Killing Cats
Killing Cats
When I went back to school in the spring of 1972, my parents handed me an assistantship in a research project that was going on at Massachusetts General Hospital. My parents were friends with a professor whose boyfriend was a medical student; this student had been working in a laboratory there and wanted someone to replace him as an assistant. The research was in neurophysiology, and it involved using very thin electrodes inserted into the brains of cats to pick up activity in certain nerve centers within the brain.
This work was complex and morbid. We would take a young cat that had been raised in a cage at the laboratory animal compound in a big room in the basement that had cages of dogs, rabbits, and a few other mammals that were there to be used in various research projects. The men who worked in the big room were called Dieners, which is German for ‘servant’, and I was told to be very careful to be respectful of them because they were sensitive.
The cat would be given an intraperitoneal (that is, in the stomach) injection of a fast acting anesthetic like Pentothal. In a couple of minutes, the cat would fall sound asleep and we would then perform a cutdown (cut through the skin to expose a vein) and insert an intravenous line. This line was used to infuse a paralyzing agent, Flaxedil, and a saline/glucose mixture that kept the cat hydrated.
After the cutdown, we would open the cat up at the neck and perform a tracheostomy (insert a plastic breathing tube into the trachea after cutting it open.) The “trach” tube would be connected to an air pump that breathed for the cat, since the Flaxedil stopped the cat’s breathing muscles as well.
Finally, the cat’s head was placed in a large adjustable metal device that supported it on two prongs inserted in the ears and a clamp that held its jaw. The skin over the top of the skull was cut lengthwise and small holes were drilled over the needle insertion sites. The needle was then run on a stereotactic vise (a vise on which precisely measured movements can be made) down into the brain until we picked up a signal from a nerve center that responded to light. The cat was placed in a large box with a translucent screen in front of its eyes and measured lines of light were projected on the screen, moving across in a slow, measured fashion, or moving up and down in the same measured fashion. The light source was adjustable from a long line to a small spot.
The desired nerve centers responded to the light in a repetitive fashion: as the line of light moved across the screen, at a certain spot the nerve would start firing, then after the beam of light had passed, stop firing again. The best nerves we located would respond to the light like a bull’s eye: there would be a round area within which the nerve would fire repeatedly, but in the center of this area the nerve would suddenly stop firing altogether for a moment.
These nerve centers represented cells within the lateral geniculate body, a kidney bean shaped area in the brain within which were the neuron cell bodies that passed along visual impulses from the optic nerve and the eye to centers in the occiput or rear of the brain that processed visual information. These neurons were organized and specialized to fire only at a light impulse that appeared in a small area of the visual field, and the individual neurons collectively built a picture of the cat’s visual field.
We also inserted electrodes into the median raphe, the general activating center of the brain. Small electrical impulses in this area would alert the cat or wake it up.
We recorded the electrical impulses we received from the electrodes that we inserted into the lateral geniculate body onto a large tape recorder that we could play back afterwards to remind us of specific activity that we had picked up at definite times after light beams stimulated it or electrical stimulation of the median raphe occurred.
When we had located a cell that appeared to have the right behavior, a bull’s eye shaped reaction to light, we would infuse LSD-25 into the cat’s vein and record the cell’s reaction, which usually lasted two or three hours. Most often, the cell’s activity would increase but its sensitivity to light would decrease.
In the first few cats we did this procedure on, we did not use any anesthetic. After I figured out what was happening from the cat’s perspective, I realized that it would be awake but paralyzed and possibly suffering. I insisted that they find some sort of anesthetic and they began to use nitrous oxide through an anesthesia machine; a mixture of 80% nitrous oxide and 20 % oxygen was produced by the machine, and this was pumped into the cat’s lungs by the ventilator.
After dosing the cat with nitrous oxide, an inhalation anesthetic that induced a light coma, we would record impulses from the cat’s brain for 24 to 72 hours, depending on how long the cat survived. Eventually the cat would die, from side effects of the anesthesia or malnutrition (we fed them intravenously with glucose but it wasn’t adequate for prolonged survival.)
We then infused glutaraldehyde as a preservative into the cat’s brain, cut it out and sent the preserved brain to be sliced for microscopic examination. This would show us the needle tracts and whether we had reached the desired location within the brain.
Between the fall of 1972 and the spring and summer of 1973, I participated as an assistant in about twenty or thirty of these procedures, each ending with the death of the cat and its preservation in glutaraldehyde for microscopic examination.
