Monthly Archives: July 2016

Here we feature some of the odder color combinations so beloved of the Arts Editor, including Amaranth.

Here comes the amaranth, supposedly you can pop their seeds in a skillet…

This one’s still a little disturbing.

The recent independent film release Weiner (2016) allows a glimpse into the peculiar mind of a man, Anthony Weiner, which is fascinating if you are something other than a politician. This fly-on-the-wall documentary of his NYC Mayoral run chronicles his ups – and then big downs – of his  campaign.  He begins the race as front-runner and becomes a victim of his own base urges, as new pictures from his Congressional career-ending sexting scandal emerge and the electorate reacts.

But he’s not a quitter. In the teeth of voter disapproval, Weiner continues his campaign, and we get to see most of that – his frustration and dissatisfaction with himself, his wife’s exhaustion, his attempts to address the issues of the City, rather than letting his private misadventures define his campaign. The film forces you to ask yourself questions: should this man’s private behavior be a factor in evaluating him for public office? Does the fact that his wife has forgiven him have an influence? How much of the voter’srejection of him had to do with his behavior, and how much was related to his marriage to a Muslim (he is Jewish), i.e., racism?

For a man with a lesser public service record, it might be hard to disentangle these questions, but he served 7 terms in the US House of Representatives, and the documentary makes clear that he had a largeimpact in embarrassing the GOP on several occasions.  The debates for his mayoral contest make clear that he has passionately held positions and experience that could have benefited the City. It brings into sharp relief a real question of if, and how, a politician’s private life should influence their public position. An unrelated example of this was seen when recent House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s pedophilic actions came to light.  When does information concerning private matters – and perhaps criminal, in Hastert’s case, although statute of limitations has run out – transition into the public sphere to become part of our evaluation criteria?

And what of the media? Is the invasive and vindictive behavior of at least one NYC publication appropriate for a supposed journalistic institution? Does that sort of crucible produce more honestpoliticians, or just those who are better at covering up? And the woman who came forward the last week of Weiner’s mayoral campaign with damningly explicit pictures – was she manipulated by anti-Weiner forces into destroying his campaign? Or did she really do this all on her own?

And then there’s the final question: Would you vote for him? There’s a certain grudging admiration that builds up during the film, for a flawed man who continues to fight even when the odds are longer than can be measured, a man who can take personal attacks and return them in a substantive manner, such as the incident in which he says, “Yes, it’s your right to say I shouldn’t be running – but it’s NOT your right to take away the opportunity for others to vote for me!”

The documentary surprises not in the mistakes made by Anthony Weiner. We know what these are. The surprise comes in the subtle questions raised to the viewer; questions about forgiveness, questions about when enough public castigation is enough, questions about whether a man’s flaws should be all that defines him.  And questions about whether a person’s good ideas should be discounted because of his bad actions.

The film has a lot going for it.  It’s definitely worth your time to see.

In lieu of typing, which currently hurts, is this wildlife photo collected today.

Evolution has been getting wonky of late.

Some slender breath-stoppers. C’mere, Mr. Bee, just another step closer…

Ignore the less than pristine back porch and just take in … the orange!

Let’s get a closeup of that last one.

A reader doesn’t trust analyses of GMOs so far:

Experts have been frequently, horribly wrong through out history. Now, I do not think for one moment that the ignorant masses’ opinions on scientific facts are as valid as educated scientists. But with GMOs, the story is quite a bit muddier and different. First, there’s not been any valid test of their safety — and by that, I mean at a minimum it has to be a long term test, because effects are likely subtle. And because any error will adversely affect billions of people, unlike say drugs which were withdrawn from the market when it was discovered they were injuring and killing people. Secondly, because large industrial agriculture is built on GMOs and other such marketable “technologies”, there are a bunch of very large, very wealthy companies doing their best to skew the science and common belief about GMOs. So when I read “many scientists believe them to be safe”, I’m skeptical that that’s a valid sample or a valid statement. Monsanto, Bayer, ConAgra, Syngenta, Dupont, Dow Chemical, BASF and Cargill make billions of dollars on the system using GMOs. They are not going to stand by idly while consumers ask for information and safety, if it’s going to slow their profits.

I note a subtle confusion of scientists with their (potential) employers. Do scientists spout the company line? As people devoted to finding the truth, you’d hope not – but no doubt some do, through fear or epistemological confusion.

