The same study that was used by the maker of Paxil to assert that it was safe and effective for teenagers was reanalyzed and found to show a lack of effectiveness. The study is reported in yesterday’s New York Times online and the same arguments that come up around every retracted study came up in the newspaper piece, here.
The only argument that didn’t come up was the issue of the number of lives lost or destroyed because of the commercial interest by a large drug company in a me-too antidepressant that was designed to compete with Prozac. In fact, as anyone who has taken Paxil can attest, it reliably causes abnormal hostile thoughts and sometimes can cause violent or suicidal actions, much in the same way as Prozac but worse.
The fact that multiple research projects needed to be undertaken to clarify the magnitude of this effect is a testament to the amount of money that the drug maker had already spent on developing Paxil when Phase III studies began to show adverse effects.
There is evidence that the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region…
Source: Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought
This study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March 2015, asserted that the record-setting drought in Syria from 2007 to 2010 was due to anthropogenic global warming, that is, human-caused increases in average temperatures. Some 15% of the population of Syria migrated from the rural areas to the cities during the drought. The “uprising” or civil war started the very next year when peaceful demonstrators were fired upon by government troops. Even if the war had not caused millions of refugees, the changes in Syria’s climate might have forced emigration for survival.
Now, after four years of war, the Assad government, supported by Russia and Iran, has the upper hand in Damascus but has lost control over most of the country. He uses the areas he doesn’t control as free-fire zones and indiscriminately bombs civilian targets. The opposition to Assad is partially composed of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as well as al-Qaeda affiliated groups. After spending half a billion dollars, the US was able to claim only fifty-four trained opposition soldiers; the rest of the “moderate” opposition is barely surviving.
Finally, there has come an offer of talks between the US and Russian military. If these two entities have the power to somehow stop the violence against Syrian civilians and re-orient the Syrian government towards attacking ISIS, then they should get together.
It is ironic that the military powers of the two governments at the highest level in the conflict could participate in talks that could lead to some improvement, if not actual peace.
If the conflict does not stop, the flow of refugees will only get worse. The Syrian government under Hafez al-Assad is responsible for the majority of the violence against civilians. His motivation has been to protect his Alawite religious minority from persecution by the majority Sunni population, although the persecution has mostly been going the other way until recently. The presence of ISIS in this area is a reflection of the attitude that the Alawites are heretics who must be wiped out among some Sunni fanatics.
There is little chance that this conflict can be completely stopped, but there is every chance that Assad can be forced by pressure from Russia to stop bombing civilian areas. This line of policy might be the best one to reduce civilian deaths in a difficult situation.
There is a hidden evil inside Mr. Trump’s plan for deporting all eleven million illegal aliens. Let us see what it is. In order to deport the people, he must first locate them, round them up, identify them, and then go through the process (whatever it takes) to repatriate them. This will necessitate a large holding area for aliens who have been located and picked up, assuming that the locating has been done without violating the civil rights of the American citizens with whom they are living, and that there has been no resistance from the aliens to being picked up.
Once the aliens have been rounded up and are in detention, it will be necessary to identify them and return them to their countries of origination. It is unlikely that Mexican authorities will accept aliens from other countries further south. Therefore, some process of identification will be required, however rudimentary.
Once aliens have been identified and processed, they can be put on a plane to wherever they came from. What about those whose home countries remain unidentified or the country refuses to accept the alien? In any case, the period of residence in this holding area could wind of being very long, requiring food and shelter for another large group of people who don’t want to be there, along with the residents of the jails and prisons.
Removing that many people will be an organizational nightmare. There is no evidence, based on past experience, that Donald Trump has the organizational abilities to handle such a complex job fraught with conflicts and ambiguity, a job that will make the United States Immigration Service (ICE) look like brutal occupiers, coming into neighborhoods with buses with bars on their windows and driving away with half the adult population, leaving vulnerable children who are American citizens with no caregivers.
This is the most dangerous and complicated enterprise ever proposed in the area of forced migrations. It is fair to say that, if undertaken, it would grossly distort and poison relations between white and brown North Americans– far worse than things already are.
