Quotes From John Stuart Mill
I stumbled across another site today. This one is called Wikiquotes, and it contains great quotations. I was looking up the expression, “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” which was claimed to have come from John Stuart Mill. Well, in fact, it did, and so did many other wonderful quotes, such as,
“Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.”
This comes from the page, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill as do many other piquant statements. This JS Mill guy must have been a genius.
Here is a quote that must have been written in relation to the Civil War as it was put down in 1862:
- War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
- “The Contest in America,” Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862); later published in Dissertations and Discussions (1868), vol.1 p. 26
Here’s one more, from a speech given in 1867, that is often paraphrased:
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
Finally, the quote I was looking for was actually stated in this way:
I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.
It was spoken in Parliamentary debate in response to a Conservative MP in 1866.
Comment of the Day
Chris Koz
Portland, OR. November 17, 2014
I love my country, I hate what it has become, and I mourn, perhaps selfishly, that I live in a time where we justify unnecessary suffering for 10s of millions of Americans for no viably argued reason. We spend two billion dollars+ a day on defense but we cannot defend our teachers or house the homeless? We give Corp. like Boeing, GE, Walmart, and Exxon billions in incentives & subsidies only because they have purchased our Democracy. For some bizarre, inexplicable reason, many of our citizens cheer for the wealthiest who have such vast wealth they can never, not even generationally, spend it. Six Walton members are worth more than 42% of our nation combined… http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/07/walmart-heirs-waltons-wealth-income-inequality)…
Even more unthinkable, add the three Koch Brothers to this list, just nine humans no better than you or me, worth $241,000,000,000.00. Only our inhumanity should find this okay and those who justify this inequality are not humane no matter how hard they try to hide behind a philosophy, an ideology, or the stench of a willful ignorance so deep that ‘they’ are willing to commit themselves & others to vast suffering in support of that which they will never be. What cowardice.
This life we are given is a precious gift filled with wonderment & it is very short. That we mask the beauty of life with such inequality (e.g. hardship) & squander our time to justify it disgusts me.
We have lost our way & it is not okay. Something must be done.
Crib Death: A Guest Post by Mary Molina
Mary’s story about the infant that died
By Mary Molina, as dictated to Conrad Seitz
Monday, July 6, 2015.
I was 21 years old in 1972, when my son Marshall was 2 years old and my daughter Kristi was 5. I was working, picking strawberries.
Kristina had gotten pregnant again, and she wound up living with us, but I don’t know why except that we took her in, at the urging of my husband. She was 18. She had two children, one of which she gave to her mother, and the other one she gave away to someone else, I don’t know who. Kristina moved in with us after the baby was born.
We all lived in a new house provided by the owner of the dairy where my husband Junior worked. There were three bedrooms and when the baby was born, six people including him; he lived to be 30 days old. He never had a name.
When we went to pick Kristina up at the hospital after the baby was born, I could already tell that she wasn’t going to bond with him. She never said anything to me about the baby. I was too busy with picking strawberries all day and then coming home to feed my husband and two children, cleaning house, then getting everything ready for the next day. I wasn’t prepared to even think about what we would have to do to take care of the baby.
Kristina never told us about taking the baby for a two-week checkup, and we were so busy that it didn’t occur to us. We wouldn’t have had transportation or time anyway; we couldn’t take off work in the busy season to take her to the doctor even if she had told us. She just didn’t seem to care about anything. She sat around the house all day, watching TV.
One day when the baby was about three weeks old, the mother told me that he had a cold and I said that she needed to take him to the doctor. She immediately gave me the little boy and said “You can have him.” Junior had already told her that, if she didn’t want the baby, we would take him. Kristina couldn’t provide milk or baby clothes; she had no friends, no car, and no relatives nearby– we lived in Laton, and the nearest were in Mendota, 50 or 60 miles away
I knew that we could barely feed our kids and I would never have taken someone in that way, but my husband had already decided for me and it was too late. In remembering, I think it was George, my brother, who brought her to our mother’s house, and it was there and then that Junior offered her a place to stay and adoption of the baby. George is another story altogether.
