A new meta-analysis reports that sperm counts have declined by about half in Western men over the period 1973-2011. The report was presented in “Human Reproduction Update”, an Oxford Academic journal, on July 25, 2017; the cause of this decline has not been determined. By “Western”, the study means North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.
The decline in sperm counts has been reported before, most notably in 1992 (that report referenced “the past fifty years”) but has been highly controversial due to variations in counting methods and variations in the quality of analyses. The concentrations of spermatozoa in men’s semen were averaging roughly 100 million per milliliter but have dropped to the neighborhood of 40-50 million, still “in the normal range” but now at the very bottom edge of that range. Declining sperm counts are associated with multiple problems, including increased mortality among offspring, cryptorchidism, and testicular cancer, and are often blamed on the presence of multiple chemicals in the environment including plasticizers like phthalates.
The problem is associated with declines in fertility, particularly in Holland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and among whites in the United States, that have led to reproduction rates below replacement rates. This means that the populations of these countries, particularly European whites, are declining. While populations should be declining for relief of climate change, this phenomenon is currently limited to whites, who have a particularly selfish reason for opposing it: white nationalists believe that the declining population of whites is a bad thing.
So there you have it: scientific evidence that could be interpreted by white racists as genocide against the white race. How reasonable is this interpretation? Not very. The causes of this problem are most likely related to environmental chemicals that were released as a result of society turning to the ubiquitous use of plastics for food containers; this does not represent an intentional effort to eliminate the white race. Scientific evidence can be misused and abused in the most despicable ways.
Comments of the Day: The Non-Equivalency of Violence on the Left and Right in Charlottesville
old norseman
Red State in the Old West 2 hours ago
Yeah, right. Sorry, but the radical right is using as tactics the equivalent of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater to deliberately stir up controversy. This is not a “both sides do it” moment.
Alan Wallach
Washington, DC 2 hours ago
In 1927 Trump’s father, Fred, marched with the KKK. In 1973, after numerous complaints the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ investigated Fred Trump for violating the fair housing act. The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. Donald, schooled by Fred and Roy Cohn (formerly Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right hand man), has built his political career on racism. Yesterday’s rant was from the heart. Trump is not the first overtly racist president of modern times–that honor belongs to Woodrow Wilson–but he is without a doubt the US’s first alt-right president.
BrooklynNtheHouse
Brooklyn, NY 5 hours ago
I’m troubled by the fact that no one is publicly connecting the dots in the likely trajectory of this escalating conflict between the malignant fantasy world of Donald Trump and the modern world. Trump gets a warm and fuzzy feeling from the support he receives from racists with guns. It is not a huge leap of the imagination to picture Trump calling these miscreants to arms when the hammer finally comes down on his presidency. He knows everything that Mueller has and more because he’s done every deed that’s being investigated. He was there. We would be kidding ourselves to imagine Trump will go quietly. I hope the GOP can pan back and take a comprehensive view of what is really happening here.
Judy
Greenville SC 5 hours ago
I wake up this morning and cry for my country. I am a veteran, my husband is a veteran, my father is a veteran and my nephew is on his way to Jordan to once again fight for our country. I am not to be put in a, “left wing” box because I believe the President and many Republicans are ruining our country. They are degrading our strength of diversity. Our strength is in all our people. Women who help make strong families, are endless caregivers to our youth and old and yes to our country as patriots. Our strength is in our people of many colors and sexual orientation as they work to be part of our nation’s strength. Our strength is in our hearts that want to build and not destroy. What makes us weak is divisions in the infrastructure of our goodness and our compassion.
We have allowed the worst of who we are to now lead our country. We have allowed the worst of who we are to try to push in health care that hurts instead of helps. We have allowed the worst of who we are to make policy behind closed doors without women or those of color in the room. Really! Is the worst of who we are, these terrible white men? Are they our weakness? I do not believe this to be true, yet they are looking like the worst of who we are? Are they becoming our weakness instead of our strength? Is the only way they feel empowered to oppress? Is the only way they feel empowered to take guns and torches and threaten those who love peace. From the President down, this is disgusting.
Greek Goddess
Merritt Island, Florida 4 hours ago
Trump has succeeded in bringing the United States to the brink of international war and civil war at the same time.
David Meli
Clarence 2 hours ago
Even Gandhi argued limits to non-violence, it should never be the first course of action, But what you are missing is the moral difference between the two sides. Nazis and the KKK are inherently un-American. It is the duty of every American to oppose their ideology. By creating a moral equivalency he has given legitimacy to these un-American ideals and by default suggest they have a place in our national dialog. Shame! Booth may have assassinated Lincoln, but trump just assassinated the party of Lincoln.
