“The pipeline itself is just too small,” Marc Nivet, EdD, MBA, chief diversity officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), told MedPage Today. “The barriers exist up and down the continuum to our segregated education system … Too many of our minority students are in poor-performing or underperforming K-12 school systems.”
via Deep Roots for Lack of Minorities in American Medical Schools | Medpage Today.
This article was linked to by Ivan Oransky’s Twitter feed. I don’t normally read Twitter feeds, but it caught my attention because it is reposted along with his regular web site / blog posts.
This calls attention to a serious problem which has gotten worse, not better, since I was in medical school. Only five percent of the first year class in my school was African-American. What’s worse, half of them dropped out after the first year. They just couldn’t cut it academically. I talked to some of them, and they studied hard, they seemed intelligent, they didn’t goof off, but they couldn’t cut the material. Either they hadn’t taken enough courses in college that prepared them, like biochemistry, or they just hadn’t been exposed to large amounts of rote memorization, like anatomy and the rest of the first year courses.
The problem is that most black kids start first grade at schools that are just no good. They are relatively or absolutely underfunded, they have lousy teachers, low standards, and an environment not conducive to learning. So even black kids who want to become doctors, in the worst way, either wind up following the Ben Carson path, or just don’t make it.
It’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the system of funding for primary education, which is based primarily or entirely on local funds. Since black kids live in low-rent districts, their tax base is grossly inadequate to fund their primary schools. This is a political crime, and it has been perpetrated against low-income, primarily black or Mexican kids ever since universal primary schooling was instituted (after the Civil War?)
The only solution is federal funding for primary school to make sure everyone gets an equal amount of money (if not extra money to make up for other deficits) to attend school.
It’s not fair to send black kids to crummy grade schools. It just perpetuates the disadvantages they were born with and aggravates the other problems, the chronic lead poisoning, the broken families (one or both parents in prison for no good reason), etc. I could go on, but I only have so much space, and what I’m saying is well known to everyone with a brain who has been exposed to the facts. The system is unfair from the beginning.
A dozen cases of Zika virus in China have been reported in the last month, all imported, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission in Beijing. An article in the New York Times (NYT) indicates that the islands of Taiwan and Hainan are at risk for locally transmitted Zika because the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries the virus, is resident in those areas. Zika virus has not yet been reported north of Thailand and Polynesia, but it has been spreading rapidly in South America.
Taiwan had a severe outbreak of dengue fever last year, which is caused by a similar virus that is carried by the same mosquito. Because of the dengue outbreak, Taiwanese authorities are taking special precautions to prevent entry of Zika, dengue, and chikungunya, all of which are carried by the same mosquito.
A laboratory study also reported in the NYT showed that fetal cells which form the precursors to the cortex in the brain are especially susceptible to infection and death from the Zika virus. This study forms a basis for the finding of microcephaly that has so alarmed scientists in Brazil recently. Babies born with microcephaly are missing a large part of the cortex of their brains, dooming them to mental retardation. This study doesn’t prove that Zika is the cause of microcephaly, but it makes scientists very suspicious.
Ryan Hoffman was a college football player, a star offensive linesman, at the University of North Carolina. After college, he began a downward spiral that included alcoholism, drug abuse, and homelessness. He said repeatedly, “Something is wrong with my brain.”
It was not until he died in November 2015, and his brain was pathologically examined, that he was diagnosed as having chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), now known to be caused by multiple concussions while playing football. He was said to have Stage 2 (out of 4) of CTE by the pathologist at Boston University (Dr. Ann McKee) who examined his brain. This is the same stage as the football player Junior Seau, who shot himself in the chest in 2012 after suffering the agonies of depression, loss of memory, loss of impulse control, and fits of rage.
The New York Times (NYT) reporter who knew him stated:
“Dr. McKee said that Stage 2 C.T.E. can be especially symptomatic, causing problems like depression, short-term memory loss, lack of impulse control, irritability and mood swings, and that some of those symptoms could be confused with mental illness. Last year, Hoffman told me that he had received diagnoses of various mental illnesses, including manic depression, but that medications never seemed to help.”
