Category Archives: Uncategorized

Soteriology:

Soteriology (/səˌtɪəriˈɒlədʒi/; Greek: σωτηρία sōtēria “salvation” from σωτήρ sōtēr “savior, preserver” and λόγος logos “study” or “word”^[1]) is the study of religious doctrines of salvation. Salvation theory occupies a place of special significance in many religions.

In the academic field of religious studies, soteriology is understood by scholars as representing a key theme in a number of different religions and is often studied in a comparative context; that is, comparing various ideas about what salvation is and how it is obtained. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Politics is religion, and the right is getting ready for the end times,” Michael Gerson, WaPo:

What I am talking about is the appropriation — really, the profanation — of religious ideas to serve ideological purposes. During the 20th century, this was often the preserve of the left. Marxism provided a soteriology — a theory of salvation — that caused people to die and kill in service to a redemptive ideal. It is what made communism so appealing — and so dangerous. It gave oppression the veneer of idealism.

Bevy:

1. a group of birds, as larks or quail, or animals, as roebuck, in close association.
2. a large group or collection:
   a bevy of boisterous sailors. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Grizzly Bears Might Return to California. Is the State Ready?” Brent Crane, Discover (April 2019):

The reserve is a picturesque expanse of shrubby hills and fields of wild oats cut through with gurgling creeks. Bevies of quail patrol dirt roads, while camera traps set up near water troughs capture images of deer, mountain lions, black bears and even rattlesnakes. The “chaparral bear,” the old nickname for California grizzlies, would have done just fine here, Alagona says.

The visual of a pack of quail, heavily armored and armed with bazookas, peering out of the ditch of the dirt road, pursues me through my dreams.

A reader sends a helpful link in response to my remark about lead levels in the Twin Cities area:

https://mndatamaps.web.health.state.mn.us/interactive/lead.html?fbclid=IwAR1b3QsQtpGx4VyMxRrbl_UU9IFm5V_q_BiCU_LoKweLZMb0q_hZWBldjj0

Which leads to this interactive map (interactivity not available on UMB):

Of more interest is this view, which I believe I found under Census Tract Map:

While these are measurements of children of recent vintage, I sort of think it’s still a good proxy for past decades. Now an overlay of where violent criminals grew up would be of interest, if I’m understanding this properly. Not necessarily dispositive as to causation of the violent tendencies, but definitely indicative.

I wish I had more time to properly explore this map.

Kevin Drum has a complaint about the mass media:

This allows me to complain about my two pet peeves from last week. First, the unbelievable amount of attention paid to a tiny little college admissions scandal. We still don’t know how many people were involved, but at appears to be something like 0.01 percent of the entering freshman class of America’s most elite universities. This is a rounding error, and it’s for a scandal that only affects about 5 or 6 percent of American families in the first place. What’s more, it’s just standard issue cheating, not even a symptom of some new or systemic problem. It deserved a few column inches on A7, not flood-the-zone coverage everywhere we looked.

And then there’s the president of the United States coyly suggesting that he has “tough” supporters who might—wink wink—get even tougher under the right circumstances. Sure, it’s just Donald Trump acting like his usual asshole self. But still. Doesn’t this deserve a few front-page stories? I mean, maybe it’s just a coincidence that hate crimes suddenly spiked as soon as Trump became president. But then again, maybe it’s not.

This bothered me, but I couldn’t quite figure out Drum’s error, and we’ll skip over the relatively minor error of assuming that the entire problem has been found – that is, is this the entire cactus, or is this an iceberg a mile high and ten miles deep?

Then, while reading this Lawfare article concerning the technicalities of the Venezuelan Constitution of 1961 and how they were eventually used to disassemble and destroy the very democracy it was designed to protect^[1], it came to me.

See, while the Venezuelan article immerses itself in an abstract summary of specified Venezuelan Constitutional procedures, as well as how members of critical institutions were intimidated into silence and submission by threats from eventual President Hugo Chavez and his followers, it sort of skips over perhaps the most important part of the destruction of Venezuelan democracy, and that’s the yawning abyss between the elites and the poverty-stricken. I’ve consulted a couple of sources on this, and they seem to agree that one of Chavez’s main charms was his loud support for the most destitute of society.

But yawning abyss is a terribly insufficient description. We need to remember the tendency of South American elites to engage in any activity which will secure their place in society. Remember Chile and General Pinochet? These behaviors, from favoring the rich in the court system to just outright killing of peasants, generates enormous resentment, destroys faith in the societal model, and fractures the nation. In a sense, the fleeing of poverty-stricken Venezuelans to Chavez was a rational response on their part. Society isn’t working for them. Find something else that works.

So how about that college admissions cheating scandal? Consider its salient features: Rich people buy their kids’ way into colleges for which they might not otherwise qualify, wherein everyone else must struggle with stringent standards, and often fail.