I had to take care of him from the day we picked him up from the hospital; he was fine at that time. When he cried, Kristina never picked him up; I would go and see what he needed, if he was wet or hungry. My children liked him and were very curious about him. I was working picking strawberries all day, and Kristina was at home watching Marshall, who was only two; Kristi was in kindergarten already. Kristina told me, “I’m not going to take care of the baby, but I’ll watch Marshall.”
Kristina was a fat girl, and she never intended to go to work at any time. She was used to being on welfare because she had lived with her mother, who was on welfare; she was the oldest of four children. When she was at home, she never did any housework and I didn’t ask her to; I just wanted to make sure she fed the baby. I had to be away at work for eight hours, and I was worried about the baby being fed.
The baby was always crying; I think he sensed that his mother didn’t love him. I would sometimes take him to bed with me because I was so tired, I wanted him to have somebody holding him, but I was too tired to stay up while I was holding him. He had been in the crib all day except for one feeding.
When I came home, I fed him, walked around with him for a while until he fell asleep, and then I went to bed. The sleeping arrangements were this: Kristina slept on the floor in one room with the baby in a crib, I slept in a second bedroom with Junior, and Marshall and Kristi shared the third bedroom. I put the baby in his crib and went to bed in the other room with Junior.
Junior and I were talking in bed, and I said, “I don’t know why you offered to take the baby– we barely enough to eat on own and we have to feed Kristina and the baby now.”
As we were talking in bed, he really didn’t have anything to say because he knew I was right, but there was nothing we could do about it. Kristina didn’t have any documents of the baby’s birth, although she had her own Medi-Cal card. I don’t know how we were going to adopt him without any papers.
Kristina had told me, just that day, that she wouldn’t take care of her own baby during the day when I was gone. I was shocked, and said, “You’ll take care of Marshall, but you won’t take care of your own baby? What do you stay home for?”
She said, “OK, I’ll take care of the baby.” But she still didn’t sweep the floor or wash dishes; I usually kept everything very clean anyway, as I felt that someone had to do it, and I was very conscientious about housekeeping.
After a week of having a clear runny nose, he developed a cough and green mucus discharge from his nose. I knew I had to take the baby to the doctor, but I needed to get a day off to do so. In the meantime, he continued to eat and wasn’t fussy. On the night he died, I put him to bed at eight o’clock as usual; I was exhausted, and I went to bed right afterwards.
During the night, I heard him crying, and since I knew Kristina wasn’t taking care of the baby, I got up. But then I heard footsteps on the bare wood floor, and after that, the baby stopped crying. I went back to sleep. I assumed that she got up and gave him a bottle or picked him up, because he had stopped crying.
Actually, she didn’t go to check on the baby until the morning; her blankets were still on the floor where she had slept. She came into our room and said, “Mary, there’s something wrong with the baby.” She sounded scared. So I got up, hurried into her bedroom, and started looking for the baby in the blankets on the floor. She said, “The baby’s in the crib.” I said, “You mean you didn’t pick him up last night when you got up?” She said, “No, I just got up to get a drink of water.” I had a premonition that the baby was dead already.
I went over to the crib to look at the baby and he was already cold and hard. His eyes were closed. I picked him up in my arms and my husband drove us to the hospital; it was about twelve miles away, in Selma. We got there about seven thirty in the morning; there was no-one around and it was quiet in the hallways of the hospital. The baby didn’t move at all, and he felt stiff in my arms.
I sat down in the emergency room with the baby on my lap. I didn’t want to look at him because I felt guilty, as if it was my fault that he had died. The nurse took him and put him on the gurney and put an oxygen mask on him. The doctors were examining him and then they took him behind a curtain. They asked me about the history and I told them that the mother slept in the same room with him. He had had a cold for a few days, but never had a fever. I had heard him crying for a little while that night and I heard the mother’s footsteps; I had assumed that she had picked the baby up. The next morning, I had started looking for the baby among the blankets on the floor because I had assumed the mother had taken him to sleep with her.
The doctor told me that the baby had died of “crib death.” He said it was partly due to the “upper respiratory infection” and perhaps that the baby had been lying on his stomach. I felt heartbroken and guilty at the same time: Kristina hadn’t taken care of the baby, and I hadn’t stepped in to take over, even though I knew something was wrong.
I felt like I was dead myself. All I could think about for weeks afterwards was the dead baby. I just walked around like a zombie. No-one came to investigate; at the hospital, they all assumed that the baby had died of pneumonia and “crib death”, whatever that was.