Mr. Hoffman was jobless and homeless, penniless, and dependent on drugs and alcohol when he died. His sister said, ““I wanted to know exactly what happened to my brother, and I just knew football did it…” He rode his bicycle head on into traffic on a dimly lit road in Haines, Florida, and died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Peach Orchard 2016
Peaches and Plums
Peach Blossom 2016
Those of you who have been following the statements of Donald Trump (Drumpf is his real family name, like “Schickelgruber”) may have noticed the wild inconsistency and extreme superficiality of his positions. This post will discuss his statements that appeared to encourage violation of the Geneva Conventions that define war crimes. First, Drumpf has advocated killing the families of terrorists because this will “hit them where it hurts”, whereas killing the terrorists themselves will not discourage them. The “families of terrorists” include their fathers and mothers, some of whom will be elderly noncombatants, and their wives and children, many of whom will be minors, who are also civilians and not arms-carrying soldiers. These persons are a protected class under the Geneva Conventions: civilians and noncombatants. Targeting these individuals for murder is a war crime.
Second, Drumpf has advocated torture, “worse than waterboarding” to extract information from prisoners. Torture is, of course, a war crime, and waterboarding crosses the line between “enhanced interrogation” and “torture.” Most reasonable people believe that waterboarding is torture, especially if they have been personally subjected to the practice. More importantly, the use of torture has not been shown to yield significant actionable information.
The tortured prisoner will make up any story to stop the torture; the prisoner’s story will be questionably truthful at best and more likely completely unreliable. Prisoners who have given up useful information under torture have been shown to have already revealed that information before the torture began, and the more torture applied, the less useful the information gained. Apologists for torture have frequently claimed that they have obtained information that could not have been gotten any other way, but under close examination these claims have been shown to be false.
Drumpf has made multiple statements of this nature, and in response to those who have said that his subordinates would refuse to carry out his orders (lawfully, because his orders would be unlawful) he has claimed that “they will do it.” Nothing could be further from the truth. No true soldier will follow an unlawful order: this has been emphasized to them repeatedly in training, and they have been told that the statement that “I was just following orders” is not a defense.
Interestingly, Drumpf has changed his story in the last few days. He now states that he will not give orders that would run counter to the rules of the Geneva Conventions. It seems that he has been told by persons unknown that he would be in serious trouble with our military and our European allies if he were to start ordering airstrikes that target civilians associated with the Islamic State, or if he were to admit that we are torturing our prisoners. That is, assuming that his subordinates would even be willing to follow such orders. Even a few resisters, even if they were jailed and silenced, would wreak havoc with military cohesion and brand the United States as a war criminal (not that some people are not ALREADY calling the US war criminals.)
Donald Drumpf doesn’t normally change his positions, even sotto voce. This change, while quietly made, is somewhat surprising. It suggests that there are people to whom Drumpf listens who are giving him advice to tone down his message, a little; fact-checking is apparently not a priority for them. Who are these people? Well-heeled supporters? Mr. Cheney? Whoever they are, we need to be aware that Drumpf is following the advice of those who are at least marginally wiser than him and more importantly, strategically more disciplined. They hold the same racist, classist, anti-humanitarian views that Trump holds, but they are more realistic, much smoother in their delivery, and they know the limits of power. They probably contribute most of the money that the Republican Party uses.
This is not a good insight. It makes it more likely that Drumpf will win at the Republican Convention. There is still only a small possibility that Drumpf could win the presidential election because he has already alienated two or three crucial voting populations beyond any recoverability: women, Latinos and Mexicans, and blacks or Afro-Americans. Blacks have not become the central minority force that was predicted forty years ago because their percentage of the population has not increased as expected and because they still do not vote in sufficient percentages to sway elections decisively (except when they have a black, charismatic candidate like Barack Obama to vote for.)
Latinos have become, almost without anyone noticing, the decisive “minority” group (Europeans, or “whites”, are becoming the real minority) in this election: they are now highly motivated to become citizens in order to vote against Drumpf and people like him. Republican strategists once entertained a fantasy that they could win over a significant portion of the Latino electorate, but that fantasy is gone.
Women are over half of the electorate and we can guess that ninety percent of them will vote against Drumpf, regardless of who his opponent is; this represents the deciding factor in this election and there is nothing that can change that in the next eight months.
The importance of this factor (the hint that there is someone behind Drumpf to whom he is listening) lies in the effect it will have on the Republican Party, especially after the election. After losing to Hillary Clinton, Drumpf will be the leader of the party and will install his sycophants in responsible positions. He will also hold the allegiance of elected Republican politicians, who will most likely continue to hold the House and probably the Senate. The money that Republican supporters supply will be used, before and after the election, to fund propaganda that slanders and belittles the Democratic leadership and promotes attacks on human rights and social values, such as equality of education, opportunity, health care, and nutrition, that even citizens who vote Republican still uphold.
