Benghazi
On September 11, 2012, a group of over 100 armed men attacked the compound in Benghazi occupied by the US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and killed him and another man, Embassy Information Management Officer Sean Smith. A subsequent attack on a CIA compound in Benghazi, where the surviving five Embassy officers had retreated, killed two Embassy security officers. The Accountability Review Board, a State Department review board, provides an excellent timeline describing everything that happened in the attacks in its report.
One detail of historical importance is that the previous US Embassy in Benghazi was stormed and burned in June 1967, during the Arab-Israeli war of that year. One would guess that that previous incident would have clued people in that Benghazi is a dangerous place. Unfortunately, many of the Embassy staffers in Libya spent only a few days there because of the way assignments were structured, so long-term thinking wasn’t a priority.
Today, Politifact published an assessment of Hillary Clinton’s claim this morning that there have been seven Congressional investigations into the attack– or at least Clinton’s culpability in relation to the attack– so far, with the special Select House Committee investigation announced in May 2014 making number eight. Obviously her claim is correct. The rest of her statement, however, may be open to interpretation, which is why I took a look at the case.
There has been, in fact, no finding of a need for disciplinary action or criminal finding of liability with regard to Mrs. Clinton’s behavior over Benghazi. Wikipedia has entries on the attack and on the House Select Committee, if you want to argue about it. To a radical Republican, however, Wikipedia is merely a tool of the devil. Any attempt on my part to review the right of center literature on Benghazi would cause terminal outrage, so I decided not to tax my already over-strained tolerance abilities on such a small issue.
Two things are clear from today’s reading: the State Department has severe mission-itis, and the Republicans (the Koch brothers in particular) have spent millions of their own and the taxpayer’s money trying to pin blame on Hillary Clinton. First, the Accountability Review Board’s report shows that there were indications that something was going to happen in Benghazi that would have been noticeable to a curious intelligence officer. Second, the Republicans (especially the Koch brothers) have millions to spend on spreading negative propaganda about Hillary Clinton, and they have the influence within the government (their majority representation in the House being one example) that makes it possible for them to set up endless politically motivated investigations into the alleged wrongdoing of senior Democrats who might run for President.
In fact, the new Select Committee specially set up to investigate the situation that the Select Committee on Intelligence was about to report on, was announced in May 2014, just before the previous Select Committee was about to release its report. The new Select Committee spent a great deal of time taking the deposition of a political buddy of the Clintons, Sidney Blumenthal, because it discovered that he had sent emails to Hillary Clinton about the situation in Libya. Blumenthal had no first hand knowledge of what happened in the Benghazi attacks, and he was not employed by the government. He was, however, offering advice to Clinton in regards to a Media Matters (a liberal web site) piece about Benghazi, and he was employed by the Clinton Foundation.
The exciting find of the new Select Committee was their discovery that Clinton had used a private email server for both her personal and business emails when she was Secretary of State. It’s not important that other government figures who had to handle classified information also used private email servers, or that her server was located in her basement and thus relatively immune to breakins (unlike official State Department servers.) What is important is that it sounds odd to the uninitiated public.
By the way, the first House Select Committee, when it released its report in November 2014, “exonerated the Obama administration of wrongdoing in response to the attack” (Politifact.) It also concluded that “officials did not intentionally mislead the public… in the days following the attack.” So that report just wasn’t good enough, which is one reason another committee had to be drafted. The other reason being that the issue had to be kept before the public until the Presidential Election next November.
The Democrats have made themselves easy targets for the propaganda put out by radical Republicans, first by leaving Hillary out there all alone as the only certain candidate for President, and second, by being too careful in their choice of message. Just tell the unvarnished truth, and let the Republicans get twisted up in the lies.
Two outside investigators looking into the death of Tamir Rice have concluded that a Cleveland police officer, Tim Loehmann, acted reasonably in deciding last year to shoot when he confronted the 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a replica gun.