Siebolt Frieswyk ‘Sid’
Topeka, KS 2 hours ago
Let us be plain spoken. This is our Nation where antisemitism thrives as does racial bigotry. Violence is vaunted in a massive military force that surpasses all in the history of civilization. We are also a Nation that sustains wildly partisan support for a sport that slowly kills its players by irremediably destroying their brains. Blunt force trauma is inflicted in moments of intense violence. Wild cheering and boos for the ‘losers’ follow. Who are we? Why are we this way? We sustain unending bigotry and abandon our children to inner city chaos and violence. Failed city services and corrupted law enforcement target minorities without remediation. A bit less than half of American voters chose a man who has all the attributes of a tyrant. He acts in grotesque ways to awaken the hopes of our enemies and destroys treasured alliances we have built after two murderous World Wars. He is making it possible for us to be discarded in the rubbish heap of history as a failed democracy. Rise up America! Ask yourselves can we really say, “I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free…’cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land. God Bless the USA.” We need to speak up and get out there to declare we are NOT happy with a president who revives the animus of our hideous Civil War and its inspiration in slavery and bigotry. We are a Nation where democracy, equity, equality and opportunity are fostered throughout our land. Be proud. Be an American who loves the USA!
Ana Luisa
Belgium 4 hours ago
Here’s why you couldn’t be more wrong:
- Studies show that during the last 10 years, 74% of all casualties of extremist violence in the US were the result of right-wing extremists, 24% of Muslim extremists, and 2% of left-wing extremists. So yes, it would have been VERY surprising of the terrorist attack of Saturday would have been perpetrated by the radical left (apart from the fact that there are ten times as many right-wing extremists in the US today as there are left-wing extremists).
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One side fought for publicly celebrating a General who killed white Americans and almost destroyed the country only in order to keep slavery as a legal system, the other side fought for no longer publicly celebrating people whose behavior is explicitly contradicted by the Constitution. There’s NO “moral equivalency” between both ideologies here.
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One side exists because it wants to fight racism and discrimination, and doing so through peaceful and democratic means. The other side exists because it wants to use force in order to change America into a white supremacist, neo-Nazi, anti-semite nation. So there’s absolutely NO “moral equivalency” between what causes both sides to exist either.
(see part 2 for the other arguments)
Ana Luisa
Belgium 2 hours ago
@ Paul Daley (part 2)
- If you believe that giving “time and publicity” may strongly increase the number of extremists on any given side, as well as the violence used by them, I hope you understand that this is what Trump has done for days in a row now … for the right-wing extremists, who are already responsible for most extremist terrorism in this country. Why do you think that was a wise choice?
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EVEN when you take a look at extremist domestic terrorism for the last half a century, it’s right-wing extremists who are BY FAR most responsible for killings (12 times as many) and injuries (36 times as many).
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If you fear “vigilante groups” on our streets, I suppose you’ll explicitly reject the tactics of the far-right (being better armed than even the police COULD be, as the Charlottesville police declared) much more strongly than those of the “other side”, who only used shields and pepper spray … ?
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Right-wing extremists killed an American and injured 20 others in what the U.S. Attorney General called a “terrorism attack”, left-wing extremist did NOTHING comparable.
Conclusion: there’s no “moral equivalency” WHATSOEVER, and the president only created more division, strongly hurt the victims of this heinous crime and all Jews and African-Americans in this country, and clearly encouraged white supremacists, the KKK and neo-Nazis to take the weapons and hateful rhetoric more often to our streets, as they themselves explicitly and happily stated.
That’s SO wrong.
It is as foolish for Americans to believe that their generals will save them from Trump as it was for liberal Germans to believe the military would protect the nation from Hitler’s excesses.
From a piece in yesterday’s Guardian by a 94 year old veteran of the WW II RAF warning that this summer feels like the summer of 1939
A NYT article describes the origin of the new missiles that North Korea is using to threaten the United States: a Ukrainian missile plant that for years produced engines for the Soviet Union’s most powerful ICBMs. The plant has fallen on hard times since the Russians stopped using their missile engine in 2006 and switched to an indigenous Russian design. In fact, they have been reduced to making trolley cars and are near bankruptcy. The once massive missile engine plant is the original source of the modified engines that the North Koreans have been using since last fall to power their suddenly revitalized missile program, but it appears that the engines they are using were part of a stockpile that the Russians had left over from their use in the SS series of ICBMs.
The conclusion: the Russians, either a criminal gang or Putin’s government, gave the North Koreans the engines to power their new ICBMs. Why? Putin is interested in weakening the US and distracting us from the threat that Russia poses to our security. A cheap way of doing that would be to build up the North Korean threat by jump-starting their ICBM program. Or is that just paranoia… to paraphrase Thomas Pynchon, author of “Gravity’s Rainbow”: Proverbs for Paranoids #1: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that there’s not somebody after you.
Comment of the Day: Something is Happening
Always, always remember that there is only one undeniable fact:
something is happening.