And absent the direct effects of GMOs on human digestion and health, there’s systemic effects: most GMO drops are GMO precisely to give them herbicide and pesticide resistance or characteristics. And those things have their own harmful effects. For instance, Monsanto’s huge line of “Roundup-ready” GMO crops: corn, beans, etc. Roundup is claimed to be “safe” because one main ingredient, glyphosate, does not interfere with human metabolism. However, it kills plants, which have a different metabolic pathway quite well. And it also kills bacteria, which have that same metabolic pathway as well. Bacteria, like the necessary and helpful bacteria in your gut. You’d die without them. Injuring them cannot be good for your health, but since science is only just beginning to scratch the surface on gut bacteria, we don’t really know what the heck we’re doing to ourselves, with so many chemicals added to our diet, intentionally and accidentally.

So even if GMO corn itself will not harm me — and again, that has not been proven via a multi-decade study — all of that corn has been saturated repeatedly with glyphosate. Any trace amounts remaining are bad for my health.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to see how much of the corn supply goes directly to humans. From Jonathan Foley, the director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, comes this via Scientific American and Ensia.com:

Although U.S. corn is a highly productive crop, with typical yields between 140 and 160 bushels per acre, the resulting delivery of food by the corn system is far lower. Today’s corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens). Much of the rest is exported. Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.

Yes, the corn fed to animals does produce valuable food to people, mainly in the form of dairy and meat products, but only after suffering major losses of calories and protein along the way. For corn-fed animals, the efficiency of converting grain to meat and dairy calories ranges from roughly 3 percent to 40 percent, depending on the animal production system in question. What this all means is that little of the corn crop actually ends up feeding American people. It’s just math. The average Iowa cornfield has the potential to deliver more than 15 million calories per acre each year (enough to sustain 14 people per acre, with a 3,000 calorie-per-day diet, if we ate all of the corn ourselves), but with the current allocation of corn to ethanol and animal production, we end up with an estimated 3 million calories of food per acre per year, mainly as dairy and meat products, enough to sustain only three people per acre. That is lower than the average delivery of food calories from farms in Bangladesh, Egypt and Vietnam.

Incidentally, the article is entitled, “It’s Time to Rethink America’s Corn System.” I must finish reading it later today, it’s interesting. Due to a wrist injury, I must curtain my response (not that I had much of one, although the reader raised a host of interesting points). I also wonder if corn is as nutritious as other crops…

These were found at a scenic overlook stop. Some nice contrasts here.

And then the tragedy of the tree.

University of Florida professor Brandon McFadden and Oklahoma State University professor Jayson Lusk conduct and publish research on GMOs and the public. From the introduction:

The seemingly high level of public opposition is puzzling given the views of most scientists on the issue. It could be argued that gaps between science and the public has always existed (4) and is increasing (5). However, the gap is extraordinarily large regarding the safety of GM foods. Only 37% of US consumers believe GM food is safe to eat; by sharp contrast, 88% of scientist members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) believe GM food is safe to eat (6).

Deeper in:

Public concern about the safety of GM food is often expressed by demands for mandatory labeling, however, the public may prefer to default to experts for decisions related to biotechnology if they are uncertain or believe themselves unknowledgeable. Respondents were asked several questions to determine preferences for labeling (see Fig.4). While 84% of respondents supported mandatory labeling for food containing GM ingredients (fig. 4A), there was also overwhelming support for mandatory labeling food containing deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) (fig. 4D). Eighty-percent of consumers supported a label for food indicating the presence or absence of DNA, an absurd policy that would apply to the vast majority of foods in a grocery store.

Rather than asking whether consumers want mandatory labeling, a more instructive question might be how they believe such an issue should be decided. A question similar to that posed by (21) was applied to the case of labeling, and results indicate only 35% thought decisions about mandatory labeling should mainly be based on the views of average Americans, with the remainder believing the issue should be decided by experts (fig. 4B). Furthermore, only 8% thought the issue of mandatory labeling should be decided by ballot initiative, and the majority, 58%, thought the issue should be decided by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (fig. 4C). Therefore, although most consumers support a mandatory label for GM food, most consumers also thought the decision should be made experts with more knowledge. Indeed, as previous results suggest, consumers had little knowledge of basic genetics.

I’ve omitted the references and figures. The ignorance concerning the prevalence of DNA in the food supply is unsurprising and not particularly grievous; it’s a big world out there and I know very bright software engineers who aren’t really aware of the contents of the solar system.

As the authors themselves note, the more interesting question concerns who should be making decisions, and quite clearly the respondents felt that the experts in the field should be in charge of making such decisions. This is quite reasonable, even reassuring on its face, although I think there will be, depending on the field, legitimate questions concerning who’s an expert and who’s not.