I was the only one who knew that Kristina didn’t want her baby and didn’t bother to try to take care of him. She had no interest in being a mother and no feelings for the child. I just couldn’t understand how a woman could have no affection for her own child and I wished she had just let the baby be adopted out immediately. She was so unconcerned that she didn’t bother to retain the birth certificate or any of the baby’s documents.
I felt horrible because I had bonded with the baby, even though his own mother hadn’t. I felt as if my own baby had died, and I felt responsible because I let Kristina take care of him that night, even though I knew she didn’t care. I was so tired that, when the baby stopped crying, I just assumed that Kristina had picked him up and checked on him.
Kristina continued to live with us for a month or so after the baby died; then she found somewhere else to live, I think with my brother George. I didn’t see her again for six years. Then I saw her at the clinic where I had begun working as a medical assistant. She had two more children, twins, from another guy. This time she kept the children because the guy stayed with her.
Partly because of this, I went back to school and eventually became a physician’s assistant. I have never forgotten this baby and I have never forgiven myself for not getting up in the middle of the night to go see what Kristina was doing with him.
Comment of the Day
GMoney America 2 hours ago
the northern united states have had an enemy state on it’s southern border for 150 years. taking advantage of the kindness and generosity of the north, with malice toward none, with charity for all, the south viewed this gesture as weakness and continued to express their fundamental assumption of racism and white supremacy through the sabotage of reconstruction, jim crow, separate but equal, state’s rights, lost cause myths, and a false narrative of heritage and tradition. the removal of this powerful symbol of southern confederate mythology is an enormous step in ridding the country of this cancer. look at how desperately not only hard core southerners but even elected officials are resisting this decision. i didn’t forsee this when the nine church members were gunned down but the situation has taken on a life of it’s own and the momentum is sweeping through areas not anticipated when the first calls for the removal of the flag were made, such as cemeteries, gift shops, and even nascar. the systemic ugliness of this mentality has been exposed and the view is shocking. it’s as if the country has been awakened from a dream or a trance and suddenly the question is “how could this have been allowed to exist?”. it has been 150 years. time to rid the country of all traces of this poison in our body politic.
via Republicans Yield as Confederate Flag Issue Roils Congress – The New York Times.
This comment appeared on an article about a bill that would have allowed Confederate flags at National Cemeteries. Clearly this bill is not politically appropriate at a time when the South Carolina Legislature approved by a two thirds margin the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the Capitol, and the governor signed the bill immediately. This was seen as a reacation to the shooting of nine black church members by Dylan Roof, who walked in to a church Bible study meeting, sat there for an hour, and then stood up and opened fire on the group, killing several pastors and a member of the State Legislature.
The situation is reminiscent of what happened in Germany after WW II– the display of the Nazi swastika was outlawed everywhere– even in movies or posters. Why was the Confederate flag allowed after the Civil War? Why was it resurrected at the time of the Civil Rights movement? Because there are a lot of unreconstructed racists in this country, and a lot of people who look back on slavery with nostalgia.
Here is the abstract to a new piece of research that has revolutionary implications, if it can be confirmed.
“Internal action models (IAMs) are brain templates for sensory-motor coordination underlying diverse behaviors [ 1 ]. An emerging theory suggests that impaired IAMs are a common theme in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) [ 2–4 ]. However, whether impaired IAMs occur across sensory systems and how they relate to the major phenotype of ASD, namely impaired social communication [ 5 ], remains unclear. Olfaction relies on an IAM known as the sniff response, where sniff magnitude is automatically modulated to account for odor valence [ 6–12 ]. To test the failed IAM theory in olfaction, we precisely measured the non-verbal non-task-dependent sniff response concurrent with pleasant and unpleasant odors in 36 children—18 with ASD and 18 matched typically developing (TD) controls. We found that whereas TD children generated a typical adult-like sniff response within 305 ms of odor onset, ASD children had a profoundly altered sniff response, sniffing equally regardless of odor valance. This difference persisted despite equal reported odor perception and allowed for 81% correct ASD classification based on the sniff response alone (binomial, p < 0.001). Moreover, increasingly aberrant sniffing was associated with increasingly severe ASD (r = −0.75, p < 0.001), specifically with social (r = −0.72, p < 0.001), but not motor (r < −0.38, p > 0.18), impairment. These results uncover a novel ASD marker implying a mechanistic link between the underpinnings of olfaction and ASD and directly linking an impaired IAM with impaired social abilities.”