This is absurd. The driver of the police car (who did not shoot) stopped his car unreasonably close to Tamir Rice, and then the passenger policeman got out and shot Rice within two seconds of the car stopping. How can he claim that it is reasonable to delay only two seconds before shooting?? That’s not enough time to give a warning and wait for a response. In the videos, Rice clearly did not make any movements after the police car stopped. How can this instant shooting be considered reasonable when Rice was not making any threatening movements?
Once again we see the Alice-in-Wonderland point of view of police reviewing shootings by their colleagues. Only a policeman could consider this policeman’s behavior reasonable. Their point of view ignores the humanity and reality of Rice’s point of view. Here is a person (12 years old) who has a “gun” in his waistband, not in his hand. Any “furtive” movement of his hands is purely in the imagination of the shooter, and could not have been observed and patiently responded to in the time allowed.
Why is this policeman so afraid of a twelve-year-old black boy with a gun (that could not have been visible to the policeman) that he has to shoot him instantly without giving him a warning? The only answer is that policemen are deathly afraid of all black men because of their training– not by experience, because policemen don’t get shot very often. How is it that a policeman can’t tell the difference between an aggressive, death-defying “active shooter” and a sub-teenage boy who is just playing around and couldn’t possibly have acted aggressively in the time available for observing him?
It is clear that the policeman shot Tamir Rice instantly just because he was black. There is no other explanation. If he was white, he would still be alive today. The policeman assumed Rice’s aggressive and lawless intent without any other information other than that he was black and he “had a gun” (the dispatcher failed to mention the 911 caller’s qualifier that the gun “was probably fake”) which is a simple equation: black plus “has a gun” equals policeman’s right to shoot without warning and without giving him time to surrender peacefully or taking the time to observe him to see if he is aggressive or behaving dangerously.
This is injustice of the worst kind, akin to the exoneration of the policeman who took down Eric Garner with an illegal choke hold (for supposedly selling loose cigarettes, which the policeman did NOT observe Garner actually doing) and then ignored his complaints that he couldn’t breathe. The policemen who left Garner lying on his stomach and crying that he couldn’t breathe were equally culpable. This was homicide, not justifiable, and not accidental; excessively aggressive arrest, illegal choke hold, negligence, and ignoring plain duty to protect a helpless man once he was handcuffed. There is no excuse for this behavior.
There must be regulations that specify serious consequences for this kind of treatment of people, whether they be black, white, or purple polka-dotted. These regulations must be enforced. Reading the regulations to every officer at every roll call is the only way to drill it into their heads that they cannot get away with murder just because they are policemen.
As record ocean temperatures cause widespread coral bleaching across Hawaii, NOAA scientists confirm the same stressful conditions are expanding to the Caribbean and may last into the new year, prompting the declaration of the third global coral bleaching event ever on record.
via NOAA declares third ever global coral bleaching event.
Corals can recover from mild bleaching, but severe bleaching events are frequently fatal. Dead coral reefs degrade and erode away, leaving coastlines with less protection from storms and less habitat for fish and the other marine animals that make a reef a lively place.
The current bleaching events are affecting Hawaii and will spread to the Caribbean, from the US Virgin Islands to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico and as far south as the Leeward and Windward Islands. The strong El Nino in the Pacific will cause warming and bleaching in the Indian Ocean and the southeastern Pacific Ocean after the beginning of 2016.
Bleaching was monitored from satellite visualization, and confirmed by divers observing local conditions. NOAA used this data to create a forecast for coral bleaching conditions worldwide. Global bleaching was first predicted in July 2015. Current conditions come immediately after serious bleaching and coral death in the Main Hawaiian Islands last year and overwhelming bleaching and death in the remote Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the worst ever seen at Lisianski Atoll.
The first global bleaching occurred in 1998, and the second in 2010. This widespread bleaching began in 2014 and is expected to continue into 2016. The first event was associated with a strong El Nino which was coincident with record high world temperature spikes which were not equaled or surpassed until 2010, when another El Nino occurred.
