Monthly Archives: May 2015

Continuing the theme, NewScientist (2 May 2015) (paywall) discusses yet another factor in climate change – microbes:

The Senate Republicans isn’t the only group unhappy about Iranian Nuclear Negotiations.  Arash Karami reports for AL Monitor on shady Iranian Parliament maneuverings:

A bill demanding that Iran suspend nuclear talks with the United States until US officials cease making military threats against Iran was presented to the Iranian parliament May 12. The bill has faced a backlash, however, with some members of parliament claiming that they were misled about the nature and content of the bill.

Javad Karimi-Ghodousi, a member of parliament from Mashhad and member of the hard-line Endurance Front, presented the bill to parliament’s board of directors. The bill, which received 80 signatures, was presented as a “triple-emergency bill,” requiring a representative from the Guardian Council to be present to give a response within 24 hours. Triple-emergency bills are typically presented when the country is actively under military attack. Mehdi Koochakzadeh, Hamid Rasaei, Esmail Kowsari and Morteza Agha-Tehrani, who signed the bill, have been some of the most vocal critics in parliament against the nuclear talks and the Iranian negotiation team. …

Mehdi Mousavi-Nejad, whose name appears on the bill also, said to Icana, “We never signed a triple-emergency bill. The bill that was put in front of me, and which I signed, was a double-emergency bill.” A double-emergency bill requires that the bill be presented to the parliament floor within 24 hours and bypasses normal committee hearings. Mousavi-Nejad said that he told the creators of the bill that he would only sign a double-emergency bill, and since they changed it his signature must be voided.

In another article, also by Karami, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is rather irate about the United States:

During his speech on May 6, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded to comments by US officials about the possibility of a military confrontation should the nuclear negotiations between Iran and members of the UN Security Council fail. The comments were some of the harshest yet by the supreme leader, who has the final say on the nuclear program.

“I’ve repeatedly spoken about the nuclear talks. What we’ve needed to say we’ve said, but everyone should pay attention — our Foreign Ministry officials, various officials, the elite of society: If a nation cannot defend its identity and greatness against foreigners, certainly it will be struck. There is no return; it has to know the value of its character,” Khamenei said.

He continued, “The enemy makes threats. In these last few days, two American officials made threats. We won’t even mention those who don’t have important posts; these are [top] officials.”

If negotiations lose his favor, then we could find ourselves back at square one.  And while the neocons may think war is both inevitable and good, the rest of us still remember the nightmare of Iraq, both past and present tense, and connect it to their foolishness.

NewScientist (29 April 2015) (paywall) explains the shortcomings of current vaccines used to stop H5N2, which has decimated chickens in Iowa and turkeys in Minnesota:

[V]accinated poultry transmit the virus without getting sick, making its spread “silent”. Vaccination has driven H5N1’s evolution as these viruses adapt to the birds. China is now trapped, say researchers: it wants to give up expensive vaccination, but if it did, ubiquitous, silent H5N1 infections would decimate unvaccinated birds.

Must make farmers feel helpless.   I hope they have insurance.

A Facebook correspondent likes Carson:

I like to listen to the man, but he is to nice to win.

Perhaps.  His speech at the National Prayer Breakfast was apparently not the nicest:

Dr. Ben Carson, former pediatric neurosurgeon and author of “You Have a Brain” declared that President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast “makes me feel that perhaps we’re [Christians] being betrayed” on Saturday’s “Fox & Friends” on the Fox News Channel.

Given what appears to be his level of ignorance on a number of subjects important in the political arena, I think he’ll either be out in a hurry, or he’ll be quite entertaining as he finds it very rough sledding in a field that he doesn’t own.

Which brings me to a somewhat startling result: sympathy.  I’ve noticed that as we become a more and more specialized society – an inevitability, given what we (for example, Dr. Carson’s specialty as a pediatric neurosurgeon) – our opinions on nearly anything outside of our specialty can be horrendous.  Dr. Carson thinks a President can ignore the Supreme Court; that the 2016 elections may be canceled; that our troops should be immune from war crimes prosecution … these are all positions that I would take to be from an unserious candidate.  Yet Dr. Carson’s indisputable accomplishments mark him as extremely serious, and being a surgeon who pioneered new surgeries marks him as a rung or two above your standard-issue doc (who I also admire for their memories and their intense work ethic – but recognize that’s what it’s all about).

So … what’s the deal?  My personal theory is simply a person can only do so much, no matter what their level of intelligence may be.  At some point, you have to turn off the info flow and rest; and if your information flow is tainted, well, GIGO.

We no longer have renaissance men or women.  We’re specialists, or we’re general laborers, working so many hours that being informed on much of anything is difficult; or we’re poverty-stricken and therefore even deeper in the hole, and sadly not well educated, either.  This all plays into a perpetual conundrum (& worry) for me: we keep on trying to govern using amateurs rules, yet moving to professional rules invites ruin.  So we keep running elections full of people who may, or may not, know what they’re doing.  It’s one of those hard questions…

A Facebook correspondent responds to this post:

“The Cascades” as a discrete entity do not exist without people to name them. But if it bugs you that a state is “home to” a natural feature of the landscape, you can always use <state> features | boasts of | contains <name of natural feature>.

… none of which are particularly satisfactory – particular to the literal, for I don’t see some collection of folks in an arbitrary state “boasting” in unison about a set of mountains that have existed for a millenia.

Or perhaps they would.  The ways of the tribal have often mystified me.

Pediatric surgeon and GOPer Ben Carson has entered the Presidential nomination race.  He has never served in a public office before.  His On the Issues quiz suggests a mostly doctrinaire conservative, although he does oppose larger military budgets and invading Iran – good for him.  His positions on gay marriage and marijuana, on the other hand, clearly indicates he’s out of touch on those issues.

The Atlantic and GQ have longish profiles of Dr. Carson.  Neither is complimentary; the latter is entitled, “What If Sarah Palin Were a Brain Surgeon?”

The Baltimore Sun reports (amongst many) that Carson wants to redefine the role of SCOTUS:

Carson said Sunday that “we need to discuss” the court’s long-held power to review laws passed by Congress. That authority was established in the 1803 landmark case Marbury v. Madison.

Carson, the former head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and a longtime resident of Baltimore County, announced his candidacy for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination last week in Detroit. He now lives in Florida.

He was asked on “Fox News Sunday” whether the executive branch is obligated to enforce laws that the Supreme Court declares constitutional.

“We need to get into a discussion of this because it has changed from the original intent,” he said.

Carson has said a president is obliged to carry out laws passed by Congress, but not what he called “judicial laws” that emanate from courts.