From Current Biology: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00651-X
The research appears to show that autistic children do not respond to offensive odors normally. Usually, a child who senses an unpleasant odor will stop sniffing. Autistic children appear to continue to sniff for the same length of time, regardless of how pleasant or unpleasant the smell is; the persistence of sniffing appears to correlate with the severity of the autism, specifically social abnormalities. This is a small study, only eighteen children and eighteen controls, but despite that, it shows a very strong correlation between autism and continued sniffing of unpleasant odors. There should be no difficulty repeating this experiment, both formally and informally, with many more subjects, as it is a simple test which takes inexpensive equipment and only a couple of hours for each subject, with little likelihood of disturbing the experimental subjects; thus, experimental ethics review committees should have no qualms about allowing almost any subject to participate.
The dramatic findings and the need for a good test for autism that is nonverbal and requires no voluntary responses (that is, the subject merely watches a cartoon while spontaneously inhaling odors through a plastic nasal cannula that simultaneously measures depth and duration of inspiration) make it imperative and highly likely that this experiment will be replicated soon. Informal replication could take only a few weeks in almost any child development laboratory.
If it works, this test will revolutionize the diagnosis of autism and pave the way for further advances in treatment and understanding of this serious and growing threat to child development.
An article in today’s New York Times (NYT) online describes losses in the Chinese stock markets: the main stock index has fallen dramatically in the last month, and the bull market that started a year ago has crashed. Prices rose from June 2014 to a peak on June 12 of this year and have fallen back, so far, to the levels of January 2015. One of the smaller exchanges has had a bull market since 2012, but has fallen off just as suddenly as the rest of the market. The government has instituted aggressive measures to try to stem the selling.
One of the market’s problems is margin buying, the leverage of which enhances booms as well as busts. Trying to reduce margin buying in China is difficult because some people borrow money on a shadow market which is mostly hidden from the government and charges high interest rates, resembling the loan-sharking business here in the US.
Since the introduction of a relatively free stock market in China, share prices have as much as quintupled in the last five years. This has been encouraged by the practice of borrowing money to buy on margin. Now panic selling has gripped the market and each day, a quarter of stocks have trading suspended because their prices have dropped more than ten percent. Up to half of stocks in the first two days of this week have had their trading suspended.
The government has been aggressively responding to the sell-off, and one of the biggest brokerage houses established a 20 billion dollar stabilization fund this week. Both banks and brokerage houses are threatened by margin buying, which is estimated to account for $550 billion in stock purchases, although accurate estimates are impossible because of hidden borrowing in the shadow banking sector, for which numbers are unavailable.
One difference from the US and European markets as well as the Japanese market is that the government of China has begun to implement aggressive measures, and is likely to be much more aggressive than other governments in trying to prevent a serious crash that could cost many people their life savings and destabilize the society. China’s government is obsessed with the country’s stability and will do anything to prevent discontent that could lead to protests and uncooperative behavior. China has a long past history of unstable, weak governments and disastrous public discontent, from walking off the job to rioting to mass migrations, resulting in famines and revolutions, and its leaders are fully aware of the consequences of loss of control.
So, unlike the government inaction that followed the stock market crash of 1929, it is likely that the Chinese government will take concerted, prolonged action to prevent the negative consequences of its experiment with free-market ideas like stocks and bank loans. Weak consumer demand and a slumping economy, while still rapidly expanding by world standards, has already resulted in government responses and is likely to lead to more if initial reactions do not have the desired effect.
The apparent trade-off that the Chinese government has made has been, and continues to be, is to obtain stability at the cost of individual freedoms and the development of an upper class that has all the power and most of the money. All levels of government are highly secretive and have been controlled by a small, insular group. Recent pronouncements by government figures show that the plan continues to be to maintain an oligarchy and to do everything possible to control public opinion through censorship and imprisonment of dissenters. Low-level dissent is punished by harassment from secret police, who can do anything they deem necessary to discourage individuals from expressing disagreement with government policies. Potentially disturbing news is quickly suppressed; censorship of electronic and print media is pervasive. Those who are trying to live within the government’s limits have learned self-censorship for survival’s sake, but upward mobility is limited by the need to have personal connections to obtain permission to undertake projects that have profit-making potential.