In the summer of 1973, our cats started dying prematurely and we discovered that the anesthesia machine had a crack in the output valve that was allowing the cats to be slowly suffocated.
In the fall of 1973 and into 1974, the lab moved into a different building and I didn’t do any more cat procedures. I analyzed the data we had gathered and performed statistical tests on it. Eventually I produced a report which was turned into a paper published in the Proceedings of something or other.
In the spring of 1973, possibly in February or March, I adopted one of the cats from the lab cages and took it back to my dorm room. It promptly took shits randomly all over the place and I had to clean these things up. The next day I took the cat back to the lab and a few weeks later, I used that cat in an experiment where I anesthetized it and cut out its lateral geniculate body for evaluation of the amount of serotonin in it by another laboratory. I then turned up the nitrous oxide to 100% and disposed of the cat a few minutes later after its heart stopped beating.
I was dating a girl named Mei-Ling Ma in the spring of 1973 and I took her on a visit to the laboratory. She took a job in a lab a floor above us where there was a hospital unit.
The lab became a place where I did unauthorized experiments, and in the summer of 1973 I took an ounce of marijuana and extracted the cannabinoids with ether, concentrating them in a smaller portion. I did the experiment late at night and put a sign up on the door to warn the night watchman that I was working that night.
When I went home I forgot to take the sign down. I remembered after I went home and turned around, and went back to the lab and took the sign down. After I took it down, it was already 7 in the morning, and I sat down at the bench to look at some specimens under the microscope. I was looking through the scope when the head of the lab came in, a few minutes before 8 in the morning. He saw me working at the microscope and assumed that I had been there examining specimens for some time. He told me to go home and get some sleep, which I did.
The process of experimenting on cats disgusted me after a while and I think I felt guilty about it too. When I went to medical school I was offered a position in a lab that did experiments on cats; this time they kept the cats alive indefinitely and they seemed to be doing well. They installed plastic domes in place of their skulls and took small samples of cerebrospinal fluid periodically to measure serotonin levels. This was some of the pioneering research that was being done on serotonin in the brain. I turned down the offer to work in that lab in medical school. If I had accepted the offer, I could have paid my way through medical school. Instead I turned to a National Health Service scholarship and obligated myself to serve for four years in an underprivileged area in return for a generous scholarship and stipend.
That was a major turning point in my life, in which I abandoned research in favor of primary practice in an underserved area.
Here’s something I never would have known if I hadn’t found this web site:
The idea is to impeach Hillary Clinton before she becomes President. I know what you are thinking, how can they do that? Well, the truth is they can’t – and they know it. So what these clever little mental munchkins came up with is a plan to impeach her for being Secretary of State, posthumously.
I am sure they were passing around gold stars to everyone over at specialoperationsspeaks.com. the good people who are leading the charge to impeach Clinton…
…Fact is, congressional precedent dictates that all elected officials remain subject to impeachment and disqualification from holding office even after resignation.
While it technically is true that an official can be subject to impeachment after they resign, the actual “congressional precedent” can be found in three cases, none of which are even remotely similar to Mrs Clinton….
…The last “precedent” was when Richard Nixon resigned just prior to adoption of articles of impeachment by the House.
This happened in a tiny town in Oklahoma back in January, but it didn’t get into the national news. I don’t know why not.
As reported in the Atlanta Black Star January 18, 2015: “on Thursday” (January 15?) a man called 911 twice and claimed that there was a bomb in the local school house, the Sentinel Head Start school. He identified himself as Dallas Horton. Local police and sheriffs (a total of five officers) conducted a raid on Horton’s home, with the black police chief leading. The chief said that he and the other officers were shouting “police” and so on, but Mr. Horton claimed he didn’t know they were police. When the police chief entered the room where Mr. Horton was standing, Horton, fired four shots at him; three struck him in the chest, striking his bullet resistant vest, and one struck him in the arm. He was treated at the hospital and released.
However, none of the other officers returned fire. After a brief investigation, Horton was released. The logic behind the release supposedly was that the calls to 911 did not come from Horton’s home, so he could not have made the threats. In addition, the investigators apparently believed Horton’s claim that he did not know that the officers were police rather than random armed intruders. The investigation was conducted by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, who searched Horton’s home; in addition to several legal firearms, they were said to have found a “possible” explosive device. There was no explanation as to why the “possible” explosive device did not justify arresting Mr. Horton for investigation of “possession of an explosive device”, which is a crime.