The New Civil Rights Movement also notes Carson’s stance and then references a rebuttal at the National Constitution Center in regards to a similar statement by Newt Gingrich:

It is a rarity for presidents to simply ignore decisions of the Supreme Court, although it has been done.  President Abraham Lincoln famously ignored Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s order finding unconstitutional Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus rights in 1861, early in the Civil War.But the example of Roosevelt and the German saboteurs is more complex than the Gingrich summary implies.  The saboteurs, convicted of war crimes by a military commission, actually had their day in a civilian court — in three courts, including the Supreme Court — as they pursued (unsuccessfully) a writ of habeas corpus.  They were not executed until after the Supreme Court had upheld the President’s power to set up the military commission.   There was never an occasion for Roosevelt to ignore the Court.

The Hill reports:

Republican White House candidate Ben Carson on Friday stood by his remark that President Obama is a “psychopath,” saying the president displays the associated personality traits.

“I said he reminds you of a psychopath, because they tend to be extremely smooth, charming people who can tell a lie to your face,” Carson told host John Harwood on CNBC’s “Speakeasy.”

“It looks like sincerity, even though they know it’s a lie,” he said.

Which reminds me of when REASON Magazine published an article on then-President Clinton and his alleged emotional damage.  Just about as credible as an alligator subsisting on apples.

The Blaze reports Glenn Beck believes Carson’s ambitions are doomed:

Glenn Beck on Friday said Dr. Ben Carson’s presidential career is over before it began, after the famed neurosurgeon said on CNN that homosexuality is a choice.

“The answer here is, ‘Why is government involved in marriage in the first place?’” Beck said on his radio program. “Let the individual be free to make his choice. The only reason why the government is involved is so the government can get their grimy little hands on tax dollars. That’s the only reason. Why are we arguing about this?”

Beck said Carson’s explanation, that “a lot of people who go into prison, go into prison straight — and when they come out, they’re gay,” sounded like it came from a “10-year-old.”

ThinkProgress has a list of 7 things Carson believes, which makes him look ridiculous.  Hard to disagree – Carson may be leaving this race early, if he has this much catch-up to do.

On another blogger, another Bangladeshi named Ananta Bijoy Das:

Attacks on bloggers critical of Islam have taken on a disturbing regularity in Bangladesh, with yet another writer hacked to death Tuesday.

Ananta Bijoy Das, 32, was killed Tuesday morning as he left his home on his way to work at a bank, police in the northeastern Bangladeshi city of Sylhet said.

Four masked men attacked him, hacking him to death with cleavers and machetes, said Sylhet Metropolitan Police Commissioner Kamrul Ahsan.

The men then ran away. Because of the time of the morning when the attack happened, there were few witnesses. But police say they are following up on interviewing the few people who saw the incident.

Bangladesh has another tragedy to mourn, and a monster to fear and chase.  My best wishes to Ananta’s family and friends, and to the Bangladeshi police who must chase down this monster, before they discover it’s a danger to them as well.

With all the talk about what Presidents can and cannot do, former and possibly future candidate Governor Rick Perry comes up with the hidden prize, speaking at a South Carolina barbeque, courtesy Sahil Kapur @ Bloomberg Politics:

“Something I want you all to think about is that the next president of the United States, whoever that individual may be, could choose up to three, maybe even four members of the Supreme Court,” he said. “Now this isn’t about who’s going to be the president of the United States for just the next four years. This could be about individuals who have an impact on you, your children, and even our grandchildren. That’s the weight of what this election is really about.” …

Though few contenders have emphasized the Supreme Court as a factor in 2016, the magnitude of the issue wasn’t lost on at least some in the crowd, who responded with a mix of sighs and approving laughter at his proposition. On Election Day, three out of nine sitting justices will be at least 80 years old, and a fourth will be 78. The average retirement age for a U.S. Supreme Court justice is 78.7, a 2006 study in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy found.

Enhancing the question is whether SCOTUS justices will still retire at that age, on average, if medical science finds a way to lengthen the human lifespan in a meaningful way.  Anyone for a Justice Kennedy at age 110?

Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress summarizes two possibilities: Clinton and Perry.

If Hillary Clinton, or someone with similar views, has the opportunity to replace four justices, these new jurists will be joined by the relatively youthful Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. That’s enough votes to overrule Hobby Lobby, ensure that anti-gay businesses do not gain a right to ignore federal law, reinvigorate reproductive choice, and potentially to shut off the flood of wealthy donors’ money into elections. It would also halt efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act and shut down other legislation unpopular among Republicans through novel interpretations of the law and the Constitution.

If someone like Perry selects the next slate of four justices, on the other hand, America could be in for a wild ride. Perry has argued that Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and federal clean air laws are all unconstitutional. He signed unconstitutional legislation purporting to nullify federal regulation of light bulbs. In a 2010 book, Perry also describes New Deal era Supreme Court decisions permitting labor regulation such as the minimum wage as “the second big step in the march of socialism.”

There seems to be a lot of certainty about SCOTUS overturning previous decisions – something, in all its incarnations, it has been reluctant to do.  (Coming up with exact figures is difficult; see Ronald Standler for more information on the subject.)  Still, this is the sort of issue that may bring out the bases on both sides.

Perhaps “The unruly, majestic Cascades roil their way through the states of Washington”… it captures both facets of interest, their beauty and dynamicism, while ignoring the political state for what it is, a passing fancy of a self-aware species.

On query to my Arts Editor, she responded:

I’m not sure “Roil” is quite the right word, but it’s evocative, at least.  “Wend” is a bit too passive.  “Forge”?  “Make”?  “March”?

How about: “The unruly, majestic Cascades span the states of Washington… etc.”  or “The unruly, majestic Cascades traverse the states of Washington…etc.” ?

But no, not silly.  There’s a point to be made about who was here first.

Or does poetic license trump literal reading?  Would the neuro-atypical agree?

Continuing perhaps the most important topic on the planet, NASA is out with its latest global temperature measurement (through January 2014), and it’s not good news.  It’s worth following the link just to see the nifty, but uncopyable, chart.  The executive summary?  We set another record as the global temperature continues to climb.

NOAA chimes in with more bad news:

Global carbon dioxide concentrations surpass 400 parts per million for the first month since measurements began
…
“This marks the fact that humans burning fossil fuels have caused global carbon dioxide concentrations to rise more than 120 parts per million since pre-industrial times,” added Tans. “Half of that rise has occurred since 1980.”The International Energy Agency reported on March 13 that the growth of global emissions from fossil fuel burning stalled in 2014, remaining at the same levels as 2013. Stabilizing the rate of emissions is not enough to avert climate change, however. NOAA data show that the average growth rate of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere from 2012 to 2014 was 2.25 ppm per year, the highest ever recorded over three consecutive years.