China has, since the accession of Chairman Mao, had an obsession with stability and growth. Mao’s disastrous personal projects such as the Cultural Revolution have been abandoned by his successors, sacrificed to the all-consuming need for stability to attain food and personal comforts for all the population. The Chinese public is willing to tolerate authoritarian rule to achieve personal sufficiency and even personal luxury, like a car for every family.
Once the people have achieved a sense of personal adequacy and are no longer haunted by the memories of starvation, still echoing since the 1930’s through the 1950’s and even into the 1960’s, they may develop additional aspirations that are familiar to us, such as a desire to speak out and to be informed objectively. The Chinese may even find a taste for real democracy and a disgust for plutocracy and the US practice of paying lip service to free speech while quietly but brutally suppressing genuine dissenters like the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
In the meantime, the Chinese government is a powerful competitor to the US government and may even be considered an enemy of sorts. Certainly, the actions of Chinese government hackers who stole all of the personal information for all of the US government’s confidential workforce after stealing huge quantities of industrial secrets, are unfriendly to the US and could be used to damage our economy.
It is essential that US government negotiators try to obtain concessions from the Chinese, after taking steps to reassure them that we do not intend to take military action to upset the balance of power in Asia. The Chinese government is anxious to be seen as a world power, equal to the US if not superior in manpower and armaments. The US is still the most armed country in the world and spends more on its military than most all other countries combined, but China is number two and is trying harder.
Recently, I posted a piece about the wrongful death penalty given to Rodericus Crawford, who was convicted of smothering his son when he discovered the infant to be dead on awakening in the morning. The infant actually died of pneumonia and sepsis during the night, but the district attorney ran with an erroneous autopsy report that ignored the evidence of pneumonia and cerebral edema in reaching its conclusion of “homicide by smothering” and “chronic child abuse” in February 2012.
Yesterday, I saw the name of the district attorney again in a news report about a man who had been released, exonerated, after over twenty-nine years on death row. The man had died of lung cancer only sixteen months after his release. He was sixty-five years old, and his name was Glenn Ford. The news article described how Mr. Ford was released due to “newly discovered and credible exculpatory evidence” provided by a confidential informant to Dale G. Cox. Mr. Cox was first assistant district attorney in 2013, when he received the confidential informant’s story, at Caddo Parish, Shreveport, Louisiana. Mr. Cox was the prosecuting attorney responsible for railroading Rodericus Crawford, who was convicted in November 2013 and sentenced to death.
By coincidence, the information came to Mr. Cox while he was investigating a murder and interviewing a confidential informant; he said that he was unable to reveal the identity of his source but that it was credible and he now believed that the murder was committed by two other men. Mr. Ford’s involvement was limited to receiving stolen goods from the victim’s pawn shop and selling them; he had no prior knowledge of the murder, nor any direct knowledge about the two who had committed the murder and robbery.
The original trial in which Mr. Ford was convicted featured testimony from the girlfriend of one of the other two men, who admitted that she had lied before, and testimony that the murder was committed by a left-handed man, which was suspicious because Mr. Ford was left-handed.
The story, in the New York Times, included this quote from the lead prosecutor in the case in which Mr. Ford was convicted:
“In March [2015], A. M. Stroud III, lead prosecutor at trial, wrote a remorseful article in The Shreveport Times, declaring, “Glenn Ford was an innocent man,” taking responsibility for a rush to judgment and arguing for the abolition of the death penalty.”
The murder for which Mr. Ford was convicted occurred in November 1983. Ironically, according to the New Yorker article about the new case, Mr. Cox had been opposed to the death penalty when he was young. He was Catholic and attended a Jesuit school. He had worked in the district attorney’s office for six years in 1983 when he resigned, saying that he didn’t feel comfortable pursuing death penalty cases. (According to Catholic doctrine, the death penalty is wrong.) However, by the time he returned to the district attorney’s office full time in 2011, he had changed his mind. He now says that he believes the death penalty should be applied more, not less, as revenge, because it does not work as a deterrent.