I think there is a delicate incongruity in this particular example in that deciding whether or not mandatory labeling is appropriate should be one for the experts, but if the answer is ‘yes’, then the vast majority of the responsibility for understanding the issues of GMOs shifts right back to the consumers. It leads back to the question of democracy and science, as we discussed in a political context here. It’s a kinky problem – there’s a shared responsibility for what we eat, between ourselves and the suppliers. But will mandatory labeling help when most consumers do not realize DNA is deeply intertwined with our food supply? Is more education the panacea, or are most consumers just too busy making a living to really have the time to care about this sort of thing? And after all that study, what if they choose to believe the GMO analog of Jenny McCarthy, the anti-vaxxer queen who does terrible damage to the efforts to extirpate many diseases from the world? It’s a head-scratcher.

(h/t NewScientist’s delicious Feedback column, 18 June 2016, paywall)

Sometimes your spouse says just the right thing.

Today, it was, “The GOP has become the National Enquirer of politics.” Then she paused. “I take that back. They’re worse. They’re the Weekly World News.”

Ironically, WWN’s tag is:

 THE WORLD’S ONLY RELIABLE NEWS

A winsome plant.

As if I knew what “winsome” meant.

Steve Benen @ Maddowblog reports on the latest remarks of former Governor and former candidate for Vice President Sarah Palin regarding the Republicans Against Trump movement:

“That gang, they call themselves Never hashtag, whatever, I just call ‘em Republicans Against Trump, or RAT for short,” the former governor of Alaska told attendees of the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, ahead of Trump’s address. […]

“[T]he ‘splodey heads keep ‘sploding over this movement because it seems so obvious,” she said. “[Colorado Republican Senate candidate] Darryl [Glenn] wins, Trump wins, America will win because voters are so sick and tired of being betrayed.”

She added, in reference to Trump’s GOP critics, “At such a time as this, you cannot be lukewarm. We’re going to take our country back, and you are either with us or against us.”

So she’s thinking voters will vote against those who betray them. Fair enough. Here’s a few statements from her own allies, a year ago, courtesy Right Wing Watch (and via Steve Benen):

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, for example, said there would be an anti-gay “revolution” that would “just break this nation apart” if marriage bans were overturned, warning that such a ruling would “literally split this nation in two and create such political and cultural turmoil that I’m not sure we could recover from it.” …

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson warned that the U.S. could witness a second civil war over a same-sex marriage decision and televangelist Rick Joynerpredicted that the court would “start an unraveling where our country fractures like it hasn’t since the Civil War.” …

“It is just a question of how soon the wrath of God is going to come on this land,”televangelist Pat Robertson warned. Florida-based pastor Carl Gallups, now a staunch Donald Trump ally, maintained that “this ruling may prove to be the final death knell of divine judgment upon our once great nation.” …

[Former House Speaker Tom] DeLay warned that the ruling would pave the way for a secret government plan to legalize “12 new perversions, things like bestiality, polygamy [and] having sex with little boys.” Ben Carson, then a GOP candidate for president, suggested that NAMBLA would benefit from the ruling. …

Mike Huckabee said that America was witnessing “the criminalization of Christianity” and that any pastor who didn’t want to officiate a wedding for a same-sex couple would be liable to face criminal charges :

If the courts rule that people have a civil right not only to be a homosexual but a civil right to have a homosexual marriage, then a homosexual couple coming to a pastor who believes in biblical marriage who says ‘I can’t perform that wedding’ will now be breaking the law. It’s not just saying, ‘I’m sorry you have a preference.’ No, you will be breaking the law subject to civil for sure and possible criminal penalties for violating the law…. If you do practice biblical convictions and you carry them out and you do what you’ve been led by the spirit of God to do, your behavior will be criminal.

That last one is clearly a deliberate attempt to confuse theological marriage with civil marriage, which can then be used to push the damaging Christian nation meme. However, the real point I’m making is that the right-fringe leadership persistently uses hysterical predictions to frighten their followers into obedience. But as Palin inadvertently clarifies, voters and followers do pay attention, even if it’s at the prompting of, let us say, competing leaders.

So, as the realization hits that Palin, Dobson, et al, are merely lying every time they want something, what will these “betrayed” voters do? Will they head even further right, perhaps into the waiting arms of the KKK and White Supremacist groups? Or will that prove too repugnant? Given the dominance of Fox News and further right radio channels, it’s a little hard seeing them returning to the neighborhood of reasonable conservatives, such as the GOP of 30 years ago – which doesn’t exist in organized form anyways? The prejudices and false information that informs their thought processes are firmly in place; interesting historical information that dismantle their mythos won’t penetrate (such as this fascinating piece on the history of abortion by CNN). What can be done?

