A Gallup poll from June 2015 explored the most divisive labels that can be attached to a presidential candidate. The old labels are a problem no longer. Ninety-three percent of voters responding would vote for a Catholic for president, all other things being equal. Ninety-two percent would vote for a woman or a black person. Ninety-one percent would accept voting for a “Hispanic”, or a Jewish person. Eighty-one percent could handle a Mormon.
Seventy-four percent would vote for a “gay” (and we don’t mean happy) which beats out evangelical Christians by one point. This single statistic shows how much the country has changed.
The really bad labels are Muslim (sixty percent), atheist (58%), and worst of all, socialist (47%.) So you can see that Bernie Sanders has a tough row to hoe right from the start, ignoring the Jewish, old white male, and happy handicaps for the moment. Yes, I said “happy” as in “gay” or “carefree” or just plain smiling. People won’t admit it, but they want their politicians to be angry, not happy. They want their politicians to be like Donald Trump, full of fire, ready with a crude insult, and bursting with self-confidence. They don’t want their elected officials to be cheerful, smiling, and free of anxiety.
The socialist part, I’m afraid, is a serious handicap. Most people don’t understand that all modern states have to have socialist components in order to maintain the health and welfare of their citizens. Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, and other necessities are essentially socialist concepts and programs.
Technically, the dictionary defines “socialism” as “ Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.” The off-putting features of this form of social organization are the central or collective ownership of “the means of producing and distributing goods”, by which is meant factories, trucking companies, railroads, package delivery systems, and even airlines, shipping lines, pipelines, and power plants.
This definition of socialism would exclude such countries as Sweden, which is odd considering that almost all Americans think Sweden is a socialist country. According to Wikipedia, 90% of Swedish “resources and companies” are privately owned, with 5% mixed and 5% fully government-owned. This compares closely to the American economy, in which only the postal service, the air traffic control and navigation system, the weather forecasting system, some research establishments, and some of the military are fully government-owned.
The Swedish government has pursued a policy of privatization for companies which do not have features essential to the welfare of all, or which have features which would be improved by competition as opposed to monopolization. Apparently they believe that monopolies should be controlled by the government, whereas industries or services in which there is a lot of competition should be allowed to respond to market forces.
The aspect of the Swedish economy which really smacks of “socialism” is the tax rate. About 44% of GDP is tax revenue, whereas in the US, less than 18% of GDP is accounted for by taxes. The taxes go to pay for universal health care, which costs about half what it does in the US; there is even a government-owned pharmaceutical retailing company. Civil servants account for a third of the Swedish workforce.
Another difference that marks Sweden off from the US is union membership: seventy percent of Swedish workers are unionized, while less than thirty percent of American workers belong to unions. There is close union-corporate cooperation and collective bargaining is standard. This makes for a particularly “socialist” feel to Sweden.
Here is where Bernie Sanders earns his “socialist” reputation. He is in favor of raising taxes on a number of powerful people and corporations. He wants to make the tax system more progressive– that is, he wants wealthier people to pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes. Despite conservative poo-pooing of this concept, mild tax increases on the wealthiest few can raise vast amounts of tax revenue and relieve the tax burdens of millions of ordinary Americans.
Studying Mr. Sanders’ web site and his exposition of his issue proposals is a brief education in what’s wrong with America. For example, nearly a third of American children live in poverty– comparable to the rates in Turkey, Spain, Mexico, Greece, and Latvia, and much worse than the rates in Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus, and so on. The only countries of the forty-one examined by UNICEF that are worse off are Latvia, Spain, Mexico, Greece, Israel, and a couple of others. The United Kingdom is not far behind the US in proportion of children living in poverty.
Mr. Sanders indicts the wealth and income inequality weighing down America today:
“America now has more wealth and income inequality than any major developed country on earth, and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the 1920s.”
[the wealth inequality present today closely matches the inequality in the late 1920’s just before the Wall Street Crash which precipitated the Great Depression.]
Mr. Sanders’ web site shows a diagram illustrating the fact that 0.1% of all Americans possess almost as much wealth as the lower 90% of all Americans. Sanders quotes Pope Francis when the Pope said:
““Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”
Mr. Sanders also quotes hard statistics when he says:
“There is something profoundly wrong when 58 percent of all new income since the Wall Street crash has gone to the top one percent.”