Trump’s inflammatory remarks have already polarized the electorate. Some find his insults and rash proposals “refreshing” while others find his open racism and sexism disgusting. What is bizarre is that radical Republicans have begun to split into a postracial, paranoid, Dr. Carson group and a racist, stuck in the past, low information Trump faction.
Neurosurgeons Are Stupid
I say this, not because I went to Harvard and Ben Carson went to Yale, George W. Bush’s alma mater. I say this because neurosurgeons require excellent hand-eye coordination, not intelligence. I have just read Ben Carson’s story on New Yorker and you can read it too, thanks to their free-article feature.
Here are some salient features of Ben Carson’s life story. His mother married at thirteen, to a twenty-eight-year-old man. He turned out to be a bigamist, and after his exit, she supported herself and her two sons by cleaning houses. This was during those bygone days of memory when a woman could support herself and two sons by cleaning houses. She enforced a studies policy on her sons, one that would be impossible today if he wanted to be “in with” his fellow black students. He didn’t discover his vocation until he started playing Foosball at Yale. Those were the days when a black man could be admitted to Yale through its progressive admissions policies of the time.
I’m not saying that all black men who went to Yale are stupid. Just Ben Carson. This is because he is a Seventh Day Adventist and doesn’t believe in evolution. What did they teach him at Yale? Not to believe in evolution? Obviously he missed those biology and organic chemistry classes or just memorized the answers on the test and forgot the material afterward for lack of use.
The other reason he is stupid is that he is a “rock-ribbed” conservative. He’s obviously stupid. Not all conservatives are stupid but it sure helps them to be stupid. See also the famous quote from John Stuart Mill: “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”
Conservatives don’t believe in evolution, welfare, the Preamble to the United States Constitution (which states, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, …” or the 1938 Constitution of the State of New York (which states, in Article XVII, “The aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state …” and, in Article XVIII, ” the legislature may provide in such manner, by such means and upon such terms and conditions as it may prescribe for low rent housing and nursing home accommodations for persons of low income …”), nor, most importantly, in global warming or climate change, which he claims is irrelevant.
In searching for “Ben Carson”, I also located an article about the autobiography of Dr. Henry Marsh, a neurosurgeon, who is, unlike Ben Carson, smart enough to write a book. The book is called, “Do No Harm” and consists mainly of confessions to serious mistakes that he made as a surgeon, in which patients were paralyzed or never woke up after surgery. This book has inspired me to write a similar piece about the mistakes and disasters I have had. I have already written about the death of a minister from hepatitis B in “A Death in Hazen.” The minister’s death wasn’t my fault, nor anybody’s fault except for the person who transmitted hepatitis B to him (and even them he probably didn’t know he was doing it.)
I have a feeling that Dr. Carson has not admitted to himself the mistakes he has made as a neurosurgeon, because Seventh Day Adventists don’t admit to themselves their own mistakes. Admitting his mistakes has not been easy for Dr. Marsh; it is always painful and sometimes impossible. Most people find admitting mistakes difficult or impossible. But it is always necessary because you must admit to something before you can change it.
A parallel in evolution is that adaptations that impair survival result in corrections by their nature; adaptations that are neutral don’t cause corrections and those that improve survival to reproduction become universal. A recent Nature research article describes the beneficial effect that maladaptive changes confer on the survival of the species. The technical term is “non-adaptive phenotypic plasticity.” Here Ben Carson showed adaptive plasticity in becoming a neurosurgeon in response to his environment as a child of a house cleaner in 1960’s America but, unfortunately, will show maladaptive plasticity in becoming a Republican candidate for President. He will be selected out when the Republicans discover that blacks won’t vote for him either. The only question is whether selecting Donald Trump as a candidate for President will be maladaptive; I certainly hope so.
According to the church, if I commit adultery, my priest can hear my confession and absolve my sin. If I murder my wife, my priest can hear my confession and absolve my sin. Heck, if I engage in an act of genocide, my priest can hear my confession and absolve my sin.But if my wife procures an abortion, she incurs an automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication, meaning she instantly falls out of communion with the Catholic Church. That precludes her from partaking in the sacraments, including the sacrament of reconciliation, which is the means by which a priest can hear a confession and absolve sins.That makes abortion worse than every other form of murder, including mass murder.And there we have the necessary moral context for judging the pope’s recent announcement. What he’s done is declare that during the upcoming Jubilee year, women who’ve had abortions and been automatically excommunicated will be allowed to partake in the sacrament of reconciliation and thereby have their sin forgiven, which would permit the automatic excommunication to be reversed.