Dale G. Cox is a sick man. He is responsible for the wrongful application of the death penalty in more than one case. His action in allowing Mr. Ford to be released was an aberration, and it is not clear to me why he did so. It may have been forced upon him by other members of the district attorney’s team, such as Mr. Stroud, because he stated that he believed Mr. Ford was at least partly responsible for the robbery and murder which resulted in his being sent to death row. He thought that Mr. Ford’s actions in fencing the stolen goods were certainly culpable.
On the other hand, exonerating Mr. Ford of the crime of murdering Isadore Rozeman, 58, the owner of a small jewelry shop, allows him to prosecute two other men, who clearly committed the crime and are already in jail for other violent crimes. Perhaps he thinks he can get the death penalty on them both.
Recently, I have posted a few times on recent scientific research involving the gut, or intestinal, microflora, that is microscopic living things in one’s intestines. I neglected to mention a few elementary facts regarding human beings and their microbes, particularly those in our least favorite bodily excrescences, feces.
First, the human feces are by dry weight 60% bacteria, living and dead. The stomach is nearly sterile; from there, bacterial populations gradually increase as one proceeds down the intestinal tract. There are, very roughly, 100 trillion (An old source from 1977 says, there are up to 10 to the 14 power (10^14) bacteria in the human intestinal tract, that is, ten times more than the 10^13 human cells in the body) microbes in your intestine. What is more important, they represent about a hundred times the number of different genes as are in the human genome, and many of these genes have functions that impact the human body in dramatic fashions.
For example, the gut microbes absorb carbohydrates and peptidoglycans that the human intestinal endodermal cells cannot, and break them down to generate simple sugars that the intestine can absorb, and the body can use. The presence of this type of bacteria accounts in large part for the presence of apparent errors in the estimation of calorie intake in obese people, especially those who claim they are eating little but continue to gain weight.
Another example is, broadly, the secretion of factors by gut microflora that influence the human immune system, intestinal growth, and most unusually, moods (by the secretion of serotonin, for example), as well as their possible effect on neoplasms in the rectum, colon, and rarely, small intestine.
First and foremost, however, the microbes of the intestine serve as a protective barrier to pathogenic bacteria when the pathogens gain access to the gastrointestinal tract. Resident bacteria adhere to the cell walls of intestinal surface cells and prevent other bacteria from gaining access by “crowding them out” or competing for residence in the same ecological niche, reducing available energy sources, and even poisoning the invaders.
The residents of the intestinal tract form many large groups but Bacteroides and Firmicutes are two of the most populous. The Firmicutes are usually gram-positive, include some pathogenic species, and they are known to be “promiscuous” sharers of genetic material by connecting to each other with thin hollow tubes that admit the nucleic acid chains and pass them from one to another. Many are also capable of forming endospores, smaller cells with condensed genetic material that are essentially inactive and resistant to adverse environmental conditions like heat and cold.
Bacteroides, on the other hand, are gram-negative and do not form endospores. They also protect the gut against invasion by other bacteria. However, Bacteroides fragilis is responsible for opportunistic infections such as appendiceal abscesses. Bacteroides are typically resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics and have recently shown resistance to more (erythromycin, clindamycin, and tetracycline.) Bacteroides are typically found in people who eat plenty of meat and animal fats, and also in those who are lean. The Firmicutes, conversely, especially those called Prevotella, are typically found in those who consume large quantities of carbohydrates, as well as vegetarians.
When people are fed a laboratory diet, their bacteria respond with changes in composition within 24 hours. However, these changes are usually modest. Normal weight people who eat a lot of fat and protein usually have Bacteroides in their intestines and do not change that composition when fed a laboratory diet over a period of ten days.
A study of European children versus children in Burkina Faso showed that the Europeans had mostly Bacteroides, while the Burkina Faso children had a predominance of Prevotella. This was attributed to the diet in Burkina Faso, which is mostly carbohydrate, whereas the European diet has plenty of fat and protein.
It is entirely possible for animals to live without any bacteria at all in their intestines. This type of animal can be grown and born without the presence of bacteria, and they can be raised in an essentially sterile environment. Germfree mice, however, require supplements of Vitamin B12, Vitamin K, folate, and biotin.
The gut bacteria also digest polysaccharides and some oligosaccharides into short chain fatty acids(acetate, propionate, and butyrate), which stimulate the proliferation of the gut epithelium and cause it to differentiate.