Mr. Horton was apparently well known to the local police, and his Facebook page has a number of violent, racist images and statements. He is said to be a “survivalist type.” The mayor of Sentinel (population 904) said that he has known Horton his entire life.
I don’t know what to make of this story, but it doesn’t sound to me as if Dallas Horton was adequately investigated or appropriately charged. Perhaps this is because this was a small town and he was well known to the police and local politicians; it seems that a white racist, survivalist type fits right in to this community.
Comment of the Day
Indrid Cold
USA 5/22/2015 8:00 AM
This explains the widespread and increasing contempt for our criminal justice system. Why do you suppose people are filled with such rage against our legal system, and the police? Could it be that the citizenry are tired of seeing people incarcerated for years over victimless drug possession, while those who steal the equivalent of a small nation’s GDP go free? I find our current system of “justice” utterly contemptible lacking even the basic mandate of criminal law enforcement. Our prisons are now nothing more than for-profit facilities designed to warehouse those without job prospects (the surplus population if you will.)
Our police, with their paramilitary operations methodology, now simply keep our for-profit penal system filled up to the capacity that the municipal governments are contractually bound to. Yet not a single corporate CEO has been indicted for massive crimes that have had negative effects from coast to coast. And the “fines” that are levied amount to little more than 10% of the amount that was illegally appropriated. I am not some young inexperienced kid railing against “the man” but am a successful business owner who quite unexpectedly finds himself in a circumstance of total disrespect for “authority.” I can hardly imagine how those who have suffered direct predation by “the man” must feel. I suspect however, that the riots in cities like Baltimore are but the fuse that will ignight a full scale civil rebellion.
In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is requesting a retraction following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author.
Donald Green, of Columbia, and Michael LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA, published the paper, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” in December 2014. The study received widespread media attention, including from This American Life, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Science Friday, Vox, and HuffingtonPost, as LaCour’s site notes.
David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, were two of the people impressed with the work, so they planned an extension of it, as they explain in a timeline posted online yesterday:
As we examined the study’s data in planning our own studies, two features surprised us: voters’ survey responses exhibit much higher test-retest reliabilities than we have observed in any other panel survey data, and the response and reinterview rates of the panel survey were significantly higher than we expected. We set aside our doubts about the study and awaited the launch of our pilot extension to see if we could manage the same parameters. LaCour and Green were both responsive to requests for advice about design details when queried. Earlier this month, they began a pilot of their extension. They soon realized that the response rate of the pilot study was notably lower than what LaCour and Green (2014) reported. When Broockman and Kalla contacted the firm they thought had performed the original study upon which the Science paper was based, the survey firm claimed they had no familiarity with the project and that they had never had an employee with the name of the staffer we were asking for. The firm also denied having the capabilities to perform many aspects of the recruitment procedures described in LaCour and Green (2014).
As noted in the article on Retraction Watch, Michael La Cour was a graduate student at UCLA. He subsequently received a PhD, partly on the basis of his dissertation, which was entitled “When Persuasion Works, Lasts and Spreads: Evidence From Three Longitudinal Field Experiments on Gay Equality and Abortion.” It is possible that this PhD may be rescinded. He also was apparently offered a position at Princeton starting in July, although that offer may have been taken back since this revelation only a couple of days ago.
We should note that the retraction isn’t official just yet; it hasn’t been printed in Science, the magazine that published the original piece. They are publishing an Editorial Expression of Concern, and after they have confirmed the information, they will presumably proceed to an actual retraction. In addition, LaCour states on his web site that he “stands by” his findings and “…will supply a definitive response on or before May 29, 2015. I appreciate your patience, as I gather evidence and relevant information…” What evidence he needs to gather is open to question; it seems to me that he needs merely to search his own mind and remember whether he actually had anything to do with Qualtrics, the company that he claimed he contracted to do the actual survey.
Green stated that LaCour had “confessed to falsely describing at least some of the details of the data collection” but apparently that confession was only for Green’s consumption, not for public attribution.
Here is another fraudulent piece of research, this time quickly discovered and put up for retraction. In the the Paolo Macchiarini case, some of the doctors involved in the care of the patients raised concerns about his claims. In this case, researchers who wanted to confirm and extend the study discovered that the data was questionable and confirmed it by contacting the survey firm allegedly used in the study.