Source: How Pope Francis is perpetuating the Catholic Church’s radical anti-abortion position
This is something I didn’t know about the Catholic Church and Catholic doctrine– there are only nine sins that incur instant excommunication, and one of them is abortion. The other eight are related to doctrinal crimes: schism, heresy, apostasy, physical attacks on the Pope, offering to hear the confession of someone who has violated their vow of celibacy, revealing the confession of one person to another person (violating the vow of secrecy taken by the priest who hears confessions, and yes, there is an interesting tension between violating the vow of secrecy of a confession and offering to hear the confession of someone who has violated their vow of celibacy, in that who is to know if you have violated the prohibition on hearing the confession etc.)
Read the rest of the article for details on automatic instant excommunication and how abortion is worse than murder…
Of course, the article also mentions that this particular murder is unique in that the victim is completely contained within the body of the murderer, another point that I hadn’t noticed. That is, the victim is completely dependent on the perpetrator and has invaded the body of the perpetrator without the perpetrator’s consent. This is ethically equivalent to your being hooked up by means of artery-vein connections to the body of another person and being told that, without your specific and sole help, that other person cannot survive. What’s more, that other person will exit your body in nine months through an invasive and extremely painful process that often takes more than a day and results in massive hemorrhage. After that, the other person will be legally dependent on you for another eighteen years and will require you to give up all your plans and hopes for the future. Ethically speaking, you cannot require someone to accept that kind of commitment without their explicit consent; yet that is what opposition to abortion (and certain methods of birth control) entails.
This is the ethical equivalent of justifiable homicide: sure, abortion is murder, but that fetus needed killing. No baby can demand of its mother (and father) that kind of commitment without explicit consent.
In a blockbuster study released Wednesday in Nature, a team of 38 scientists finds that the planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees, blowing away the previously estimate of 400 billion. That means, the researchers say, that there are 422 trees for every person on Earth.However, in no way do the researchers consider this good news. The study also finds that there are 46 percent fewer trees on Earth than there were before humans started the lengthy, but recently accelerating, process of deforestation.“We can now say that there’s less trees than at any point in human civilization,” says Thomas Crowther, a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies who is the lead author on the research. “Since the spread of human influence, we’ve reduced the number almost by half, which is an astronomical thing.”In fact, the paper estimates that humans and other causes, such as wildfires and pest outbreaks, are responsible for the loss of 15.3 billion trees each year — although the authors said at a press conference that perhaps 5 billion of those may grow back each year, so the net loss is more like 10 billion annually.
Thus, the study estimates a loss of nearly half of the world’s trees and a continuing loss of 10 billion trees net a year, or roughly 3 percent a year, suggesting that by 2050 there will be a loss of more than 50 percent of the remaining trees– so that there will be less than a quarter of the trees remaining by then, and the rise in carbon dioxide levels will be more than 3 parts per million per year, and there will be more than 500 parts per million of carbon dioxide. The increases may not be sustained in a linear fashion.
Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown had traveled from New Jersey to Red Springs, N.C., a small town near the Carolina border, to visit relatives when they were arrested Sept. 28, 1983, for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie. Mr. McCollum was 19, and Mr. Brown 15. The crime drew national attention for its brutality: The victim had been suffocated with her own underwear shoved down her throat.
But there was no physical evidence that either man had been involved. Under hours of questioning by the police with no lawyer present, Mr. McCollum falsely confessed. The two were convicted and sentenced to death. In 1994, Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court cited the brutality of the rape and murder as evidence that the death penalty was not a “cruel and unusual punishment” as prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
Lawyers with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation pressed for DNA testing of evidence, including a cigarette butt left near the murder scene. The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission found the DNA matched that of another man, Roscoe Artis, who lived a block from where the victim’s body was found. Mr. Artis was serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of an 18-year-old.