Skeptical Science (an anti-climate change skeptic site) explains how CO₂ measurements are pursued and what they show (July 2011):

The following graph shows atmospheric CO₂ levels over the last 10,000 years. It includes ice core data for CO₂ levels before 1950. For values after 1950, direct measurements from Mauna Loa, Hawaii were used.

Figure 1: CO₂ levels (parts per million) over the past 10,000 years. Blue line from Taylor Dome ice cores (NOAA). Green line from Law Dome ice core (CDIAC). Red line from direct measurements at Mauna Loa, Hawaii (NOAA).Mauna Loa is often used as an example of rising carbon dioxide levels because its the longest, continuous series of directly measured atmospheric CO₂. The reason why it’s acceptable to use Mauna Loa as a proxy for global CO₂ levels is because CO₂ mixes well throughout the atmosphere. Consequently, the trend in Mauna Loa CO₂ (1.64 ppm per year) is statistically indistinguishable from the trend in global CO₂ levels (1.66 ppm per year). If global CO₂ was used in Figure 1 above, the result “hockey stick” shape would be identical.

Judith Curry may be a good source for ongoing coverage of climate change technical details.

And in the communications department, Treehugger blogger Margaret Badore runs down the story on a professor and a student who take the data … and make music out of it. It’s quite moving, and worth your time.

(h/t CNN)

Jeb Bush gets on the right page – Steve Benen of MaddowBlog reports how Republicans never make a mistake:

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush would have authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as his brother and then-president George W. Bush did, he told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly in an interview to be aired Monday. …

Note the evolution in Jeb Bush’s approach to the issue. Just three months ago, asked about the disastrous war in Iraq, the Florida Republican told reporters, “I won’t talk about the past…. If I’m in the process of considering the possibility of running, it’s not about re-litigating anything in the past.” Soon after, Jeb Bush was willing to concede “mistakes were made,” but he wouldn’t say who made the mistakes or how he would have done anything different.

Jon Green at AMERICA blog thinks Jeb is doing the right thing:

But here’s the thing: despite the baggage George W. Bush would bring as a surrogate, Jeb probably loses less by embracing his record than he gains by distancing himself from it. No matter what he says about the previous Bush administration, he’s going to be tied to it. If he runs from it, it’ll be seen as a political dodge. Owning the issue tells voters that he doesn’t think it’s a liability, so they shouldn’t, either. Given that Hillary’s position on the Iraq War is, for all intents and purposes, the same as Jeb’s — “We made the best decision we could given the information we had.” — Jeb does more to defuse Iraq as a 2016 campaign issue by embracing the invasion than he does by criticizing it. As there is no clear separation between any of the 2016 frontrunners on the issue, none of them feel any particular need to play defense on it.

This may be true for the Republican base, to which he is initially playing, but Independents, who he would have to win over for the general election, should have more critical faculties and be willing to say, If he doesn’t seem Iraq as a critical mistake, even a lie as Andrew Sullivan eventually decided, then why should we cast a vote for him?

This is, at best, a roll of the die.

Bernie Sanders campaign fires off an early shot:

“Never again should a financial institution be able to demand a federal bailout,” Sherman said.  “They claim; ‘If we go down, the economy is going down with us,’ but by breaking up these institutions long before they face a crisis, we ensure a healthy financial system where medium-sized institutions can compete in the free market.”

The 2008 financial crisis had a devastating impact on the U.S. economy. It cost as much as $14 trillion, the Dallas Federal Reserve calculated. The Government Accountability Office pegged the cost at $13 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the crisis nearly doubled the national debt and cost more than the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

The six largest U.S. financial institutions today have assets of some $10 trillion, an amount equal to almost 60 percent of gross domestic product. They handle more than two-thirds of all credit card purchases, control nearly 50 percent of all bank deposits, and control over 95 percent of the $240 trillion in derivatives held by commercial banks.

The Sanders and Sherman legislation would give banking regulators 90 days to identify commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and other entities whose “failure would have a catastrophic effect on the stability of either the financial system or the United States economy without substantial government assistance.”

While being well aware this will never pass, it’s the sort of thing that makes some sense and part of me very much wants to see it pass just to see “what if“?

Sanders further comments on the HuffPo Politics blog:

It should make every American very nervous that in this weak regulatory environment, the financial supervisors in this country and around the world are still able to uncover an enormous amount of fraud on Wall Street to this day. I fear very much that the financial system is even more fragile than many people may perceive. This huge issue cannot be swept under the rug. It has got to be addressed.

Although I voted for Dodd-Frank, I did so knowing it was a modest piece of legislation. Dodd-Frank did not end much of the casino-style gambling on Wall Street. In fact, much of this reckless activity is still going on today.

The Hill can’t resist comparing Sanders to Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is not running:

The overlap between Sanders’s message and the one frequently espoused by Warren was indistinguishable at one point.

“The function of banking should be boring,” said Sanders on Wednesday.

Warren has frequently sung from the “banking should be boring” hymnal, doing so most recently in a speech in April.

“If banks want access to government-provided deposit insurance, they should be limited to boring banking,” she said.

When Sanders launched his presidential campaign earlier this month, he earned plaudits from liberal grassroots groups for his long record on fighting inequality and battling the nation’s most powerful. Many of those same groups also said they were still waiting for Warren to jump into the race.

AlJazeera agrees.

George Zornick at The Nation sees Sanders as creating a litmus test for Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, as well as currently sitting legislators:

The prospects of this bill passing in a Republican-controlled Congress approach absolute zero. Sanders acknowledged that reality, but said the legislation presents a basic test for legislators.

“When Wall Street tells members of the Congress not to do anything that will damage their interests, most members of Congress adhere to that,” he said. “Can we pass legislation in the United States Congress that Wall Street opposes?”

It also unavoidably poses a test for Hillary Clinton, the other declared Democratic candidate. Much of the Draft Warren movement launched by progressive activists focused on the Massachusetts senator’s advocacy for combating the financial sector’s power generally, and breaking up the big banks in particular—and Clinton’s perceived weakness on that front.

George also notes that potential candidate and former Governor O’Malley recently wrote an op-ed of a similar nature.  I think this strategy is good – get uncomfortable questions out there about an industry which can hardly be said to be a free market, given how many of these huge banks benefited from bargain prices on their road-kill prey.

Community bankers are hip to it:

That sounds like a good idea to the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade association representing more than 6,000 banks across the country.