There is an indication that Drumpf really wants to be President, and that he is delusional enough to think that he has a significant chance of winning this post; the people behind him are probably realistic enough to know he will lose in November. Even in a head to head contest, Drumpf has no chance against Clinton and only a fair chance against Sanders. None of the other candidates has a chance either; Bush was the only one who had a measurable possibility of winning.
If Drumpf becomes the Republican nominee and a splinter group of “true conservatives” fields a third party candidate, then Drumpf is dead in the water. This is why all the other Republican candidates for President, despite denouncing him as a fraud and a con man, say that they will support Drumpf if he wins at the Convention. They sound like robots, faithfully following their conservative programming, marching together to defeat.
This is the real danger of Drumpf: he is a charismatic leader who will take the Republican Party much deeper down the rabbit hole of paranoia, self-aggrandizement, and blind nationalism, and he will take a significant number of economically defeated, disenfranchised, under-educated white Americans with him. If you thought the wild slanders and vile insults that have come from Republicans against Hillary Clinton and all important Democratic and non-political leaders were disgusting, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Mild, Repetitive Chronic Brain Injury
Here is the abstract from a study on a mouse model of repeated mild brain injuries:
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is an emerging risk for chronic behavioral, cognitive, and neurodegenerative conditions. Athletes absorb several hundred mTBIs each year; however, rodent models of repeat mTBI (rmTBI) are often limited to impacts in the single digits. Herein, we describe the effects of 30 rmTBIs, examining structural and pathological changes in mice up to 365 days after injury. We found that single mTBI causes a brief loss of consciousness and a transient reduction in dendritic spines, reflecting a loss of excitatory synapses. Single mTBI does not cause axonal injury, neuroinflammation, or cell death in the gray or white matter. Thirty rmTBIs with a 1-day interval between each mTBI do not cause dendritic spine loss; however, when the interinjury interval is increased to 7 days, dendritic spine loss is reinstated. Thirty rmTBIs cause white matter pathology characterized by positive silver and Fluoro-Jade B staining, and microglial proliferation and activation. This pathology continues to develop through 60 days, and is still apparent at 365 days, after injury. However, rmTBIs did not increase β-amyloid levels or tau phosphorylation in the 3xTg-AD mouse model of Alzheimer disease. Our data reveal that single mTBI causes a transient loss of synapses, but that rmTBIs habituate to repetitive injury within a short time period. rmTBI causes the development of progressive white matter pathology that continues for months after the final impact.
In simpler terms, mice showed a pattern of inflammation in the brain after repeated mild injuries (severe enough to cause momentary loss of consciousness but no more) that differed from the changes seen after a single injury. In the first injury, there is a loss of some dendritic spines (projections on the cell surface) that is repaired in 24 hours; the injury is mild enough that there is no death of nerve cells, inflammation, or axon (signaling end) injury. In contrast, after repeated injuries suffered on a daily basis, thirty times, there is pathology seen in the brain layer that carries the signalling projections consisting of inflammation and increases in the number of active supporting cells (microglia). These findings, in mice, show that repeated injuries without sufficient recovery time cause inflammation in the brain, not a sign of Alzheimer’s disease but equally serious. Individuals with this type of injury have difficulty keeping their balance and clumsiness.
This is only an experiment with mice, but it shows that pathologically serious damage in the brain can be caused by repeated blows to the head that are relatively minor by themselves. There is no reason to suspect that humans are any more resistant to microtrauma than mice.
Zika Virus and the Olympics in Brazil
May 2015: Zika virus is first detected in Brazil. Zika is a new mosquito-borne virus spreading across South America which has infected at least 1.5 million Brazilians.
August 5-12, 2016, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: the Olympics, held every four years, a series of athletic contests in a nearly comprehensive range of sporting disciplines.
The CDC has announced an emergency in relation to the Zika virus, which is spreading rapidly across Brazil. The Center recommends against pregnant women travelling to the areas affected by the spread of the virus, notably Brazil and the island of Tobago. Anyone who does travel to these areas should take special precautions against mosquito bites, including restricting travel to air-conditioned hotels and wearing repellent on exposed skin.
Further detail on the CDC’s announcement that nine pregnant women had tested positive for Zika virus: they were in a group of 257 women who had requested testing, and represented three percent of them. Of those nine, one had Zika symptoms during her first trimester, and gave birth to a severely microcephalic child. Two had Zika symptoms late in pregnancy, and gave birth to normal babies. Five others had Zika symptoms during the first trimester, and all but one had miscarriages or abortions; the last one is continuing in utero (still pregnant.) One more woman who had Zika symptoms late in pregnancy is still pregnant.