After years of legal wrangling, Judge Douglas B. Sasser vacated the convictions on Sept. 2, 2014. The next morning, the two men walked out of prison as free men and were driven to their father’s home in Bolivia, N.C. Mr. McCollum had been on death row for so long that he did not know how to fasten the seatbelt.
via 2 Men Awarded $750,000 for Wrongful Convictions in 1983 Murder – The New York Times.
Yes, that’s right, the same Antonin Scalia who should be impeached and removed from the Supreme Court for his behavior in cases too numerous to mention.
A Lifesaving Decision
At one time I was the doctor at a small hospital in rural South Dakota; we had ten or twelve beds and we were attached to a nursing home with thirty or forty patients. I had just gotten out of my first year of residency the year before and I was still green.
In the wintertime we had a hard time getting IV supplies because the fluids would freeze in the delivery vans when the outside temperature got down to zero or below; sometimes, in December and January especially, it would get down to forty below. The hospital pharmacist would lay in a supply of IV fluids in the fall that had to last until March or April.
We were ninety miles from Rapid City, the nearest large hospital; any surgery beyond the most basic procedures would have to be done there. I tried to transfer patients with serious illnesses that would be helped to the hospital in Rapid City, but sometimes it was difficult when the weather was bad. Not so much cold, since a vehicle could usually be coaxed to function in forty below temperatures. The problem was usually wind and snow; sometimes winds exceeded eighty miles an hour, mostly from the north. With heavy wind and snow, visibility would drop to less than a hundred feet, and your vehicle would crawl along at twenty miles an hour through blinding white; it was like being on the inside of a ping pong ball.
One night when the weather was particularly bad I had two patients admitted around the same time; one was a young woman with abdominal sepsis and the other a middle-aged man with lung cancer and pneumonia. I only had enough gentamicin to give it to one of the two patients, although according to the book I was supposed to give it to both of them.
On evaluation, the young woman with abdominal sepsis turned out to have a treatable problem and a number of years left to live. The man with lung cancer had been treated already with radiation and a partial pneumonectomy. He had a recurrent metastasis to the liver. He had developed pneumonia, which was to prove growth of Pseudomonas aeruginosa after a couple of days of culture, although I didn’t know that the first night. The young woman grew gonococcus on her cervical culture; with rebound tenderness, she had clinical symptoms of peritonitis and needed gentamicin. The old man, likewise, needed gentamicin for his lungs.
I made a decision, based on the limited quantity of gentamicin on hand, that I would administer it to the young woman with peritonitis. The old man got penicillin although he did not have pneumococcal pneumonia; I made a chart entry that suggested that he did have a pneumococcus, or at least I thought he was going to have a pneumococcus. In fact, he did not have, and I did not suspect him of having anything other than gram-negative pneumonia, which was much more likely in an enfeebled patient dying of lung cancer.
I made a decision that the young woman needed the gentamicin and the old man did not. I decided that giving gentamicin to the old man would be futile because he was going to die soon anyway, and the gentamicin wouldn’t buy him any more life. Even if the Pseudomonas bacteria proved to be sensitive to gentamicin, the patient’s body would not be able to fight off the infection.
The next day, the old man died. I happened to be in the room when he breathed his last breath. He croaked like a frog. It was the most incongruous thing I had ever heard. The man’s son and his wife were also in the room; I asked them to step out for a minute while I confirmed that he was not going to start breathing again. His pupils quickly dilated and became unresponsive to light. It was then that I knew I had made a life-saving decision. I had allowed the man to die, with his family present, quietly and without any fuss, while another person was saved and restored to health.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster Is Real
Science News Available Online For $16
Science News is now available online for $16 a year; the staff produces about five stories a day on weekdays, as well as summary and review articles. There are few to no articles appearing on weekends. It’s definitely worth it now that I’m paying a hundred dollars a year for the New Yorker (mainly it’s the covers.)
I am considering paying the eighteen dollars annually needed to rid this site of ads. If there is anyone reading this, even Eric, please comment that you have at least seen an ad on this site and describe how you experienced the ad. Please.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 