“ICBA agrees that the too-big-to-fail megabanks are too big to exist,” said ICBA President and CEO Camden Fine. “After triggering a historic financial crisis and receiving trillions of dollars in taxpayer assistance, the nation’s largest and riskiest financial institutions continue to pose systemic threats to our economy while enjoying an artificial funding advantage subsidized by taxpayers.”

PoliticusUSA is excitable:

The left is on the march, and the billionaires and corporations are in for a fight.

(h/t ericlewis0 @ The Daily Kos)

Another missive from the same correspondent on this long running subject :

Yes, we do spend too much on end of life care, very often to the detriment and discomfort of the patient! Some of that is driven by the system about which I complain — more profits are to be had by all that excessive treatment, and it also does a better job of avoiding law suits over not doing enough. (Clearly the American public is at fault here, too, for their warped expectations, but I’d also argue that some of those expectations were created by profit-minded health care marketing.)

I would prefer to think the American public are adults, although given how we abuse ourselves I might be hard-pressed to defend the assertion.  Nevertheless, brain-washing charges are difficult to uphold on the large scale implied here, and I should like to think it’s less Big Pharma and more simply our national culture to fight for everything we can.

I didn’t delve into this issue, but I am well aware of it. I only used a broadside against Big Pharma because they are so plainly wrong and greedy. But yes, there are plenty of drivers to our high costs. Big Pharma and excessive end of life care are definitely 2 of the largest ones. I’m really busy these days, but maybe if I get motivated I’ll try to look up some of my sources (e.g. articles written by doctors themselves in The Atlantic, etc.). I can’t promise anything. Oh, and how are my bonafides not applicable? The point is, I’m far better informed on the subject than the vast majority of the population, both from job experience and personal research and interest in the subject.

Working in a highly technical position within an industry doesn’t make one an expert on the moral issues of that industry – it can give one special access, but not everyone takes advantage of it.  That’s why I didn’t really care about those particular bona-fides – I worked in one of the earliest HSM shops, but today I don’t have an opinion on HSMs; I don’t even know if they’re still in use.

But participating in round tables with experts … that’s interesting.  So long as the experts don’t turn out to be Dick Morris.

This lovely letter from Liz Bell shows up in NewScientist (25 April 2015) (paywall):

It also strikes me that the enormous diversity of belief is a source of strength for our species, giving us flexibility, adaptability and options in coping with new challenges. The harm wreaked by fundamentalists and extremists is that they try to remove this diversity and impose uniformity, through moral imperatives, group interest and threatening violence towards dissidents.

I like to believe that by doing so they sow the seeds of the eventual destruction of the systems and societies they are trying to create, as they become unable to deal with new challenges that conflict with their rigid beliefs.

I think that’s absolutely lovely and applies to many things where people don’t see how diversity applies – for example, marriage.

The marijuana movement recently acquired a slightly different ally:

Republican state Rep. David Simpson of Longview argues marijuana comes from God and therefore shouldn’t be banned by government. The tea party stalwart has repeatedly championed what he calls the “Christian case” for legalization.

Jacob Sullum, REASON.com senior editor, takes note of the Marijuana Policy Project in Texas:

“I know that if we win there, we win the country,” [Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project] says. “I know decrim has a chance in Texas already, and I know that while people like to think of Texas as very conservative, the people of Texas are not as conservative as people outside of Texas think, that Texas is going to turn from a Republican state to a Democratic state at some point in the next eight years. So I said we can give that a whirl….We hired a lobbyist, have a full-time staffer in Austin who’s coordinating the grassroots, and now we’re seeing real momentum in the legislature as a result of the focused effort.”

Here is Mr. Simpson’s web site:

I covet your prayers now as we prepare …

That’s an interesting turn of phrase.  Here he gives his views on the subject:

As a Christian, I recognize the innate goodness of everything God made and humanity’s charge to be stewards of the same.

In fact, it’s for this reason that I’m especially cautious when it comes to laws banning plants. I don’t believe that when God made marijuana he made a mistake that government needs to fix.

Good is contextual; I recall how my GP nearly broke down and cried when he admitted his own son had said, “But Dad, it’s natural, it’s gotta be good for you.”  Even for bees, plant nectar can be poisonous – or not, depending on just what sort of bee you may be.

So, to Representative Simpson, we’d have to ask how arsenic is good for you, or any of a host of substances.

He may have reached what I regard to be probably a right conclusion, but the path seems dubious at best.

(h/t Jen Hayden @ The Daily Kos)

Just a brief note on this project: with the onset of spring, my priorities are my wife, exercise, work, blogging, gardening … and then this project.  So only a little has gotten done, and that consists of deciding on a debugging approach.  Each XML production rule has been modified to look like this:

p_in # & … & p_out #;

The p_in and p_out functions keep track of the current depth of the stack of production rules and write

Production In #

and

Production Out #

with an indentation reflective of the depth of the stack.  They also print the name of the production if they know it.  Additionally, they replace the current failure function  with a local failure function which curries in the current failure function and will invoke it upon invocation of itself …. and will say

Production Fail #

and the name of the production if known, at the proper indentation level.

I have found this to be useful in tracking down some typos and/or poor decisions I’ve made in the production rules.

The Mythryl compiler has also developed a queer little hitch.  It’s typically blindingly fast for everything else I’ve written, but with this project there’s a 30 second pause at some point.  I suspect it’s during whatever it uses as a link phase, but since Cynbe is working on a newer version, I’m not trying to track it down … partly since, as I told Cynbe, I do not have compiler chops and lack interest in developing them.

NewScientist‘s Stephanie Pain (25 April 2015) reports on the recent discovery that plant nectar often contains toxins (paywall):

At least 15 genera of plants contain caffeine, primarily as a chemical defence against insects, or so it was thought. Caffeine tastes bitter to insects, and bees are no exception; they find it repellent. But this doesn’t deter them from visiting the flowers of coffee and citrus plants, the nectar of which has been found to contain caffeine. It turns out that the caffeine is present at levels too low for bees to taste, as Stevenson and neurophysiologist Jeri Wright at the University of Newcastle, UK, recently revealed. Yet when offered a choice of nectar with or without a dash of caffeine, bees prefer it with. Wright suspected that caffeine acts as a drug, influencing a bee’s mind in much the same way it does ours. She was right.

In the lab, Wright trained bees to associate nectar with a particular floral scent. When she added caffeine to a drop of nectar, twice as many bees remembered the scent three days later. Closer investigation suggests that caffeine produces this dramatic improvement in long-term memory by intensifying how the bee’s brain reacts to information from its antennae, where smells are detected (Science, vol 339, p 1202).