Tentatively, one may offer the suggestion that Zika infection during the first trimester is likely to cause severe disability, but infection late in pregnancy is less likely to be dangerous.
Comments on Homelessness in San Francisco
These comments were left in response to a New York Times article on homelessness in San Francisco:
Sue McCormack
SF Bay Area
Up through the 80’s downtown SF had a lot of SRO (single residential occupancy) hotels. Many of these rooms were lost to redevelopment and gentrification. Many developers, in exchange for higher residential density, made mitigation payments to the city or county. If any low income housing was built it was generally on the periphery in areas far from mass transit and employment opportunities. Some of the homeless would benefit from a stable environment in order to manage mental and physical health issues. Some comments seems to consider the condition of homelessness to be a moral failure on the part of an individual. I believe that the failure is institutional. State mental hospitals were closed in the 70’s before local services could be built. We have two generations of veterans with untreated PTSD who did not receive honorable discharges due to their undiagnosed condition and are now excluded from veteran’s benefits. There are people with drug and alcohol dependency issues that have no place to go after detox. The on-going problem is also institutional, whether it be a lack of political will or a fear that the grant gravy train will come to an end. We can talk about job training, updating skills, resume workshops, etc. But if you don’t have a warm dry place to lay your head, with running water to keep clean and a toilet so you don’t have to use the street, all of the job training or education won’t matter.
Cheri
Tucson
I spent a good deal of time in San Francisco during the early years of this century. Homelessness was barely noticeable. Now it appears to be a huge problem. There is a similar situation in Seattle. The downtown area is filled with aggressive homeless people who accost tourists and commuters alike. They expect handouts and get belligerent if it is not forthcoming. The entire area around Pike’s Market and south towards the big ballfields smells of human waste.
It ought to be clear to everyone there is no monolithic group of homeless. They are essentially divided into two groups. There are those who were a paycheck away from losing their homes, and when the paychecks stopped coming they were on the street. These are the people who use the services and shelters available to them and their families. They are the people who would stop being homeless in a heartbeat if they got those paychecks back. The other group is made up of the emotionally unstable, drug addicts, and chronic alcoholics. They choose to live on the street. It is sad but true that no amount of money is going to help these people. They need to be dealt with differently. If necessary, they need to be involuntarily committed or arrested. They pose huge safety risks to themselves and those who come into contact with them. It is clear that be looking the other way, the authorities in San Francisco have made the city a more dangerous place to live and work. They are enabling, not helping, this group of homeless.
An Observer
Alta, Utah
I just spent the fall in San Francisco for work. The social stratification there — a putatively liberal city — is reminiscent of India (where I have also spent time recently). Here in conservative Utah — and I am a strong Democratic voter — we have done much better. The secret of solving homelessness is homes. But in San Francisco, no one wants to sacrifice space for the unfortunate, the poor, or these days even the middle class. The situation in San Francisco is a disgrace, and emblematic of what’s wrong with our country.
JefferyK
San Francisco
I moved to San Francisco in 1989 and lived there for 26 years. San Francisco has always been an incredibly wealthy city. It was always expensive to live there — you paid a federal income tax, then a state income tax, and then a high local sales tax. City Hall ought to be rolling in dough. But I could never figure out where my money went. The streets and sidewalks were dirty, the buses were filthy, the transit stations were coated with grime. I was shocked when I moved to Seattle — even the alleys here are spotless. Don’t blame the homeless. San Francisco has had a serious leadership and management vacuum in City Hall for decades. Unless this changes, the quality of life there will never improve, for anyone.
Homelessness is particularly visible and repulsive in San Francisco, where the mild climate year-round allows people without residences to exist on the streets. According to the comments, the city government is to blame for allowing the problem to become so extensive; it would appear that a large city program to house these people and/or supply them with safe bathrooms and places to sleep away from the tourists is needed. The loss of single-occupancy hotel rooms is a good example of how expensive is the space in the city; government must step in and alleviate this problem by whatever means necessary.
I suggest that provision of adequate short-term housing and laws that criminalize sleeping in the open within city limits are necessary. With adequate housing, the police can pick up anyone who appears to be without a place to stay and deliver them to the housing space without delay. As it is, there is no place to put these people, so the police have no alternatives to imprisonment. Putting people in prison for being homeless is absurd and inhumane, but at present there is no place for them to go.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 