The gut immune system is stimulated by enteric bacteria, and it forms into nodes along the intestinal tract; when fully developed, it is known as gut-associated lymphoid tissue or GALT. When an antigen is consumed orally, the systemic response to it is prevented; this effect persists for more than a month in normal guts but only a few days in germ-free mice.
More fascinating facts later.
Sources: Science public access article 2011; Infection and Immunity 2008;
Sentenced to Death for Marijuana Possession: Wrongful Conviction of Black Man in Louisiana
A twenty-three year old black man, Rodericus Crawford, was sentenced to death after his one-year old son died in bed with him, of pneumonia. His conviction hinged on a bad autopsy that was done by the forensic pathologist for Shreveport, in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. A story giving full details was published in last week’s New Yorker (combined issue, July 6 and 13, 2015.)
The infant had a prior minor injury that occurred one day before his death: a fall in the bathroom that resulted in a minor cut on his lip and a bruise above his eye. The autopsy showed bruising around the lips that must have occurred during postmortem attempts at resuscitation, bruises on the buttocks, and pneumonia, as well as cerebral edema. The pathologist diagnosed “chronic child abuse” and claimed that the infant had been smothered. The presence of cerebral edema, however, contradicted this cause of death because smothering or suffocation does not cause cerebral edema: the victim dies before edema can get started. The edema must have been due to the pneumonia. The parents had reported that the infant had had “a little cold” and had been treated with a nasal aspirator for congestion; rapid progression and death from pneumonia and sepsis can occur within a few hours without the caretakers awareness of severe acute illness, especially during night-time hours.
The man responsible for the trial, conviction, and death penalty, however, was named Dale Cox, the first assistant district attorney of Caddo Parish. He has a positive obsession with killing black people for perceived crimes and had been responsible for more than a third of the death sentences in Louisiana. His parish, Caddo Parish, is home to unreconstructed racists from the Confederacy and was the last capital of this renegade regime during the Civil War. This parish also had the second most lynchings of any county in the South.
After the trial, three pathologists were enlisted to write autopsy reports that contradicted the one used to convict this man: all agreed that the infant had died of pneumonia and sepsis. A blood test confirmed that sepsis was present. Daniel Spitz, a forensic pathologist who had already co-authored a pathology textbook that is popular in medical schools, stated that his autopsy results made it impossible to try the father for supposedly murdering the infant. He stated that the original pathologist had diagnosed homicide “on what seemed like a whim.”
The prosecutor, who received the contradictory autopsy report from Spitz a week before the trial, conceded that it deterred him, but on conferring with the original pathologist, who told him that there was also bruising on the infant’s bottom, he decided to proceed.The pathologist, Traylor, claimed that the pneumonia couldn’t have been severe because the parents didn’t report any fever or rapid heartbeat.
Daniel Cox, the prosecutor, who was sixty-seven at the time of trial, had gone through a divorce and personal bankruptcy in 2005, and some of his colleagues felt that he had become unstable, volatile, and that his usually calm demeanour had deteriorated recently. The defense attorney, Daryl Gold, who thought that Cox was unusually “nice”, even speculated that Cox had a “brain tumor or something.” Another defense lawyer, Henry Walker, the former president of the state’s criminal defense bar, wrote to Listserv that Cox had “developed a state of mental unbalance…”
This rabid, unbalanced prosecutor was hell-bent on sentencing Roderius Crawford to death even though he had no proof of his allegation that the infant was smothered. He used the fact that Crawford had been arrested for marijuana possession as a club at trial to make him and the infant’s mother seem like drug fiends who had brutally murdered their child in a fit of marijuana-induced stupor or sexual frenzy. He openly played on the jury’s prejudices and ignorance regarding drug use as well as the circumstances of their poverty. He hammered on the fact that the father and defendant had never held a full-time job (never mind the unemployment rate and lack of opportunities in his neighborhood in Shreveport.)
Rodericus Crawford was not called to testify by his defense lawyer, although he could have made a sympathetic figure and could have truthfully denied that he had ever abused the infant.