If bees remember which scent or colour indicates good food, they are more likely to return to the same sort of flowers, bringing other members of the colony with them. Plants that use caffeine to manipulate bees’ minds in this way should benefit from the greater loyalty of their pollinators.

A single toxin may affect different pollinators differently, tests show:

Tests with captive bees showed that grayanotoxins have dramatically different effects on different types of bee. “They have no apparent effect on worker bumblebees,” says Stout. “Mining bees show short-term symptoms of malaise. They lie on their backs with their legs in the air but recover later. But honeybees die within hours.” In honeybees – and humans – grayanotoxins hold open the sodium channels present in all nerve and muscle cells, so that neurons keep firing until they are fatigued. In the bees, this leads to palpitations, paralysis and death. “We don’t know why this doesn’t happen in bumblebees,” says Wright. “Like any other drug, some animals are more susceptible than others.”

So what does this have to do with monoculture?  From the accompanying sidebar:

Toxic nectar is more of a threat in landscapes where a single crop or invasive plant that produces nasty nectar covers vast areas. Then, a pollinator’s options are limited. “If bees feed on toxic nectar, they might be poisoned. If they avoid it but there’s little else around, then they’ll suffer from inadequate nutrition. Either way, that could have a severe impact on their colony,” says Stevenson.

So, how to avoid adding to pollinators’ many problems? “We can try to manage the landscape in ways that make it better for pollinators,” says Stevenson. “The most obvious way is to ensure there is a wide enough choice of flowers to satisfy the needs of a diversity of bees and other pollinators.”

If you’re wondering about monoculture, SustainaBlog gives a brief economic theory behind it and tries to define rename it:

One of the most wise and basic farming practices is to “rotate crops.”  If a farmer plants a grass crop one year, a broadleaf crop the next, a different grass the next, etc. it tends to break pest cycles and to put different nutritional pressures on the soil. Actually, most of what people imagine as “Big Ag” or “Industrial Farming” actually involves rotated crops on family farms.  The rotation differs by geography.  In the heart of the Corn Belt there is usually a soybean/corn rotation with winter wheat in some areas.  In the Southeast, cotton, peanuts and wheat tend to be mixed in with the corn and soy rotation.  North and West of the Corn Belt wheat, sunflowers, sugar beets, canola are common rotation options.  These traditional rotations are employed on hundreds of millions of acres of US farmland. …

If someone is serious about a critique of modern agriculture, “monoculture” is not the best term to use – particularly if you want to communicate with farmers.  The real issue is the difference between “diverse rotations” and “non-diverse rotations.”

My correspondent continues our exchange:

Let me give you some reasons (I was pretty sure I’ve done this before), besides my assurances. First, let me point out some of my bonafides, so to speak. I’ve worked in the American health insurance business on and off since 1994, including time at 2 of the largest insurers, United Healthcare and Cigna. I’ve also worked with one of the largest German health care insurers, AOK (www.aok.de).

I’m not sure how this is applicable.

I’ve spent a great deal of time reading non-fluff articles about the situation and participated in short round-table of sorts on the problem of health care costs and delivery in the US with some similarly “high minded” people who happened to include a couple of professionals in the field, e.g. an executive at Allina.

OK, that’s cool.

Lastly, I’ve had the misfortunes of having to actually use both the American and German systems of health care, and of not being covered by a typical “generous” employer-sponsored health plan (which are all becoming rarer and rarer these days).

Tying one’s insurance to a business tax deductible employer sponsored program is just insane. It has multiple downsides and very few upsides. It means that many people can’t find insurance because they can’t find employment with an employer large enough to have a viable group. My employer, for example, despite having 7 employees, is having its insurance dropped by Blue Cross of Minnesota because we’re just too small to bother with (so I’ll be on the ACA-created marketplace to find my own insurance).

And this I can get behind and did so years ago (as my correspondent may recall). Many years ago I suggested group buys of insurance should be disconnected from employers, thus rendering pre-existing condition clauses obsolete. In a sense, the insurance exchanges are a step in that direction, although I envisioned private groups.

Plenty of those people could be self-employed or starting their own businesses or working for someone else doing the same. Instead, a significant portion of people take jobs they don’t really like or want simply so that they can have health insurance. One major effect of that behavior is a lot fewer start-up companies and a lot fewer employment opportunities and a lot less economic activity. Recall that most jobs in this country are created by small businesses. If I had not felt young and invulnerable back when we started VISI.com, but instead had been someone desperate for health care coverage, I never would have gotten involved. I had to go without health insurance to do that.

It also obscures the true costs of health care, providing perverse financial incentives and therefore effectively so totally distorts the market to make it any but a “free” market. The result is all kinds of money spent on marketing and lobbying efforts that would be better spent on real health care, and the resulting purchase by those who were marketed to and lobbied of less than the most effective treatments and insurances.

Lastly, it means millions of uninsured workers, which is neither good for them or society, on a purely economic basis. Most bankruptcies are caused by health care costs, and most people who file bankruptcy for health care costs actually both have jobs and some amount of insurance. Having no insurance or no job is, of course, going to make that situation that much worse.

Reason number 2: health care in America is insanely expensive, compared to every other country in the world. We spend 4 times plus the next most expensive country, and yet our outcomes are worse than the top 20 or 30 or 90 other countries (depending on who’s measuring and how) most of which spend far less than us. It’s insanely expensive for all kinds of reasons, one of which is that our drugs are far more expensive — even the very same drugs which are sold for as little as a tenth of the price in other countries.

But it is just one factor, and I hesitate to put drug prices on the spot – because it’s even much more well known that we spend a huge amount on end of life care.  According to Medicare,

Medicare spent 28 percent, or about $170 billion, on patients’ last six months of life. 

Most countries are not as fixated on stringing out life as long as possible.  Add to this our poor eating, exercising, sleep, and work habits, and it’s no surprise that we may win second place for the most self-abusive society on the planet (Russia rings the bell).  But if you wish to count the dollars spent on the remediation of illnesses coming from those sources, they become a measure of our irresponsibility, both individually and collectively, no?

I think I want to get rid of what I perceive as the big brush which misleads us, but don’t have the details to do so.  But it does feel like apples and oranges….

Meanwhile, Big Pharma is among the largest and most profitable industries in this country, and have some significant “regulatory capture” as well as congresscritter capture (they spend more on lobbying than just any other industry) going on. For example, both the Medicare “doughnut hole” legislation under Bush and the ACA gave Big Pharma huge financial bonuses. In the former case, it prevented Medicare from negotiating(!) better drug rates for Medicare users, unlike Medicare’s ability to do that for all other medical services and unlike every major health insurance plan (HMO, etc.) in the country! That’s insane! And corrupt.