Coral bleaching is associated with high ocean temperatures. Other than bringing the ocean temperature down to normal, mutations that enhance the coral’s ability to tolerate the heat are the only answer to these devastating events that will exacerbate the effects of global warming.
No New Ebola Cases Were Reported in the Past Week; Some Other Epidemic will Cause a Population Crash
West Africa has had its first Ebola-free week, with no known cases, since the epidemic began in March 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday.
via No New Ebola Cases Were Reported in the Past Week, Health Agency Says – The New York Times.
The Ebola epidemic appears to be subsiding, after affecting 17,757 people in Guinea and Sierra Leone (12,048 laboratory-confirmed cases) and killing 6,489 of them. Liberia had the second-most cases, with 10,666 total cases but only 3,151 laboratory-confirmed cases. The total of cases in other countries was 36, including one who has been hospitalized in Britain just recently for a relapse. Four cases were reported from the United States. There have been no cases in Liberia since September 3, 2015, when the country was declared virus-free (for the second time) by WHO. (See CDC reports of case totals)
During the early phases of the Ebola outbreak last year, some people claimed that a million victims were possible, even probable. Such predictions did not take into account the odd proclivities of the Ebola virus, particularly its tendency to rapidly lose its lethality after repeated transmission from person to person, and its low infectiousness except when the body is teeming with virus just before death. The practices that encouraged spread, mainly intimate contact with the highly infectious corpse before burial, were limited to the cultures of the local peoples, and not difficult to restrain with adequate education (although some were highly resistant to change and conducted funeral ceremonies in secret.)
Our conclusions are that Ebola, while a dangerous disease, is not the world-beater that some have fantasized. Although it is tempting to see in rapidly-spreading epidemics the one that will kill everybody, the pandemic, it isn’t time yet. There are indications that the pandemic is coming: overpopulation, chronic hunger and malnutrition, armed conflict, rampant selfishness, under-funding of public health and epidemiology research.
The human population boom that has gripped the world for the last hundred years (since the development of effective public sanitation measures) has led to the extinction of many other species, some of whom were already threatened, but many previously booming themselves, such as the passenger pigeon. A human population crash would appear to be just around the corner, unless we do something to reverse the effects of the boom upon the Earth.
A nurse who almost died after contracting ebola is in a serious condition in hospital after the virus reactivated.Pauline Cafferkey was flown by military plane from Scotland to London, where she was last night in a specialist isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital.Her relapse – only the second case ever recorded
Source: Nurse in serious condition after ebola relapse – World – NZ Herald News
The first case of recorded relapse was not the only case of persistent Ebola. A case of transmission from a husband to wife resulted in the wife’s death, leading to the discovery that the virus persisted in the man’s testes and was transmissible through semen. The Ebola virus has also been recorded as persisting in the eye and causing uveitis.
Elephants Never Forget nor get Cancer
Have you ever wondered if elephants get cancer? Well, they don’t, and two research papers out recently suggest why elephants are resistant to cancer. There is a gene, TP-53, that is critical to cell mechanisms for cancer resistance. This gene is involved in triggering apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in response to damage in the cell’s chromosomes or critical cell machinery. Humans have one (paired) copy of this gene, and elephants have at least 20 copies, all of which have evolved to increase the cell’s sensitivity to important injuries. The elephant cell is more likely to undergo apoptosis and die off in response to injuries that could result in mutations and uncontrolled cell growth.
As a result of their advanced immune systems, elephants have a cancer death rate of less than 5%.
What about human death rates from cancer? Out of 2.5 million deaths in the US in 2013, 584 thousand were from cancer, or about 22%. Heart disease was the leading cause of death, with 611 thousand, while “chronic lower respiratory disease” claimed 149 thousand. Accidents beat out stroke, with 130 thousand versus 129 thousand. Alzheimer’s Disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease each got between 84 thousand and 49 thousand, and finally suicide, with 41,149 deaths.