Another quote from the Sanders web site:
“Despite huge advancements in technology and productivity, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. The real median income of male workers is $783 less than it was 42 years ago; while the real median income of female workers is over $1,300 less than it was in 2007. “
One final zinger from Sanders’ site:
“Breaking up huge financial institutions so that they are no longer too big to fail. Seven years ago, the taxpayers of this country bailed out Wall Street because they were too big to fail. Yet, 3 out of the 4 largest financial institutions are 80 percent bigger today than before we bailed them out. “
Mr. Sanders advocates investing over a trillion dollars in repairs to our crumbling infrastructure of roads, bridges, dams, and so on. He also advocates investment in green energy production:
“The fossil fuel industry spends billions and billions of dollars lobbying and buying candidates to block virtually all progress on climate change. At the national level where companies have to report what they spend on lobbying and campaign contributions, the oil companies, coal companies and electric utilities spent a staggering $2.26 billion in federal lobbying since 2009 and another $330 million in federal campaign contributions. Even in Washington, that’s a lot of money.
But that’s just the part we know about. Thanks to the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the fossil fuel industry can pour unlimited amounts of money into the political system without having to disclose how much or where they spend it.”
Here’s another Bernie Sanders proposal to limit the influence of profit-making companies on politics:
“Bernie introduced a constitutional amendment that prohibits for-profit corporations from making contributions or expenditures into political campaigns.”
How simple is that? Now you can see why Bernie Sanders cannot be elected: the big companies and the rich people will not allow it. If he shows sufficient popular support to have a serious chance, there will be an outpouring of negative propaganda against him such as you have never seen the like. “Socialist” will be the least of the epithets they will attach to this happy, friendly unelectable man.
Paleontologists at New York’s American Museum of Natural History unveiled a cast skeleton of the world’s biggest dinosaur, a new species of Titanosaur, to a packed crowd of media on Thursday morning.
via World’s biggest dinosaur skeleton unveiled in New York | Science | The Guardian.
Go to the article in The Guardian for pictures of this 122 foot long, 19.2 ft tall fossil (replicated in fiberglass) installed in the biggest gallery of the museum. The face, with its flattened jaw and numerous teeth, is worth a good look and the pictures in this article really do it justice. This dinosaur was clearly herbivorous and must have lived in a swampy environment.
Abstract
We report the discovery of ASASSN-15lh (SN 2015L), which we interpret as the most luminous supernova yet found. At redshift z = 0.2326, ASASSN-15lh reached an absolute magnitude of Mu,AB = –23.5 ± 0.1 and bolometric luminosity Lbol = (2.2 ± 0.2) × 1045 ergs s–1, which is more than twice as luminous as any previously known supernova. It has several major features characteristic of the hydrogen-poor super-luminous supernovae (SLSNe-I), whose energy sources and progenitors are currently poorly understood. In contrast to most previously known SLSNe-I that reside in star-forming dwarf galaxies, ASASSN-15lh appears to be hosted by a luminous galaxy (MK ≈ –25.5) with little star formation. In the 4 months since first detection, ASASSN-15lh radiated (1.1 ± 0.2) × 1052ergs, challenging the magnetar model for its engine.
This supernova, at an estimated distance of 3.8 billion light years from us, is still a visible, superluminous supernova. For four months, it has radiated energies that “challenge” the magnetar model– that is, the model of a central tiny, rapidly spinning magnetized core. Its brightness is estimated at 570 billion times that of the sun (BBC story.)
Wind, solar power soaring in spite of bargain prices for fossil fuels – The Washington Post
“Renewables have turned a corner in a fundamental way,” said Dan Reicher, a former Energy Department assistant secretary who is now executive director of Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance.
While solar and wind power have been expanding in the United States for years because of steadily falling costs, decisions by Congress and the White House in 2015 have set the stage for continued growth, Reicher and other energy experts say.
These decisions include last month’s extension of the production tax credit, which encourages investments in solar and wind through 2019, as well as the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a regulation adopted in August that requires states to reduce emissions from power plants. Clean-energy companies also received an important boost from last month’s climate accord in Paris, where more than 190 countries approved a plan to reduce pollution from fossil-fuel burning worldwide.