Start a service to rehabilitate regretful extreme-right conservatives?

The signs and symptoms of climate change can be seen everywhere, even at the edge of space. On Spaceweather.com, Dr. Tony Phillips writes about the phenomenon of noctilucent clouds and how their increasing brilliance may signal changes in the atmospheric composition:

They appear with regularity in summer months, shining against the starry sky at the edge of twilight. Back in the 19th century you had to go to Arctic latitudes to see them. In recent years, however, they have been sighted from backyards as far south as Colorado and Kansas.

Noctilucent clouds are such a mystery that in 2007 NASA launched a spacecraft to study them. The Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere satellite (AIM) is equipped with sensors specifically designed to study the swarms of ice crystals that make up NLCs.  Researchers call these swarms “polar mesospheric clouds” (PMCs).

Source: National Weather Service

It’s a fascinating story, discovering that climate change means the mesosphere actually becomes icier, as he notes here from a 36 year long data record:

At altitudes where PMCs form, temperatures decreased by 0.5 ±0.2K per decade. At the same time, water vapor increased by 0.07±0.03 ppmv (~1%) per decade. …

These results are consistent with a simple model linking PMCs to two greenhouse gases. First, carbon dioxide promotes PMCs by making the mesosphere colder. (While increasing carbon dioxide warms the surface of the Earth, those same molecules refrigerate the upper atmosphere – a yin-yang relationship long known to climate scientists.) Second, methane promotes PMCs by adding moisture to the mesosphere, because rising methane oxidizes into water.

Speaking of CO2, how is it doing? From the Mauna Loa station:

… isn’t this odd?

… it looks like the plague as a flower.

Much nicer!

And another view of our everted lungs.

Once again we have a Vincent Price collection, but unlike the Poe-based vignettes reviewed earlier, these are based on Nathaniel Hawthorne stories and are more suspenseful. I speak of Twice Told Tales (1963), in which Price stars in the adaptations of the stories.

In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment“, Price is the friend of a doctor and scientist, Heidegger (Sebastian Cabot), both now elderly. A storm hits and lightning strikes the mausoleum of Heidegger’s long-dead fiancee, Sylvia, from whose death he never really recovered, and the old men venture out to examine the structure for damage. They find the woman’s body extraordinarily well preserved, and Heidegger hypothesizes that a liquid coming through the roof and finding its way into her coffin is responsible. In a devil-may-care moment, he drinks the liquid and regains his youth. Pressed, Price’s character does likewise, and now they are young bulls.

Heidegger becomes hopeful, and despite Price’s bland discouragements, presses forward to administer the solution to his fiancee’s corpse, and the ultimate is achieved! Sylvia revives. But as the doctor disappears to fetch clothing, we discover the disaster waiting to happen – Price and Sylvia had been lovers, cheating on the good doctor, and, the two filled with the hormones of youth after decades of decay, indulge in lust’s sweet embrace, much to the consternation of the doctor. He returns with a knife, with which is he is incompetent and suffers the indignity of a sudden death. Meanwhile, the effects of the liquid are effervescent, and Sylvia dries up, leaving Price to scrabble after the last few drops in a tomb run dry. A simple story of how the most base of sins will have repercussions even at the end of a life, spoiling all that one may have worked for, and for all that it is of the speculative fiction genre, it is effective.

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” tells the story of a man’s obsession with keeping sin from his daughter: she becomes a poison, a danger to everyone. But one chemistry student aspires to her hand, nonetheless, and this cannot be tolerated, and so, rather than cure the girl, the man becomes poison as well – never able to cheat on her. In the end, all is lost. It is properly told: why is the bush poisonous, why is its essence administered to her, oh why why why? And so we’re hooked on the story, and the work of the actors, all the way to the end.

Unlike the first two, “House of the Seven Gables” lies in the horror genre, with supernatural forces at work, but for all that the moral questions are serious: are the relatives of a man unjustly executed for witchcraft required to help the family of those who accused that executed man find treasure? Do sins accrue over the centuries? Sadly, at least for Vincent, his family is a dusty, corrupt echo of what it once was, and he succumbs to the ghostly (and poorly done) skeletal hand around the throat, as a due answer to the questions du jour, and as the house collapses and the opposing family member escapes, we’re left to meditate upon the sins of the past and how they effect the current election, the general competency of the performances of Price’s bygone age, and how much was done with so little money.

There are more ways to tell a story than with 200 digital artists working on computers.