Everything else is a theory about that something.
From an article about Elon Musk and his theory that we are in a simulation in the Guardian.
Quote of the Day: Kim Goads Don the Con
“We consider the U.S. no more than a lump which we can beat to a jelly any time.”
North Korean taunt reported by the New York Times on Friday (August 11, 2017)
gemli
is a trusted commenter Boston 20 hours ago
It’s possible that the hypersensitivity we see surrounding race, gender, ethnicity, political leanings and all of the other silos of identity are due to one underlying cause: there is a sense that progress has stopped.
Various groups are feeling pushback after decades of slow advancement. White Power is surging, legislators are passing bathroom bills to thwart transgender rights, abortion rights are under attack, a Supreme Court nomination was hijacked by Republicans, and a man with a possibly racist past was nominated for Attorney General. When Elizabeth Warren protested, she was told to sit down and shut up.
We have a president who invited white supremacists to sit at his right hand, and who has the cultural sensitivity of turn-of-the-century robber baron. As I write this, people are dying in Charlottesville as white nationalists assert power.
Nobody wants to listen politely to right-wing zealots speaking at their commencement, or thoughtfully consider what Betsy DeVos has planned for public education in this country. The Civil War ended a century and a half ago, and people are still having to remind us that black lives matter.
The Twentieth Century was a time of increasing rights for people of color, women, gays and lesbians, the poor and the sick. Salaries were rising and infrastructure was booming.
Conservatives are fed up with all of that, and they’ve let us know they’re not going to take it anymore.
Some don’t choose to listen politely to their plans.
I like this picture so I’m going to use it to head all my posts.
The new EPA administrator and former attorney general of Oklahoma, who used to get his jollies suing the EPA, now is implementing his plant to dismantle the agency and abnegate its mission of protecting our environment. Here’s a quote from a NYT article about his “secret” and paranoid mission:
Mr. Pruitt, according to the employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs, often makes important phone calls from other offices rather than use the phone in his office, and he is accompanied, even at E.P.A. headquarters, by armed guards, the first head of the agency to ever request round-the-clock security.
A former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career suing the E.P.A., and whose LinkedIn profile still describes him as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,” Mr. Pruitt has made it clear that he sees his mission to be dismantling the agency’s policies — and even portions of the institution itself.
But as he works to roll back regulations, close offices and eliminate staff at the agency charged with protecting the nation’s environment and public health, Mr. Pruitt is taking extraordinary measures to conceal his actions, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former agency employees.
Why would a man insist that employees leave their cell phones behind and take no notes, as the NYT states elsewhere in the article? Because he is paranoid about leaks. Why would he leave his own office to make important phone calls? Because he is paranoid that the employees of his office are against him and out to leak details of his plans.
Do we really need an EPA administrator who plans to dismantle the EPA? Or who is so paranoid that he won’t make important phone calls from his office?
Billy the Dog says:
Comment of the Day: Don the Con is Desperate
James
San Clemente, CA 14 hours ago
On the same day that Donald Trump threatened nonspecific military action against North Korea, and contended that his despicable comments denigrating U.S. diplomats and local employees in Russia was just “sarcasm,” the President opened a new front in his rhetorical war on the world, saying that he would “not exclude” military action against Venezuela. I’m getting the feeling that all these impromptu press conferences the President has been giving lately all have the same purpose. He’s feeling the hot breath of Special Counsel Robert Mueller on his neck, and he is casting around for an issue to distract the press from the fact that the walls are closing in on his administration. All this flailing is understandable, given that the President has no actual skills other than those appropriate to a snake-oil salesman, but we are getting close to the point where one of Trump’s ill-considered remarks could actually start a war. This is political malpractice on an epic scale, and raises the following question: when will the Congress, the remaining adults in the Executive branch, and the American people themselves decide that they have had enough and must now begin the process of removing this travesty of a President? The clock is ticking, and Trump’s folly grows.
A Modest Proposal on North Korea
- Offer, in secret through the Chinese, to begin negotiations without preconditions, one-on-one, between North Korea and the US. If they ignore the offer, make another offer in public.
- Remind the public that at present, North Korea and the US are still technically at war, and what exists is a 50+ year truce, not a peace treaty.
- Make secret, one-on-one negotiations with the North Koreans through a plenipotentary (authorized to make any deal at once) ambassador.
- Continue sanctions and a military cordon around North Korea until they agree to give up their nuclear weapons per the UN’s resolutions.
- Rinse and repeat.
(Note that the Chinese have declared that, if North Korea attacks the US or South Korea first, the US will have a free hand and China will “remain neutral.” But that, if the US tries to unseat Kim or attacks first, China will defend North Korea. It seems obvious that, with that Chinese statement, we have little to fear from the North Koreans; if they attack us, we can annihilate them and China will stand by and do nothing.)