In this case, the conclusion is that people who are biased against gay marriage can be convinced to accept it with a brief talk– implying that the bias is either not deeply held or is readily overcome with personal discussion. This conclusion has lost support because the study claiming to confirm it has been shown to be fraudulent.
In the previous case, an exciting new therapy for replacing organs damaged beyond repair was given support by false reports of survival after surgery. This new form of therapy is still in the experimental stages and the false reports leave us without confidence in the technique used– for the moment.
Retractions of published research papers seem to be very common, but according to Retraction Watch, they represent only a tiny percentage of publications– about 600 a year out of 2.5 million papers total. It seems that retractions are newsworthy and memorable, especially the ones involving fraud, but the ordinary paper that is not retracted just flies under the radar.
Retractions do not always indicate fraud– in most cases, they are the result of mistakes made in the preparation of figures and formulation of hypotheses. Thus, even when a paper is retracted, it does not necessarily reflect on the character of the authors. The really newsworthy retractions are the rare cases in which one of the researchers has actually committed fraud or made something up.
These cases are also the most difficult to detect, since an author who has made something up has probably consciously covered his tracks. Thus, it is possible that there are many more fraudulent papers out there that haven’t been and may never be discovered. This means that the best way to avoid fraud is to teach the potential authors to be honorable while they are still in college. Even more important, current researchers tell us, the pressure to “publish or perish” needs to diminish to prevent excessive publications. Researchers cannot function effectively when they are subjected to this kind of pressure.
PS The originators of the site Retraction Watch have written an “op-ed” piece about research fraud for yesterday’s New York Times. It has additional explanations for the “epidemic” of fraud and is well worth reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/opinion/whats-behind-big-science-frauds.html …I’ll summarize it tomorrow as I have already posted too many times today (there’s a limit?)
But there was one measure of a specific slur. According to analytics compiled by Topsy, a research company that collects and analyzes what is shared on Twitter, the number of postings that included Mr. Obama’s name and one particular racial epithet jumped substantially on Monday, the day of the president’s first posting, to 150.
One Twitter user who did not use that specific racial slur responded to the president with just two words: “Black monkey,” a comparison that was not uncommon. “Get back in your cage monkey,” another person wrote.
Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said that the language directed at Mr. Obama was unfortunately “all too common on the Internet,” and that officials would probably not spend much time trying to block abusive commenters from the president’s account.
via Obama’s Twitter Debut, @POTUS, Attracts Hate-Filled Posts – NYTimes.com.
Here’s a measure of how stupid and full of hate some people can be: sending Twitter posts to President Obama’s personal account referring to him as a “monkey” or a “N..” You’d think people would know better. From the article:
”
One person posted a doctored image of Mr. Obama’s famous campaign poster, instead showing the president with his head in a noose, his eyes closed and his neck appearing broken as if he had been lynched. Instead of the word “HOPE” in capital letters as it appeared on the campaign poster, the doctored image had the words “ROPE.”
The accompanying message said “#arrestobama #treason we need ‘ROPE FOR CHANGE.’ ” It was addressed to @POTUS by a user calling himself@jeffgully49, who has posted other images of Mr. Obama in a noose, and whose Twitter profile picture shows Mr. Obama behind bars. “We still hang for treason, don’t we?” his post said.
The writer, Jeff Gullickson of Minneapolis, subsequently posted on Thursday that his reply to Mr. Obama had earned him a visit from the Secret Service at home. Reached for comment, Mr. Gullickson responded by asking in an email how much The New York Times would pay him for an interview.
White House officials and a Twitter spokesman said they could not determine the percentage of postings to Mr. Obama that were racist. But they appeared to be a small number in what was an otherwise social-media-fueled show of love for Mr. Obama, who was drawing followers at a rapid pace — nearly 2.3 million by Thursday afternoon — and hundreds of worshipful messages that welcomed him to Twitter and praised him on everything from his appearance to his policies.
“I love you, @POTUS,” wrote one person, @camerondallas, who has nearly five million followers, in a posting marked as a favorite more than 15,000 times.
”
So most of the Twitter posts were positive. The number of negative, racist, or simply hateful messages is a reflection of the Republican Party’s attempts to demonize the President as much as it is a sign of how many people are racist, xenophobic, or disrespectful. The Republicans seem to have energized their most antagonistic followers to openly display their hate on a forum closely followed by the Secret Service.
