Comment of the Day
Lin Kaatz Chary
Norfolk, VA January 26, 2016
Maybe it’s also about sex, but what it’s really about is maintaining control over women’s autonomy, child-bearing, and personal health decisions. All of which go to the heart of the ability of women to have an independent life in society, especially working class women and women who have no independent income of their own. Women who have no control over their own reproductive choices – and I don’t mean only through access to abortion as a last resort but through planning and contraception and education from the get go – typically have no control over when and with whom they choose to have sex, including in marriage. (Most people still don’t believe there can be such a thing as rape in marriage, for example, which may be an extreme case but certainly still occurs.) The ongoing attacks on Planned Parenthood are only marginally about access to abortion or Puritanism about sex in my opinion; they are far more about control and the reestablishment of a culture and society in which white men (not only, but in particular) feel more in control of home and family, etc. – an effort to take us back to the “Father Knows Best” and “Make Room for Daddy” days when if you were white and middle-class, life was so much simpler.
[17 Recommendations]
The above comment was one of nearly a thousand comments in response to an editorial entitled “Vindication for Planned Parenthood”, which discussed action taken by the Grand Jury in Harris County, TX. This Grand Jury was convened in an attempt by the District Attorney to indict Planned Parenthood for something, anything… In response to the evidence presented, the Grand Jury refused to indict Planned Parenthood for anything at all. Instead, they indicted the makers of the infamous “baby parts for sale” video for a felony, presenting false identification (a fake [non-official] California driver’s license that included their real photographs but used a false name and address) in its successful attempt to infiltrate the group. A charge, a misdemeanor attempt to “purchase human organs” was brought forward, in response to an email that the makers of the video sent to Planned Parenthood that offered to buy fetal parts for $1,500 a sample; Planned Parenthood never responded to the email.
The response of Texas government officials to the indictment was predictably muted. The District Attorney for Harris County stated, “I respect their decision on this difficult case.” The Governor of Texas said that the Inspector General of the Texas Commission on Health and Human Services and the Texas Attorney General have been investigating Planned Parenthood and that “Nothing about today’s announcement in Harris County impacts the state’s ongoing investigation… The State of Texas will continue to protect life, and I will continue to support legislation prohibiting the sale or transfer of fetal tissue.”
The state’s Attorney General said, “The fact remains that the videos exposed the horrific nature of abortion and the shameful disregard for human life of the abortion industry. The state’s investigation of Planned Parenthood is ongoing.” He neglected to mention that abortion requires the death of a human fetus, nor that the rights of the woman involved were being violated by forcing her to carry her human fetus to term.
Naturally, the ethical considerations involved in the contemplation of abortion have been and are being ignored. As I have stated here before, it is a simple matter of justifiable homicide: the fetus is attempting to take over the life of the pregnant woman and to force it to enslave herself to its care for eighteen or twenty-one years, not just endanger her own life for nine months. The ethical requirement that one person save the life of another who has attached him or herself to her body without her consent simply is not there.
For example, let us describe a hypothetical situation: suppose you were to wake up one morning and find yourself attached to another person by tubing that runs from your arteries to its veins and back again. Before you went to sleep, you had engaged in an act of sexual intercourse, but you had used the most effective means available to prevent any consequences (pregnancy); despite your precautions, the other human being has managed to attach itself to you. The other human’s spokesperson tells you that you will be required to continue the attachment for another nine months, and at the end of that time, you will undergo an extremely painful procedure lasting about twelve to twenty-four hours that will result in separation. After that, you will be required to support and nurture that human, to the exclusion of all other activities in your life, for another eighteen to twenty-one years.
The question is, can that other human ethically (never mind legally) force you to continue this arrangement? Remember that you have not consented to the hookup; in fact, you have used whatever means necessary to prevent it. The only thing you have done wrong is to engage in sexual intercourse, an activity that results in pregnancy less than three percent of the time even when no precautions have been taken.
The ethical answer to this question is NO. Even if the other human has no recourse other than to hook itself to you, even if that human will die without your help, you are not ethically obliged to help them. In the simplest case, we can drive past the scene of an auto wreck without stopping, even if we see another person lying bleeding on the street. Naturally, most of us would volunteer to stop and offer whatever assistance we are capable of; however, we are not obliged to do so, even if we have special training in life-saving procedures. This situation is far simpler than that of a pregnant woman: the woman is faced, not with momentary inconvenience or minor danger, but with giving up her entire life, her hopes for college or a well-paying job, or even her ability to feed the other children she may have.