Agreed..  I’ve never understood why this has been allowed to stand.  Although given government’s special standing, I should think some care would have to taken to ensure abuses of governmental power when buying drugs do not take place.

This is also why I distrust comparisons with other countries when it comes to drug prices.  Why are they lower?  Because the governments just order the prices to be lower?  And if the company tries to withdraw a drug, the country might tell them to cease business entirely?

Hospitals in the USA are sort of like Major League Baseball in that they have bizarro, complicated exceptions to non-profit and anti-trust laws that everybody else has to abide by. And a large number of hospitals are VERY profitable these days, and their executive staffs of non-doctors are starting to look like the over-compensated C-suites of private businesses. And they’re making decisions to increase the profits which run direct opposition to good health care, implementing stupid policies that the docs would tell you are medically bad.

Oh, interesting.  Exceptions to laws for hospitals … of course, if it’s not a free market in medicine, perhaps the exceptions are justified?

Given the move away from procedures and towards outcomes, I wonder how long excessive salaries might last.

Health care is also insanely expensive because of private insurance companies. Every cent they make in profit, in fact every cent they spend on anything other than direct payments to doctors, clinics, labs and hospitals is money NOT being spent on medical care but which WAS spent by an employer or insured to obtain medical care. And that amount is huge — it’s many, many billions. Sure, you might argue that that administrative overhead does buy some good, and that’s true. But the proportion is small. Most of it is fat, overhead and profit inflating the cost of health care, and enriching the few

Your personal health care quality is actually significantly diminished by this same situation. Every year, a typical employer renegotiates its health insurance coverage. That means, employees may and often do suddenly find that they have differing coverage and more importantly, don’t have coverage with the same doctors they had been seeing. Likewise, every year (or less, if a multi-year contract), those health insures are renegotiating their deals with “medical practice” businesses, e.g. large multi-office clinic chains (e.g. Allina, Fairview, Ridgeview, Walgreens, CVS, etc.). That means a particular set of clinics and/or an individual doctor may be covered by insurance XYZ this year but not next year. If you are a patient, you face the choice of changing doctors or not having your service covered by insurance. This means you suffer from a lack of continuity of care. It’s well known that seeing the same doctor at the same clinic for decades produces far better health care than changing doctors every year.

I’ve not heard that, actually.  I would worry about seeing the same doctor year after year.  I know they try to keep up, but frankly the insane way medicine improves makes me doubt a GP in his 50s is necessarily as uptodate as the doc just out of residency.  I know my rheumatologist has told me not to trust what a GP does about gout and related diseases – they just don’t have the basic training.  OTOH, having had the same doc for about 20 years now, at least there’s a little bit of a relationship there – he laughs at my jokes.

I could actually go on and on (and on) about this topic, with facts and figures to make your head spin or your stomach turn (depending on how much empathy you have for the sick and underinsured, or your degree moral idealism and belief in meritocracy). But I won’t. The American system of health care and health care insurance is huge train wreck. It’s corrupt. It’s inefficient. It causes widespread suffering. If fails to do the basics. The ACA is a small, inadequate bandage on the elbow of a banged-up and bruised bicycle accident victim. It’s better than nothing, but far short of what’s needed. Universal coverage (e.g. like Germany with its multiple private insurers but everyone IS covered at some base level) or single payer (e.g. like Canada, UK) is the only way to have any kind of sane healthcare in the current world.

And what I notice is a relentless focus on now, not on the future of medicine (yes, the financial future, but no not the medical future) – which is what the argument often came to be – if we change how we fund medicine, will companies still be motivated to research meds and procedures?  I know that NewScientist has reported that certain fields are no longer actively researched by Big Pharma, even with our current system – leaving us with possibly critical deficits in, for instance, antibiotics (NewScientist 20 May 2014) (paywall):

This week, the WHO’s 194 member states are meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to endorse a proposed action plan to save antibiotics. It includes a modest-looking call for “new business models to encourage investment in and preservation of new products”. Translated, that means we cannot solve this problem if antibiotics research and marketing continue to be governed solely by market forces.

Last week at another meeting in Geneva, healthcare researchers and pharma representatives agreed that companies must be paid more to invent antibiotics – but in a radical departure, profits cannot depend on drug sales.

There are no big profits in antibiotics, says Kevin Outterson, an expert in health law at Boston University, whose report on the issue was presented at the earlier meeting. Normally a company invests a great deal of money in research and development to get a drug to market, then recoups that, and profits, by selling it.

The problem, says Outterson, is mainly that older antibiotics that still work are off-patent and therefore cheap, so new ones that must compete cannot be priced very high. The only profit is in maximising sales – but this inevitably speeds up the development of resistance. So companies have deserted antibiotics in droves: 18 big companies were doing antibiotics R&D in 1990, but only five of those were still doing it in 2011.

The Sanders campaign may be encountering the first headwinds: his views on gun control are not what might be expected of a liberal.  Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

But before liberal Democrats flock to Sanders, they should remember that the Vermont senator stands firmly to Clinton’s right on one issue of overwhelming importance to the Democratic base: gun control. During his time in Congress, Sanders opposed several moderate gun control bills. He also supported the most odious NRA–backed law in recent memory—one that may block Sandy Hook families from winning a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the gun used to massacre their children.

Steve Bennen on the MaddowBlog explains:

To understand why, it’s important to realize that Vermont has some of the most lax gun laws in the nation, in large part because gun violence in the Green Mountain State is so low.
Indeed, a wide variety of prominent Vermont Democrats and liberal independents routinely enjoy support from the NRA. Former Gov. Howard Dean, his reputation as a liberal firebrand notwithstanding, was endorsed by the NRA in Vermont more than once – a fact he used to brag about during his 2004 presidential campaign.

On The Issues supplies a page on Sanders and Gun Control:

Voted YES on banning high-capacity magazines of over 10 bullets.
Voted YES on allowing firearms in checked baggage on Amtrak trains.
Voted YES on prohibiting product misuse lawsuits on gun manufacturers.

Liberty In The Hills publishes a letter Sanders wrote on the subject:

In my view, the debate over mass killings should not be only about guns.  In my view, Congress must consider a comprehensive approach which also includes a serious discussion about the need for greatly expanded mental health services and ending gratuitous violence in the media.   It is imperative that Americans who need mental health services be able to access them in a timely manner.  That is not the case today.  Several hearings that I recently attended made it very clear that throughout our country there are thousands of Americans who harbor suicidal/homicidal thoughts – and are unable to find treatment at a cost they can afford.  That must change.

