from grabbing it and using it. According to MIM President Pat Trueman, ".xxx was supposed to solve the internet's porn problem. Advocates for the .xxx domain said pornography companies would leave the .com domain and relocate on .xxx, making the rest of the internet porn-free. Well the charade is up. Porn companies did not give up their .com sites and move. Instead, many just opened up additional sites on the .xxx domain, making pornography more available on the internet."

Same-sex marriage fallout. North Carolina was a state in play until President Obama made his May 9 announcement saying he favored same-sex "marriage." Now it looks to be solidly in the Republican camp. Public Policy Polling, a liberal-leaning survey firm, said the president is losing "a stunning amount" of African-American backing in North Carolina over the SSM decision. Mitt Romney has almost doubled his support from the black community (from 11 percent to 20 percent). This is a remarkable shift when you consider that more than 95 percent of blacks voted for Obama in 2008. It's also significant because Obama won North Carolina by only about 14,000 votes in 2008. It won't take a big swing in the African-American vote to turn the state from blue to red.

A cure for AIDS? The most famous AIDS patient in the world is in the news again. In 2009 Timothy Ray Brown, known as the Berlin patient, became known as the first patient ever to be cured of HIV infection. Brown, 45, had two bone marrow transplants in Berlin in 2007 and 2008 to treat leukemia. The blood cells for the transplants came from a donor with a genetic mutation that makes his cells immune to HIV. The transplants wiped out Brown's HIV infection. But new data presented last week in Spain raise a question about whether there are minute traces of HIV in some tissues. They also raise scientific and ethical questions. What, indeed, is a cure? Was Brown's experience unique or will this treatment work with others? Given these new data, are we sure that it even worked with Brown?