So there is plenty of room for improvement in the human genome, although the improvement in this case will involve much more than simply increasing the number of TP-53 genes. In the future we may be able to lift sections of the genomes of certain advanced animals for our own use. That is, in addition to the genes that we will synthesize to improve on normal functions or add new functions.
There is no reason to think that our evolutionary advancement in cerebral capacity is matched by advancement in all other capacities. For example, our tender skins are unprotected by any fur, and our nails are pitifully inadequate in a fight. Our muscles are far less powerful than those of the chimpanzee, and we cannot run as fast as a horse nor climb a tree like a monkey. In muscle strength alone, we have seen mutations in both man and animals that increase muscle mass by blocking myostatin (a newly discovered hormone that regulates muscle growth.)
The only advantage we really have is the size of our brains and the quality of our thoughts.
Scalia Strikes Again: Michigan vs EPA
The Supreme Court recently, by a 5-4 majority headed by A.J. Scalia, struck down an EPA regulation that would have reduced mercury emissions from coal-fired electric power plants significantly on the excuse that the EPA ignored cost considerations when making the rule, supposedly costing the industry 9.6 billion dollars while “quantifiable benefits” were supposedly only $4-6 million a year.
Justice Kagan, in her dissent, however, stated that the “measurable benefits” would be “up to” $80 billion a year, and at least $30 billion. In addition, she described the multiple stages in the EPA rule-making process in which cost-benefit considerations were explicitly considered. The only stage at which cost-benefit considerations were rejected was at the initial stage: deciding whether to regulate mercury emissions at all. When the levels of regulation were considered, the EPA made it clear that, if costs exceeded benefits, the coal plants would not be expected to spend money on mitigating mercury emissions.
So what is the dramatic difference between “quantifiable benefits” and “measurable benefits”?? There are the 4,500 premature deaths a year and the half a million days of work lost; perhaps those are not “quantifiable”? It seems that the benefits of limiting mercury emissions are not limited to mercury reduction: particulate and sulfur emissions are also reduced, resulting in dramatically greater benefits. The majority of the Court refused to consider those “ancillary” benefits, because they are achieved in the process of reducing mercury, which is the only pollutant mentioned in the initial regulation. That is the difference between “quantifiable” and “measurable”, if you can believe it. Thus, you don’t get any credit for reducing other pollutants if your first impulse was to reduce just one.
It seems that the Court is angry at the EPA for being too effective: the antipollution regulations, which have to be bad in the Court majority’s eyes, have yielded extra unexpected benefits that can’t be to the credit of the regulations because they were unintentional.
The majority, with Justice Thomas submitting a concurring opinion, seems to think that it is reining in a federal agency that is running wild. In reality, it is finding an excuse to deal a setback to an agency that has been doing its job, albeit extremely slowly. This is typical of conservative thought. They have made a conclusion before reviewing the evidence; afterwards, they have gone through the documents looking for a way to excuse their conclusion. See the texts of the decision, handed down June 29, 2015, at https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/14-46#writing-14-46_SYLLABUS
China has been enriched by American-supplied jobs, making most of the destined-for-the-dump merchandise you find on store shelves all over America, every piece of plastic you can name, as well as Apple products, Barbie dolls or Nike LeBron basketball shoes retailed in the United States for up to $320 a pair. “The uplifting of impoverished people” was one of the reasons Phil Knight, Nike’s co-founder, gave in 1998 for moving his factories out of the United States.
The Chinese success, helped by American investment, is perhaps not astonishing after all; it has coincided with a large number of Americans’ being put out of work and plunged into poverty.
Source: The Hypocrisy of ‘Helping’ the Poor – The New York Times
Paul Theroux has written a provocative essay, published in the NYT online October 2, 2015, that links the impoverishment of the American “middle class” to “offshoring” or moving manufacturing jobs from the US to China and Vietnam. A few American investors have become immensely rich by taking factories from American cities and moving them to China and other Asian venues.