It seems that when Crawford was arrested for possession he was released because the police believed that he had promised to inform on his neighbors, a house five doors down from his that was thought to be a “drug den.” After his release, he refused to turn “state’s evidence” or “fink” on his friends, so the police were dissatisfied and may have placed his case in line for re-arrest; if so, he would have been held until trial because he had no money for bail. Crawford’s mother perceived that his prosecution for his son’s death was revenge for his failure to rat on his friends after the original arrest.
There was a pervasive culture of racism where Crawford lived; when he called 911, the dispatchers assumed that he had smothered his son and stated that there were “a hundred people living in that house” (there were five.) It took over twenty minutes for the ambulance to arrive, and when it did, the paramedics quickly realized that the infant was dead. There were signs, like jaw rigidity and milky opacification of the corneas, that indicated he had been dead for more than an hour. However, they excluded the father from the ambulance and never told anyone that the child was dead. A crowd quickly formed around the ambulance, and they finally drove away after calling the police and requesting protection from the people (family members and neighbors from whom they had withheld the fact that the child was already dead) surrounding them. They turned off their lights and sirens as soon as they turned the corner.
The police wouldn’t let Crawford or the mother follow the ambulance to the hospital. Instead, they immediately detained him and ignored his behavior, which indicated he was severely affected by the incident and already assumed his son to be dead. His innocence was most clearly expressed by his behavior at that time: he was sobbing uncontrollably despite the mother’s reassurances.
How can you sentence someone to death on such slim evidence, and ignore the dissent of three pathologists who are willing to go on record as stating that the first autopsy was mistaken? Even if you assume that the infant was smothered, the father clearly did not intend for his son to die, thus could not be convicted of first-degree murder; and manslaughter is usually not a capital crime. Clearly, Cox is driven by his pathological animosity to black people and is in the driver’s seat when it comes to kidnapping innocent citizens and sending them to be murdered by the apparatus of the state. We can only hope that this case comes to the Supreme Court and is reversed before the murder can be committed.
Cerebral Folding and Brain Size
A new article in Science magazine describes a mathematical function which relates cerebral folding to surface area and thickness. The thinner the cerebral cortex, the more folds it can make and the more surface area it can accommodate. The article can be found here.
Here is a quote from the abstract:
“Larger brains tend to have more folded cortices, but what makes the cortex fold has remained unknown. We show that the degree of cortical folding scales uniformly across lissencephalic and gyrencephalic species, across individuals, and within individual cortices as a function of the product of cortical surface area and the square root of cortical thickness. ”
This formula can be demonstrated by crumpling different thicknesses of paper; maximum crumpling tolerance depends on the square root of the thickness of the paper and results in different final volumes for the ball of crumpled paper.
Therefore, as lissencephalic brains tend to be found in patients with mental retardation, and gyrencephaly is said to be associated with genius, the surface area of the brain is important to its functional ability. The average human neocortex contains about 20 billion neurons and roughly 30 billion glial cells (the number of glia varies widely) in a six-layered coating of gray matter on top of large numbers of long axons covered in myelin, which shows up as the fatty white matter underneath. The more surface area, and the more folding, the more neurons and glia can be included in the neocortex. It appears that the brain functions by sending signals from an introductory ball of interneurons to a more abstract layer of neocortical cells, and even from the initial neocortical area to another, yet more abstract set of neocortical cells. The processing done by each set of neurons to signals received from below relates to how the brain responds to a given set of sensory signals. “Thinking” is really a series of processes carried out by sets of neural cells that react to their inputs by sending an output either to a higher level set of cells or towards a set of cells that initiates motor function. Even motor function is controlled by several layers of sets of cells; in a sense, function is merely passing along signals from one’s input cells to the corresponding output cells. Even within a single anatomically localized set of cells, there may be layers: cells that receive input from the distant region, cells that receive local inputs and send only to equally local output cells, and finally cells that receive local input and send their output to a higher distant region.
For example, in the visual system, there are cells in the retina that sense light, a layer of interneurons, and below that, a layer of cells with axons that project in the optic nerve, cross in the chiasm, and end in the lateral geniculate body. This set of neurons has cells that receive the input of axons from the optic nerve and pass them along to interneurons; then there is an output level that sends its axons along to the occipital area of the neocortex, on the posterior pole of the brain. From there, another bundle of axons radiates to the frontal or prefrontal cortex, which is a third level of abstraction.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 