These are the ethical and personal considerations that face a woman who has not consented to become pregnant. The life of her “unborn child” (embryo or fetus) is weighed against her life, not just in a medical survival sense, but in the sense of taking on lifetime obligations to her offspring.
You may consider that it is selfish of a woman to choose her own life above that of her offspring. That may be true. However, there is no law against being selfish, or else the Koch brothers would not control billions of dollars in resources that could be better used to support the lives of thousands of other humans. It seems that the anti-abortion fanatics are selective in whom they would require to be unselfish, or rather self-sacrificing.
There is no ethical requirement for a woman be sacrifice her self for the benefit of a child, not yet six months in the womb, that she does not want. There is a legal requirement, enshrined in Roe v. Wade, that has withstood (so far) repeated attempts to overturn. This judgement, while it may be accused of “judicial activism” set forward for the first time very clear dividing lines between constitutional and unconstitutional laws regarding abortion. First, the judgement states that the law may not proscribe abortion at all during the first trimester (twelve weeks) of pregnancy. Second, the law may only require that the facilities for providing abortion during the second trimester are medically suitable (safe for the mother.) Third, the law may proscribe abortion during the third trimester, that is, after the fetus has become viable outside the womb.
When the judgement was written, it was generally believed that infants under twenty-four weeks gestational age had no chance of survival outside the womb. This has changed somewhat; the chance of an infant under twenty four weeks of surviving has improved to about twenty-five percent. Over half of all infants of this age who survive have already sustained major organ damage and will have a very limited life as well as reduced life expectancy. These statistics relate to infants born to mothers who want them, not to survivors of abrupt delivery (such as might occur in an abortion.) This is important because most pregnancies that are terminated this late are aborted because there is evidence on ultrasound of a serious anomaly, such as hydrocephalus, which is incompatible with life or with consciousness.
Those pregnancies that do not show serious anomalies that are aborted this late occur because there has been a delay in performing the abortion. It would be highly unusual, not to say abnormal, for a woman to suddenly decide that she no longer wants a pregnancy at this late date. Usually, the mother is under age and there have been delays in obtaining judicial permission or even in making the diagnosis of pregnancy.
The anti-abortion fanatics have tried to abuse science to the point at which they can claim that a twenty-week fetus can “feel pain.” Such claims are as absurd as they are irrelevant. Whether or not the condemned prison “feels pain” when he or she is executed seems to be a matter of indifference to these fanatics. The idea that a developing fetus can “feel pain”, that the necessary nerves are hooked up to the point at which a conscious sensation of pain or suffering can be induced, is laughable. If the possibility of pain is of concern to these hypocrites, they can ask that the fetus be given an overdose of anesthetic, such as is done in executions. What is truly absurd is the thought that an anesthetic would have the same effect on a developing fetus as it would on an adult or even a child.
Such issues are irrelevant: the main point is that a woman has an absolute right to decide whether she wants to have a child or not. No-one else can make that decision for her. For societal safety and convenience, the Supreme Court has said that we may outlaw abortion after the development of viability, not to mention after a normal birth. We have not yet, and may never, reach the point at which, as a society, we are so overpopulated that the life of a breathing, kicking infant can legally be ended. We will likely never reach that point because the development of technology has reached the stage at which the mother can take a pill and, with pain and cramping, have a miscarriage before the eighth week of pregnancy.
The absurdity of the anti-abortion position has reached the level, in Texas, that the provision of normal health care to women has been grievously affected. This has happened because the Texas legislature has defunded all women’s health care providers who are connected in any way with an abortion provider. This has forced most Planned Parenthood clinics in the state to close and revealed that they are providing essential services to thousands of poor women who have no other resource.
This lack of contraceptive and pregnancy services has resulted in thousands of unintended pregnancies and deliveries, most of which result in increased payments by the state for health care and welfare services. The Texas state government has estimated that they are liable for billions of dollars in costs for welfare and health care. The problem was so huge that the Texas Legislature was forced to take remedial measures; unfortunately, once a clinic has been closed and its personnel have left for other jobs in other states, it is very difficult to re-assemble the clinical service because the personnel cannot be found.