“The policy base for renewables has strengthened, both on the incentives side and through mandates,” Reicher said. “At the same time, the financing of renewable-energy projects has become a mainstream business for Wall Street. The early-stage investments from Silicon Valley for clean energy were small potatoes compared to the massive investments Wall Street is making. It truly is a global business.”
via Wind, solar power soaring in spite of bargain prices for fossil fuels – The Washington Post.
This article promises new hope for amelioration of the global warming phenomenon but we should remember that the data say that the problem is already well-advanced and that the severe effects of global warming have yet to really show themselves. The rise in carbon dioxide concentration that we have seen is consistent with a higher global mean temperature, and the behavior of carbon dioxide in air tells us that it will not be washed out of the atmosphere for a hundred years or more.
I do see hope for the delivery of huge amounts of renewable power to run air conditioners and heaters in the places on the planet where people will be living. I don’t know if there will be a surplus economy with strong growth or a scarcity economy with stagnation but I’m hoping for the surplus.
We can expect temperatures to continue to rise for some time, and there will be significant rises in sea level. In a hundred years, if we stop producing an excess of carbon dioxide as the above article suggests, atmospheric levels will drop significantly and temperatures will stabilize.
An editorial in the Fresno Bee caught my eye today: it was written by Eugene Robinson, who has a regular column there, I believe. Mr. Robinson analyzes the appeal of Donald J. Trump to his audience: the middle-class, white, probably socially conservative male with a high-school education. He says that Mr. Trump “almost seems to be reinventing politics” and leaving the political parties behind with his reckless, instinctive, transgressive style.
Trump trashes “political correctness” and refuses to be polite to minority groups and those who have been called victims. He invites those who support him to give vent to their anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-foreign feelings that had been suppressed before. He ridicules traditional politics and politicians. He points out that the Republicans had been promising that, if they were in power, they would get rid of Obamacare, stop illegal immigration, slash federal spending, and reduce the long-term debt, and they have not done any of that.
Trump appeals directly to “racial and ethnic animus”, the impression among ill-educated, overwhelmed white men that they are being discriminated against because “they” have seized the levers of power. “They” are, of course, Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, women, and gays. The ignorant mass of people who are being left behind by change are drawn to Trump’s crude, rude slanders and lies.
The Democratic Party needs to beware of this reaction against traditional politics and politicians and to offer an alternative to the same old slogans and people. Mr. Robinson warns that a “wave of disgust” threatens to destroy both political parties.
Mosul Dam, which was completed in 1984 by a German and Italian consortium and is 30 miles upstream from the city of Mosul, has long been a maintenance nightmare. Before fighters from the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, swept across northern Iraq in 2014, approximately 600 Iraqis worked at the dam.
Because the water was eating away at the gypsum base under the dam, Iraqi teams drilled holes in that foundation and filled them with a cement grout mixture. That work was carried out three times a day, six days a week.
The Islamic State controlled the dam for a little more than a week in August 2014, but its fighters did not damage the structure. After it was retaken later that month, however, many of the Iraqi workers never returned and the Iraqi government did not resume regular maintenance. The Iraqis also lost their usual source of grouting material, which was produced by a factory in Mosul, now under the control of the Islamic State.
As worries about the dam mounted, the Obama administration formed an interagency team and installed 92 instruments to measure, among other things, the pressure on the dam and the sediment in the water nearby — one way of assessing the rate at which the gypsum base was disintegrating.
The Obama administration ruled out undertaking the costly repair project itself, and the Pentagon has been reluctant to set up a base near the dam to protect the repair efforts.
So the Obama administration has sought to help the Iraqis defray some of the cost by urging the World Bank to agree that $200 million of a $1.2 billion loan for Iraq would be for Mosul Dam repairs. International companies were informed by American officials that they would need to negotiate directly with the Iraqis and make their own security arrangements.
via Neglect May Do What ISIS Didn’t: Breach Iraqi Dam – The New York Times.
Iraq is gradually becoming another failed state. What Saddam Hussein couldn’t do, and George W. Bush couldn’t do, the passage of time and neglect will do.
Here’s another “decline of the West” type of factoid: some scientists are beginning to believe that sperm counts have been going down over the last fifty years. Not low enough, on average, to cause infertility, but going down. It is controversial because counting sperm has always been difficult and subject to alteration by changes in method, but many studies are pointing towards declining counts.