Most of these antagonists don’t seem to be aware that every post they make on Twitter puts them on the Secret Service’s list of potential assassins. They also don’t seem to understand that the Secret Service takes its mission– protecting the President and his family– very seriously and will imprison and prosecute those who display an unfortunate zeal for attacking Mr. Obama.
In this way, while it makes the President’s supporters very uncomfortable to hear these negative sentiments, it neatly exposes those who are antagonistic and foolish enough to commit their sentiments to Twitter. The really dangerous people, though, are those with enough presence of mind to keep their mouths shut and make preparations to kill without revealing their intent.
These hidden antagonists are the ones that the Secret Service worries about the most — the ones who hide their intentions until the critical moment and make it necessary to interpose their government paid bodies in front of the President when they shoot at him. It is because of these people that the Secret Service has its most potent oath: to die if necessary to prevent anyone killing the President.
An investigation in Sweden into a surgeon who is a pioneer in the field of regenerative medicine has found that he committed scientific misconduct by omitting or falsifying information about the conditions of three patients in medical journals.
Dr. Bengt Gerdin, the independent investigator who looked into accusations against the surgeon, Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, said that in several journal papers, including one in The Lancet in 2011, Dr. Macchiarini had “omitted some data and also fabricated or falsified some data regarding the postoperative state of patients” on whom he had performed experimental groundbreaking operations.
via Inquiry Finds Misconduct by a Top Surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini – NYTimes.com.
The substance of the accusation was that the surgeon had failed to do followup on several patients into whom he had transplanted prosthetic tracheas of plastic treated with stem cells and regeneration drugs. At the same time, he had reported the followup examinations as if he had really performed them. Two of the patients have died, and the third has been stuck in intensive care for almost three years.
The investigation started last fall after four doctors who treated the patients complained that their conditions had never been as good as represented in the papers published about them. Each patient had suffered a severely damaged trachea which, in an experimental operation, Dr. Macchiarini replaced with a plastic trachea implanted with stem cells. The trachea was treated with drugs that promoted regrowth, and, it was hoped, eventually a new trachea.
There have been both tremendous interest and numerous attempts recently to create new organs, to take the place of damaged ones, with stem cells in a plastic scaffolding that supports regrowth and eventual replacement. Animal experiments have so far been very encouraging. The results of Dr. Macchiarini’s surgeries were the subject of several scientific articles, including a positive report in The Lancet in 2011.
There are also complaints that Dr. Macchiarini failed to obtain adequate informed consent from the involved patients for the operations, and that there had not been appropriate ethical review of the procedures. These accusations will be taken up at another level, according to Dr. Gerdin.
There has been some delay because the report by Dr. Gerdin was published only in Swedish, based on the work that Dr. Macchiarini had done at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Some principals have delayed their response until the report is translated into English. The accused doctor has denied all the allegations and blamed other doctors for the problems.
Why Did the US Invade Iraq in 2003?
Recently Jeb Bush, the younger brother of ex-president George W. Bush and son of ex-president George H.W. Bush, made a stir in the news by saying that he would have still invaded Iraq “knowing what we know now.” Jeb was forced to dial back on this mis-statement at least twice, but still he failed to tell the truth.
The fact is that we did not invade Iraq based on a mistake. We invaded based on a blatant lie. George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney were dissatisfied with the information that UN weapons inspector Hans Blix was providing, namely that Iraq no longer had any weapons of mass destruction. He was even more dissatisfied when his own CIA told him the same thing. So he set up his own “intelligence” unit within the CIA, operated by Douglas Feith, to cook up stories about “hidden” weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, stories that turned out to be lies.
Even the story that Saddam Hussein tried to have George W. Bush’s father George H.W. Bush assassinated was a lie. The entire incident was made up, yet believed by the media and still believed by many who should know better.
Even if the invasion of Iraq was justified based on the cruelty and brutality of Saddam Hussein, our mismanagement of the country after our successful invasion was not justifiable. We disbanded the Iraqi army and sent its soldiers home with nothing to do and nothing to support them. We destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq during the invasion unnecessarily and we failed to properly rebuild it. We disbursed billions of dollars for rebuilding projects that were misused and diverted into the pockets of crooks in Iraq as well as in the United States. We spent billions of dollars on private security forces who were so trigger happy that some of them were tried for murder in the US because of the public outcry in Iraq. We turned Hussein over to his enemies for a rigged show trial instead of sending him to the United Nations for an International War Crimes Tribunal, partly because that Tribunal could have indicted our own generals and administrators in Iraq. We created secret prisons that tortured and murdered innocent Iraqis. We set up a system of blood money payments to people for turning in their neighbors to be secretly tortured and murdered by an Iraqi secret police that we created and trained.