I draw your attention to this article on the website RealClimate, referring to a cold spot that has appeared in the western North Atlantic: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/03/whats-going-on-in-the-north-atlantic/. This is also referenced in today’s edition of “Daily Climate”, a blog that aggregates climate stories for the global warming oriented people out there.
There is an area that is much cooler than normal, about a degree Celsius below, which really stands out on the surface temperature records. The article has a figure showing the globe and temperature changes that makes this really stand out. The reason for the anomalous cooling is apparently that the Gulf Stream has weakened in the last few years, an event not duplicated in proxy records of the last thousand years. This proxy record is the subject of the RealClimate post, which is rather technical but worth exploring.
The authors of the study referenced in RealClimate state that their study of the proxy record for the last thousand years indicates that the weakening of the Gulf Stream System is caused by global warming and not by natural variations to a high degree of confidence.
This anomalous cold area is suggested as a cause of the extremely heavy snowfall just recorded in winter storm “Jason” over the last weekend. There is also a change in the jet stream that leads to cold air from Canada streaming down across the East Coast of the US; this cold air is meeting extra-humid warm air near the coastline, causing an extra-heavy snowfall. The warm air is more humid than usual because of the anomalous cooling of the sea surface.
Scientists have consistently underestimated the extent and the effects of global warming ever since forecasts began. The IPCC reports that come out every few years have contained predictions and degrees of uncertainty associated with those predictions; every prediction published so far has been an underestimate of how conditions have actually turned out. While this is good for the reputations of the scientists involved since they are seen as conservative, it is bad for the people affected by climate change. Changes have been greater and more extensive than expected, and this suggests that in the far future (say, the year 2100) the changes may be overwhelming.
The things that we could and should do to slow down or reverse this change in climate have not been worked out. The agreement recently worked out between 190 countries, while an improvement over past agreements, is unlikely to do much to slow down climate change. There has, however, been an experiment published by Lawrence Livermore Laboratories that may show considerable promise. Scientists at this government lab (known for its work on nuclear weapons) have worked out, experimentally, a method of desalinating seawater that results in an alkaline residue that directly soaks up carbon dioxide and holds it in the residue water as bicarbonate ions. This residue can be returned to the remaining seawater to partially reverse the acidification that has occurred as a result of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Another result of the desalination is the release of gaseous hydrogen, which can be burned to produce more energy.
It may take a decade or more to scale up this experimental process to an industrial level, and longer still to reach a scale that might have an impact on the atmosphere. Nonetheless, it is this type of innovation that will be needed to get us out of the hole that we are in.
Sarah Palin Endorses Donald Trump
“Are you ready for the leader to make America great again?” Mrs. Palin said with Mr. Trump by her side at a rally at Iowa State University. “Are you ready to stump for Trump? I’m here to support the next president of the United States — Donald Trump.”
via Sarah Palin Endorses Donald Trump, Which Could Bolster Him in Iowa – The New York Times.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, along comes Sarah Palin to ruin your day. The spectacle of a former candidate for vice president who lost in a landslide and redefined “dumbed down” politics endorsing a real-estate mogul who loves to insult women and minorities must have been dreamt up by a struggling television network.
Now the only thing that could get worse would be if Trump were to win the presidency. That could never happen– right? I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Trump will get the Republican nomination for presidential candidacy– and he will lose in a landslide to Hillary Clinton.
Why? Because Republicans are not stupid enough to choose a candidate who has already alienated virtually all the women, blacks, and Mexicans who can vote. Please, please tell me the Republicans will not give the nomination to Donald Trump. Just how blind and wilful can Republicans be?
Which reminds me that I haven’t written enough about Bernie Sanders. Any requests for more information on Bernie Sanders? Because Democrats “are not stupid enough to choose a candidate who” has already alienated virtually all the Republicans who can vote by declaring for socialism. Not that there’s anything wrong with socialism; it’s just that the junior high school social studies teacher who defined “socialism” as “communism” is the last political “fact” that most Americans can remember.
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.