This move is the logical extension of the manufacturers’ previous move, from the Northeast to the South in the early part of the 20th century. This move imposed the same mass unemployment on Northeastern towns back in the 1920’s that was imposed on the South in the late 20th century. The earlier move was motivated by the same reasoning, the search for cheaper labor, as the later move.
Asian workers are cheaper, out of desperation; they are recruited from the terribly poor and hungry, usually rural, lower class of Asian unemployed. American workers are more expensive; they require union representation, workers compensation, overtime, sick pay, vacations.
Mexican workers in maquiladoras are almost equally economical and they are available close by, manufacturing goods cheaply with minimal interference from worker’s rights agitators.
There is a counter-example, however: the German model. In the German system, there are exports of expensive, high-quality manufactures, and the workers are fully protected and given complete health coverage. The difference is that the goods manufactured for export in German factories are known for their superior quality and durability, making them well worth their extra cost. This higher-cost, higher-quality manufacturing system supports premium worker’s rights protection and health care coverage. The result is a highly paid, well satisfied worker population and a higher standard of living.
In order to get out of the trap represented by mass production of medium quality low priced goods imported from countries that are in the process of developing themselves, emulating the German system would be a better way to go. It would be quite straightforward to design a manufacturing process that deliberately creates products that are extremely high quality, through precision machining, superior quality control, hand finishing, and so on. The extra cost of manufacturing would be supported by premium pricing and a deliberate advertising policy emphasizing superior quality.
The alternative would be to legislate made-in-USA manufacturing requirements similar to those that are currently in place for automobiles. Current laws require a certain percentage of passenger automobiles to be made in the US. This requirement is the only thing that has prevented the complete destruction of the domestic automobile industry.
Another change that has resulted in imposed poverty instead of distributed benefits is the increase in productivity, partially related to automation. Productivity improvements have resulted in the production of a larger quantity of finished goods with less labor. Instead of distributing productivity improvements by shortening worker’s hours with the same number of workers, owners have kept the hours the same and reduced the number of workers, creating unemployment instead of prosperity. This will be further addressed in a later post.
Service in Medicine
One thing that medical students are not taught is the essential transaction that is part of every encounter between doctor and patient. The doctor should go in to the patient thinking that he wants to give the patient something and that the patient is asking for that something. The first question is “what does the patient want?” and “how can I give it to him?”
The thing that always intruded between me and the patient in the above-described type of encounter was that the patient seemed to be wanting something that was inappropriate. There is no annoyance, to a doctor, so large as when the patient says he wants drugs, narcotic pain-killers for example. This type of request often comes from a relatively young man who doesn’t seem to have much wrong with him.
There is nothing so destructive as the loss of concentration on this basic transaction. No matter how annoying the patient can be, the doctor must ignore these annoyances and focus on providing the patient with what he wants, treatment or explanation, usually a prescription.
The loss of focus and surrender to the annoyances leads to a destructive and obstreperous encounter with the patient. Harsh words that are not retracted cannot be retracted later. There’s no exception to the demand to just give the patient what he wants in the real world.
In the world of interpersonal relation harsh words can never be taken back.
Guns Shoot People as Well as Prairie Dogs
I like guns, especially for shooting prairie dogs, but I think they’re dangerous, a “two-edged sword” so to speak. Most people have no business handling guns, either because they don’t know what they’re doing or they’re not mentally capable of safely handling them.
Here’s the abstract of a study that concludes that gun ownership is related to firearms homicide rates:
Objectives. We examined the relationship between levels of household firearm ownership, as measured directly and by a proxy—the percentage of suicides committed with a firearm—and age-adjusted firearm homicide rates at the state level.