As a result of our mismanagement of the government of Iraq, a revolutionary terror group that calls itself the Islamic caliphate of Syria and Mesopotamia has arisen to overrun the Sunni parts of Iraq and threaten the Shia and Kurdish parts. The shortsighted lies of people like Paul Wolfowitz who claimed that the invasion would cost less than a hundred billion dollars and take less than a hundred thousand soldiers have been shown up, and the the realities that General Shinseki warned about and was fired for have been proven true. The results: over a trillion dollars spent and 2.5 million soldiers deployed, including those who spent two or three or more tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The results: unknown hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and the devastation of a struggling but viable country.
In the face of these facts, the admission by Jeb Bush that “mistakes were made” has to be one of the grossest understatements of the twenty-first century so far. The possibility that Jeb might become president has to be the most depressing thought of the election of 2016.
A new report states that there has been a loss of 42.1% of honeybees this last year, worse than last year, and the second worst since die-off records have been kept, in 2010. Colony collapse disorder has claimed the lives of more and more honeybees every year, troubling agriculturalists and honeybee keepers. For the first time, summer losses exceeded winter losses.
Normally, honeybee keepers expect to lose ten percent of their bees every year. About ten years ago, losses began to increase, for unknown reasons. Mass deaths have been less in the last few years, but remain very high.
A variety of possible causes have been suggested: the varroa mite, which affects small backyard bee keepers more than commercial growers; neonicotinoid insecticides, which are deadly to bees; and the loss of millions of acres of wildflowers due to intensive farming practices.
The honeybee is in no danger of extinction, but these large losses are causing difficulty in pollinating a large number of commercial crops, which depend on honeybees.
Most importantly, the lack of a clear cause for these massive die-offs of entire colonies is worrying to entomologists and farmers alike.
For more information, check out http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/us/honeybees-mysterious-die-off-appears-to-worsen.html and http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/ which blames the die-off on a combination of multiple insecticides and fungicides.
The latter article mentions that it takes 60% of the honeybee population to pollinate just one crop, almonds; and California grows 80% of the world’s almonds.
Market Economy
Here is a controversial subject: the economy, what is often called a “market economy”, that is, a system in which things are priced by reference to an open market of the top bid by any potential buyer (also known formally as an “auction economy”), which is supposed to be either good (if you are a Republican) or bad (if you are a “left-wing Democrat” although few Democrats would endorse this point of view.)
Thus, a market economy is considered the ideal state of affairs by Republicans, while at the same time there is a strict moral code prohibiting pornography, homosexuality, abortion, and so on. Democrats are far more equitable in their moral views, with at least some Democrats tolerating homosexuals, abortions, etc.
At the same time, Republicans view Democrats as “secretly opposed” to a market economy. Democrats would say that they were not opposed to a market economy but would like to have it regulated and abuses prohibited. Republicans shudder at the concept of “regulation.”
What is a “market economy” and how does it supposedly work? First, there is supposed to be a public market in which people offer their products and services for sale and others buy what they wish to and can pay for.
In addition, it appears that, ideally to most Republicans, government would place no restrictions on individual’s ability to corner stock markets, take over corporations, consolidate into monopolies, suppress minimum wages, avoid medical insurance, give out enormous salaries to top executives, and so on. Most Republicans would also accept the many fraudulent enterprises who currently find ways around ordinary taxes by claiming to be religions, and favored corporations such as Halliburton who still enjoy privileged access to government contracts.
The Democrats and Barack Obama especially have attacked this ideal situation that the Republicans had under Bush. They have instituted an attempt at universal health insurance and some companies have been forced to raise their minimum wages even though the labor market is very soft.
Many of the Democratic reforms are now in the hands of the Supreme Court. It remains to be seen whether the Court will be able to block these changes that the Democrats want. For one thing, the Court could destroy the foundations of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) by a case it is currently considering and will promulgate this summer. There are numerous other cases in which initiatives of the Obama administration are being attacked by Republican plaintiffs who expect the Supreme Court to derail Obama’s plans. Decisions to come out this summer will tell the tale, with more cases to follow this fall.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 