National Journal mentions it in the larger context of working class vs liberals:

The blue-collar agenda puts Sanders in a complicated position with the contemporary Left on noneconomic issues. For instance, he has cast votes against federal gun-control legislation, like the landmark 1994 Brady Bill, and owes his first congressional victory in part to support from the National Rifle Association. “He doesn’t have a gun,” says his close friend Richard Sugarman, a religion professor at the University of Vermont, when I asked how Sanders—a University of Chicago graduate from Brooklyn—became a Second Amendment guy. “He doesn’t really care about guns. But he cares that other people care about guns. He thinks there’s an elitism in the antigun movement.”

I suggest to Sanders that his vision for a new progressive base of old white guys runs somewhat counter to the conventional wisdom, but he cuts me off. “Who told you that?” he scoffs. “I’m talking from a little bit of experience. I did get 71 percent of the vote in my state. And despite popular conception—with all due respect to my friends in California, Northern California, where you have wealthy liberals who support me and I appreciate that—Vermont is a working-class state. So I’m glad you raised that, because your analysis is incorrect. And I’m right and everybody else is wrong. Clear about that?”

If he can turn the boat from gun control to mental health issues, he may survive the current; otherwise, it’s out to sea with the sharks.

One Pissed Off Liberal over at The Daily Kos suggests that not all rights should be exercised:

Sure, it’s your right to say whatever you want no matter how stupid or hateful, but is it a good idea? Are you doing yourself or society any favors? It’s your perfect right to be an idiot but your idiocy, once loosed upon the general public, is another matter. You don’t have the moral right to make other people suffer because you’re stupid. Sometimes life is about more than what you have a right to do, but what you should or shouldn’t do within the context of civilized society – which I submit, we should be aiming for. Civilization seems a worthy goal at this point. …

Two people are dead and one wounded because a bunch of dumbass macho yahoos down in Texas (who could have been so much more) thought it’d be cute to have a ‘draw the prophet’ contest…to prove they weren’t afraid of Sharia law and shit.

‘Hoo boy! Look at us! We ain’t afraid of no durned Muslims and we ain’t ashamed of being dumber than fucking dirt. It’s our RIGHT!’

Hateful, ignorant and proud of it, what could be more American than that?

Mrph.  Suggesting that they – that is, the American Freedom Defense Initiative – should not exercise their Constitutional Rights because it might offend someone strikes me as toleration gone too far.

Consider: the various religious sects existing within the USA are expected to tolerate each other and to concede to the government supremacy in the law of the land, just as the government does not meddle in theology.  As part of this and other concerns about government, we concede full speech rights to one and all, with minor restrictions.  We do NOT suggest that folks be reasonable and not exercise some right, because reasonableness is not necessarily an objective term, but a subjective term.

For example, to me, it’s sweet reasonableness that there is no evidence for a God and we should live by a secular moral code that explores rationality, rather than mystical spirituality.  In full analogy mode, I should then propose that all Bibles be burned because they offend me.  (Actually, they don’t, but that’s another discussion.)  Should I expect cooperation?

Of course not.  Reasonableness depends on your frame of reference.

The importance of this incident is not that a bunch of folks who may be Islamophobes decided to bait the Muslims.  It’s not that a couple of Muslims lost their temper and rose to the bait.  The importance of this incident is to clarify the primacy of free expression – not reasonably free expression.  It’s important that liberals, conservatives, Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians – and agnostics – all understand that.

And about those minor restrictions?  The eponymous attorney & UCLA professor at the Volokh Conspiracy checks in on hate speech and the First Amendment:

I keep hearing about a supposed “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech,” or “When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn Islam — or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal aliens, or native-born citizens — as one is to condemn capitalism or Socialism or Democrats or Republicans.

To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with “hate speech” in any conventionally used sense of the term. For instance, there is an exception for “fighting words” — face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. But this exception isn’t limited to racial or religious insults, nor does it cover all racially or religiously offensive statements. Indeed, when the City of St. Paul tried to specifically punish bigoted fighting words, the Supreme Court held that this selective prohibition was unconstitutional (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992)), even though a broad ban on all fighting words would indeed be permissible. (And, notwithstanding CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s Tweet that “hate speech is excluded from protection,” and his later claims that by “hate speech” he means “fighting words,” the fighting words exception is not generally labeled a “hate speech” exception, and isn’t coextensive with any established definition of “hate speech” that I know of.)

In another post, he states:

“Incitement,” of course, isn’t just a lay term (like offensiveness or blasphemy) — it’s well-known as the name of a First Amendment exception, a category of speech that can be restricted. What’s less well-known is the precise definition of incitement: advocacy intended to, and likely to, persuade people to engage in imminent illegal conduct. “Imminent” here means that the speaker is trying to persuade people to act in the coming hours (think the classic example of someone speaking to a mob assembled in front of a particular building), not at some time in the indefinite future.

Former Governor Mike Huckabee is throwing his hat into the ring again.  His On the Issues Quiz answers strike me as a doctrinaire hard line conservative:

The one exception might be his opposition to free trade.

Ballotpedia notes he had the computers in his office destroyed before he left the governorship of Arkansas.

Steve Benen feels a little ill concerning Mike’s activities between public service gigs:

How sketchy? Huckabee’s [e-mail] list has been used to “blast out links to heart-disease fixes and can’t-miss annuities.” And this isn’t just some unfortunate part of his distant past – as recently as this year Huckabee was still sending his mailing list bizarre messages “about food hoarding.”
To be sure, Huckabee isn’t directly responsible for the often ridiculous messages, but these email addresses have gone out under his name and face, giving the appearance of an endorsement.

But let’s also not overlook the fact that Huckabee’s lucrative snake-oil operation isn’t limited to unfortunate uses of email addresses. Just two months ago, Huckabee also appeared in an infomercial-like video in which he touted an “amazing” treatment that can “reverse” Type 2 diabetes.

The Council on Foreign Relations notes that he seems fixated on Islamism and, in fact, says virtually nothing about the rest of the world:

But it’s the nature of modern presidential campaigning that candidates eventually have to stake a flag on foreign policy. Huckabee laid out his vision of “America’s Priorities in the War on Terror” in a Foreign Affairs article. He also took positions on issues such as democracy promotion in the Arab world, Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Russia, and climate change, though he said little or nothing about places like Africa, India, and North Korea. …
How would Huckabee defeat violent Islamic extremists? He has not laid out a specific blueprint, but in a recently released ad, he strongly implied that the answer was force.