Methods. We conducted a negative binomial regression analysis of panel data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting Systems database on gun ownership and firearm homicide rates across all 50 states during 1981 to 2010. We determined fixed effects for year, accounted for clustering within states with generalized estimating equations, and controlled for potential state-level confounders.
Results. Gun ownership was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates (incidence rate ratio = 1.009; 95% confidence interval = 1.004, 1.014). This model indicated that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%.
Conclusions. We observed a robust correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.
Read More: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301409?journalCode=ajph%29&
And a study that concludes that higher gun ownership is related to higher death rates of policemen from being shot:
Objectives. In the United States, state firearm ownership has been correlated with homicide rates. More than 90% of homicides of law enforcement officers (LEOs) are committed with firearms. We examined the relationship between state firearm ownership rates and LEO occupational homicide rates.
Methods. We obtained the number LEOs killed from 1996 to 2010 from a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) database. We calculated homicide rates per state as the number of officers killed per number of LEOs per state, obtained from another FBI database. We obtained the mean household firearm ownership for each state from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.
Results. Using Poisson regression and controlling for factors known to affect homicide rates, we associated firearm ownership with the homicide rates for LEOs (incidence rate ratio = 1.044; P = .005); our results were supported by cross-sectional and longitudinal sensitivity analyses. LEO homicide rates were 3 times higher in states with high firearm ownership compared with states with low firearm ownership.
Conclusions. High public gun ownership is a risk for occupational mortality for LEOs in the United States. States could consider methods for reducing firearm ownership as a way to reduce occupational deaths of LEOs.
Read More: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302749
Finally, a study that concludes that higher gun ownership is related to higher nonstranger shooting deaths:
Objectives. We examined the relationship between gun ownership and stranger versus nonstranger homicide rates.
Methods. Using data from the Supplemental Homicide Reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports for all 50 states for 1981 to 2010, we modeled stranger and nonstranger homicide rates as a function of state-level gun ownership, measured by a proxy, controlling for potential confounders. We used a negative binomial regression model with fixed effects for year, accounting for clustering of observations among states by using generalized estimating equations.
Results. We found no robust, statistically significant correlation between gun ownership and stranger firearm homicide rates. However, we found a positive and significant association between gun ownership and nonstranger firearm homicide rates. The incidence rate ratio for nonstranger firearm homicide rate associated with gun ownership was 1.014 (95% confidence interval = 1.009, 1.019).
Conclusions. Our findings challenge the argument that gun ownership deters violent crime, in particular, homicides.
Read More: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302042
Notice that we say “is related to” rather than “causes” because these studies only show a correlation and do not prove causation. Nonetheless, these striking findings suggest that the presence of guns merely relates to more people getting shot, which is pretty simple. Guns certainly do not relate to any protective effect against getting shot, nor do they protect policemen from getting shot. It is hard to get away from the logical conclusion that guns cause people to get shot.
Guns are useful devices, but in the hands of fallible humans they go off, causing sometimes fatal wounds, when you point one at someone and pull the trigger. Having one doesn’t necessarily protect you from someone else who has one. Not having one leaves you defenseless, but if no-one other than a policeman has one, the fatality rate is lower– these studies show that.
Unfortunately, laws won’t reduce the number of guns floating around; illegally obtaining a gun is not difficult in most cities because there are so many in circulation. At last count, there were almost 300 million firearms in the US; a minority of people actually have them, and those that do usually have several on hand.
Reducing the gun homicide and suicide rates would be most effectively approached by dramatically increased investment in mental-health treatment, conflict-resolution teaching, and anti-poverty programs, particularly programs to provide well-paying jobs to disadvantaged youth, especially those of color, the most likely victims and perpetrators of gun homicides.
Removing a significant number of guns from circulation would require an enormous, unconstitutional search-and-confiscate mission which would likely miscarry because people would be forewarned and would hide their guns away. There really is no clear solution that doesn’t involve massive investment in mental health and anti-poverty programs.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 