The first big study we have is here: http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/newscience/reproduction/sperm/2000swanetal.htm This is a survey of a large number of primary studies gathered together from 1934-1996. The final conclusion, after looking at 101 studies, was that the declines in sperm count are real. It goes on to mention the increases in testicular cancer and cryptorchidism that have occurred during the same time period. The study says at the end that environmental exposures are probably responsible for this increase, although it doesn’t mention any specific exposure.
The numbers were 113 million per milliliter in 1940 and 66 million/ml in 1990.
In 2012, a French study reported in the journal Human Reproduction concluded that there had been a significant decline in sperm count over the seventeen year period from 1989 to 2005; the numbers were 73.6 million per milliliter in 1989 and 49.9 million/mil in 2005.
A contrary study from 1996 showed sperm counts of 72.7 million/ml in California, 100.8 million/ml in Minnesota, and 131.5 million/ml in New York.
Another review concluded that there was no over all decline in sperm count based on a large number of studies done over the period from 1950 to 2000; six studies showed declines, sixteen did not, and five were ambiguous. More importantly, the studies that did not show declines totaled 100,000 subjects and the ones that did show declines only totaled 10,000. Counts varied dramatically based on country studied.
So the most we can say is that there may have been decreases in France, Israel, Greece, Denmark, and Italy, and no decreases in the United States, Denmark, Canada, Spain, Slovenia, Korea, and possibly Japan. Contradictory results were found in Denmark and France (Paris vs. Toulouse.), and in Israel. Eight of the studies that failed to find decreases had less than a thousand subjects, but three (Canada, Spain, and Korea) were very large. In contrast, all but one of the positive decrease studies had over a thousand subjects. Three of the ambiguous studies were over five thousand, including one each in Denmark and France.
There has, however, been a decline (in the United States) in serum testosterone concentrations, and it has been suggested that this is due to increasing obesity.
A study of eighteen year old men having their military physicals in Denmark showed no decline in sperm counts. Unfortunately, the study was never actually published; the data was presented on a web site by the Danish Ministry of Health. This study, of 5,000 men over fifteen years, seems to be the most convincing research yet done, and it is negative.
A comprehensive review published in February 2014 concluded that there is no definite evidence of an overall decline in sperm counts nor a definite sign of an “endocrine disrupter” lowering counts. The review examined epidemiological studies published from 1985 to 2013 and found “no[t] enough evidence to confirm a worldwide decline in sperm counts” and “no scientific truth of a causative role for endocrine disruptors” because of mixed evidence: some studies show a decline, but most do not. The authors of this review emphasize the difficulties in producing reliable counts over long periods of time due to variations in methods and analyses, and especially due to large variations in sperm quality and quantity. There is considerable variation simply from one geographic region to another.
Our conclusion is that there is no definite evidence of a decline in sperm count over the years; it will be necessary to continue large, long-term studies to see if there are any definite variations in the future. This aspect of the “decline of the West” is ambiguous, to say the least.
Placebo effects are getting stronger in the United States, for example, though not elsewhere. Researchers reported last year that in trials published in 1996, drugs for chronic pain produced on average 27 percent more pain relief than placebos. By 2013, that advantage had slipped to just 9 percent. Likely explanations include a growing cultural belief in the effectiveness of painkillers — a result of direct-to-consumer advertising (illegal in most other countries) and perhaps the fact that so many Americans have taken these drugs in the past.
via A Placebo Treatment for Pain – The New York Times.
This is an opinion piece that plumps the value of placebos and warns that opioids have caused thousands of overdose deaths (see also our post on overdose deaths and the dramatic increases recently.)
The statistics are interesting, even impressive; for example, 44 percent of those receiving sham acupuncture had “adequate” relief of symptoms. Even more provocative, if the person who performed the acupuncture was especially “supportive and empathetic”, 62 percent of patients had adequate relief.
There is, however, a significant percentage (almost half, in most studies) of patients who do not receive relief unless they are treated with the “real thing.” Even more distressing is the percentage of patients who do not get relief from any medicine given: perhaps a quarter of those treated are not helped.