When you’re dealing with Islamic jihad, that has as its goal the annihilation of everyone who does not agree with their absolute religious fanaticism, you’re dealing with a rattlesnake…As a kid growing up in south Arkansas, one thing I learned about rattlesnakes, you don’t try to get in their head and figure out why they want to bite you. You don’t try to have a conversation with them. You don’t negotiate with them. You sure as heck don’t feed them. You take their heads off with a four ten shotgun or a hoe before they bite you—because the one thing that you can be sure of is that snake will bite you if he can.

Huckabee has yet to explain why his envisioned use of force would be more successful than George W. Bush’s or Barack Obama’s.

The folks at the Advocate.com find little to like:

“It is a classic example of — really a page out of 1984, when what things mean are the opposite of what they really are,” Huckabee told the Family Research Council president in early April, referring to the George Orwell novel about a dystopian future. “And that’s what I’m seeing here is that in the name of tolerance, there’s intolerance. In the name of diversity, there’s uniformity. In the name of acceptance, there’s true discrimination.”

He claimed that “intolerance” of Christians “won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel, and I’m talking now about the unabridged, unapologetic Gospel that is really God’s truth.”

National Review notes he may have some tough sledding in portions of the course lorded over by the anti-tax folks:

[and] … the tax increases he didn’t protest as governor, have earned him the enmity of the behemoth of conservative outside groups, such as the Club for Growth, whose president has promised the group “will make sure that Republican primary voters thoroughly examine his exceptionally poor record of raising taxes and spending as governor.”

But, if you accept that the average GOPer believes in torture, he has changed his ways for the better:

If Huckabee is, to some conservatives, maddeningly stubborn in his fiscal heterodoxy, he’ll be charting a different course on foreign policy than he did in 2008, an area where he struggled. Then, he called for the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and for “treat[ing] others the way you’d like to be treated” in matters of foreign affairs and diplomacy. In fact, he called that “the fundamental issue that has to be reestablished in our dealings with other countries” as the Bush presidency drew to a close. This time around, he’s sounded downright hawkish, promising to “lead with moral clarity in a dangerous world” and to “keep all the options on the table in order to defeat the evil forces of radical Islam.”

His website is here.

A Facebook correspondent responds to business and the ACA:

The initial concept of ACA was a good one, but of course, many wealthy interests lobbied (successfully) to make a mess of it. Still, it’s better than nothing by a small but significant amount. Right-wing myopia knows no bounds, however. I know of right-wing employers complaining about ACA at the same time it was actually saving them expenses and increasing their profits. Universal coverage would be good. Take my word for it.

Indeed, I’d love to be able to trust assurances like that, but I am all too well aware of the narrow interests with which we all tend to operate.  Naturally, some folks can throw out the blinders and ask what is better for society at large, and so I always have to wonder if a businessman who disregards his immediate cash savings is motivated by mere ideological kant – or a sincere concern that the issue at hand, while beneficlal to themselves, is harmful to society.  Think of the polluter who is not required to clean up after themselves, and yet does so anyways.  Do the employers fit the first category, or the second?

And, of course, businessmen are not the only folks faced with this conundrum.  Any citizen can be faced with a situation in which their reaction may be beneficial to themselves, but not for society.  Indeed, most of us fail that test rather horribly – everyone here owning a car who could make do with a bike, hands up!

Yep, that’s just about all of us.  Including me.

And while the pollution one is easy, the medical one is more difficult.  My exposure to the theoretical arguments over motivations for medical research in a one-payer system was greatly lessened when I gave up on REASON Magzine, so I don’t know if any kind of consensus was ever reached; I doubt it, since neither side had a motivation to end the fight.  My hope is that, soon enough, we’ll understand how to develop meds far more cheaply than we do now, greatly reducing costs and making the question of whether we should jump to a one payer system more easily answered, and executed if necessary.

Tangential to this topic, Treehugger covers how California’s drought may be killing off those creatures that could save us from climate change folly – trees:

Researchers at the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) have completed an aerial survey of the Sierra Nevada and certain parts of Southern California, covering 8.2 million acres of forest, and the view from the air is alarming. Thanks to the worst drought in over a 1,000 years, trees in California are dying by the millions. The USFS estimates that about 12.5 million have already died in the state’s national forests, and the massive die-off is not over, as millions more are expected to die over the summer.

All these dead trees and dry conditions are making California’s forests dangerously flammable. This means that any small fire can turn into a huge blaze, potentially destroying many more trees as well as killing wildlife and damaging other property.

If they’re dead then they can’t do this:

[A] new report from the International Union of Forest Research Organizations shows that forests can play an important role in eliminating hunger and creating more food security. This is important, because protecting forests has been identified as a key and cost-effective means of fighting climate change. So, a better understanding of how forests help feed people may be another tool in the arsenal of their defense. …

The report examines the nutritional benefits of both natural forests and agro-forests, where food trees are cultivated among other species of trees and are still part of a functioning ecosystem. They find that tree foods can help create more nutritionally balanced diets, particularly for developing areas in the tropics. Seeds, nuts and fruit can be important sources of vitamins and minerals, particularly for communities that are otherwise dependent on starchier staples. Non-tree foods can also add to a wider food portfolio, such as insects, edible greens, fungi and bushmeat.

Jerry Brown’s order to lower water consumption by 25% will almost certainly have no effect on the California forests; they had best hope that the drought breaks soon, or consider irrigating the forests, rather than the farms.

Another danger to forests, interestingly enough, is, according to the US Forest Service (via LiveScience), pot:

“The attributes that make the lands of the National Forest System excellent producers of wildlife habitat and clean water are also prized by illegal marijuana growers,” [David] Ferrell said in his testimony [to the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control]. “The lands are remote with few people, the forest vegetation is dense, there is an extensive system of roads and trails (both open and closed), soils are fertile, and water for irrigation is available for the diverting.” …

The growers clear plots to plant, destroying natural vegetation in the area and disrupting wildlife. They transport water from lakes and streams (an average plot of 1,000 plants requires 5,000 gallons, or about 19,000 liters, of water daily). Some growers also liberally apply toxic chemicals to keep their plots clear of weeds, bugs and rodents, according to [Warren ] Eth. …

“The most disgusting aspect of it is the pollution,” Eth said. “They just pour chemicals like nobody’s business… and they get washed into streams that flow through national parks.”

Specifically, increasing concentrations of the rat poison warfarin have been detected in a sensitive, and nearing endangered status, mammal called the fisher (Martes Pennanti) in California, Ferrell said. This poison could be contributing to the fisher’s declining population.

While legalization of pot will not positively impact the consumption of water, and may negatively impact it, legalization should lessen the motivation to find remote areas to grow it.  I had not considered this aspect before.

However, High Country News‘ Christi Turner is all over that topic.

Nowhere do I see trailor defined as a real word…