Some of those who do not get relief from drug treatment are candidates for surgery, but another group are unable to get relief and do not have a “surgical lesion” (that is, there is no clear reason for operating.) These patients are the most distressed and the most at risk for drug abuse and overdose.
Some of these patients will chase their pain with higher and higher doses of painkillers or even heroin, and only find relief when they are unconscious or near death. These are the patients most in need of “supportive and empathetic” treatment, a real connection with another person who will listen to them and not abandon them.
This is the most stressful and most crucial task in medicine: to connect with someone and accept the fact that they have untreatable physical and psychic pain.
There is a scene in the Japanese movie “Redbeard” in which a young intern (circa 1868) is given an assignment by an experienced doctor: sit with a dying patient and just watch him die.
The intern wants to rebel and run away, but he finally accepts his role with this suffering man: just to sit there and watch him die. Sometimes we have to accept our suffering because there is nothing we can do about it.
,
BioRxiv– the preprint server for biology
Abstract
Negative and positive experiences can exert a strong influence on later memory. Our emotional experiences are composed of many different elements – people, place, things – most of them neutral. Do emotional experiences lead to enhanced long-term [recall] for these neutral elements as well? Demonstrating a lasting effect of emotion on memory is particularly important if memory for emotional events is to adaptively guide behavior days, weeks, or years later. We thus tested whether aversive experiences modulate very long-term episodic memory in an fMRI experiment. Participants experienced episodes of high or low pain in conjunction with the presentation of incidental, trial- unique neutral object pictures. In a scanned surprise immediate memory test, we found no effect of pain on recognition strength. Critically, in a follow-up memory test one year later we found that pain significantly enhanced memory. Neurally, we provide a novel demonstration of activity predicting memory one year later, whereby greater insula activity and more unique distributed patterns of insular activity in the initial session correlated with memory for pain-associated objects. Our results suggest that pairing learning episodes with arousing experiences may lead to very long-lasting memory enhancements.
This study found that associating a pain (heat on the skin) that was intense but tolerable with a random image enhanced remote recall of the image a year later. This implies that memories are enhanced by being associated with painful experiences, not a surprise but comforting to find that it is experimentally detectable. A memory that is enhanced by association with pain describes many of the most common memories that we retain. Think about it: have you forgotten that time you burned your fingers on the waffle iron at age four?
Abstract
Background
Marijuana use is increasingly prevalent among young adults. While research has found adverse effects associated with marijuana use within experimentally controlled laboratory settings, it is unclear how recreational marijuana use affects day-to-day experiences in users. The present study sought to examine the effects of marijuana use on within-person changes in impulsivity and interpersonal hostility in daily life using smartphone administered assessments.
Methods
Forty-three participants with no substance dependence reported on their alcohol consumption, tobacco use, recreational marijuana use, impulsivity, and interpersonal hostility over the course of 14 days. Responses were analyzed using multilevel modeling.
Results
Marijuana use was associated with increased impulsivity on the same day and the following day relative to days when marijuana was not used, independent of alcohol use. Marijuana was also associated with increased hostile behaviors and perceptions of hostility in others on the same day when compared to days when marijuana was not used. These effects were independent of frequency of marijuana use or alcohol use. There were no significant effects of alcohol consumption on impulsivity or interpersonal hostility.
Conclusions
Marijuana use is associated with changes in impulse control and hostility in daily life. This may be one route by which deleterious effects of marijuana are observed for mental health and psychosocial functioning. Given the increasing prevalence of recreational marijuana use and the potential legalization in some states, further research on the potential consequences of marijuana use in young adults’ day-to-day life is warranted.
As nearly as can be determined from the abstract, this study involved forty-three subjects, who each kept a diary for fourteen days. The subjects were selected for an absence of a history of any substance dependence. They reported on their alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use, and at the same time reported their feelings of impulsivity and interpersonal hostility concurrently. The limitations of this study are clear. There is no report as to whether the subjects kept notes in their diaries on other issues, which strikes me as odd. If one is keeping a diary of feelings and behaviors, one might well report on other things that are going on at the same time, and the fact that this is not mentioned limits the reach of the study. The most serious limitation of this study is the journal in which it is published: “Drug and Alcohol Dependence.”
Conrad Theodore Seitz 