Is that fair?

Of course not. And that generates division in our society. Sure, it’s only a few kids involved. A rounding error, to quote Drum. So far. So fucking far.

But societies must have cohesion, and this is another chip out of that cohesion. Fractured societies fall to fighting, lose production, spirit, begin to have food riots, and before you know it you have a broken country. Even a broken governmental paradigm.

Now, you can handle this in one of two ways. The first, covering it up, results in a big old abscess full of pus, which gets worser the longer the prick is delayed. Sure, maybe you take a chance on it never being exposed, but those are long odds.

The second is to expose it to public loathing immediately, as our press has (hopefully) done. It’s embarrassing, there’s going to be a lot of speculation that the kids who have unknowingly benefited are not ready for society due to this bit of bad parenting, and maybe a few more foolishly rich parents will be caught doing the same thing.

But through the public debate that comes with the exposure, society has at least a chance of not being damaged by this idiocy. But if it’s not, if it festers?

It alienates the poverty stricken, the middle classes – everyone who isn’t in on the cheating.

OK, so Trump opened his mouth and his dementia carried him along to claim the military and police and a biker gang would support a coup d’état on his part. Let’s think about that. If the military is truly ready to support such a thing, then we’d better talk about the education scandal because we haven’t a chance against an American military that’s ready to turn on its own families. We Just Don’t. If the military can be persuaded to commit such a heinous action, then this nation doesn’t deserve to exist.

If the police are ready to support it, but not the military, the police get squashed by the military.

And a biker gang? Maybe this is an example of Trump’s wit, because it’s just damn silly.

But for all that the education scandal is a rounding error, it just illustrates that Drum’s looking through the numeracy prism at the wrong time. The importance doesn’t lurk in the numbers, but in how it potentially affects society, as it goes through our adversaries’ magnifiers and becomes worse and worse.

Until that rich family in the gated community doesn’t dare leave because of the rioters outside. Or me in my middle class community. All because trust has been destroyed.

And society fractured.

¹ No, really, I kid you not!

The Hill is reporting that the State of Washington’s moving to force anyone seeking to be on their Presidential ballot to reveal their tax returns:

Washington’s state Senate passed a bill this week that would drop President Trump from the state’s 2020 presidential ballot until he releases his tax returns.

The bill, which advanced Tuesday to the state’s House of Representatives, according to CBS News, would require any candidate on the ballot for president in the state to release five years of tax returns before appearing in a general or primary election.

Senators voted by a 28-21 margin to approve the bill, according to CBS. The state’s attorney general and solicitor told lawmakers in a letter this week that the proposal likely was constitutional, but analysts expect the law if passed to be challenged in federal court.

“The disclosure requirement you propose is likely Constitutional,” the two wrote to lawmakers, according to CBS, adding that the measure “would definitely be challenged in court.”

And if the Democrats are smart, one of them will challenge the law. Because it’s possible that when Trump’s campaign sues, a Federal court would rule that, while the lawsuit is unresolved, the law is suspended, and if the lawsuit is filed sufficiently late, it might not be resolved until after the 2020 elections, thus letting President Trump slip onto the ballot without revealing his tax returns.

There’ll be arguments about privacy, but I think they are superseded about the importance of the voter knowing whether or not the nominee is truthful as to their claims. (Indeed, now I’m tempted to suggest that nominees should be required to support contentious assertions, but I hesitate to suggest Yet Another Law.) Many voter interviews have indicated that Trump voters considered his alleged success in the private sector to be a reason to vote for him.

One of the Republican opposition remarked:

“We’re on really risky ground when we’re trying to place conditions on a federal election,” said Sen. Hans Zeiger (R), according to CBS.

I don’t think so. States choose how they select electors to the Electoral College. This is clearly a requirement the State has the prerogative to impose, in my view.

Should be interesting. Would he submit falsified returns? Just drop out? Or just try to make it all fly based on his supposed charisma? (Don’t worry, I never fell for President Clinton’s supposed charisma as well.)

This mouse may be dissatisfied with its existence.

Some movies just go right into the WTF category, and I think Blood Tea and Red String (2006) may be one such. Mostly stop-action, it seems to tell the story of the mice and the … bird-hyenas. Maybe. I see Wikipedia suggests rats. But they had beaks.

In any case, the bird-rats, yes, we’ll go with that label, have constructed a doll into which they’ve implanted an egg, and put it up over their doorway. Maybe it’s supposed to be a scarecrow. The mice steal it in the middle of the night, speeding away on their turtle, and seem to fall quite unhealthily in love with it in their lair. The bird-rats track their doll down… and I’ll just let it go at that.

This is not something you rate. It exists, you exist, and if it makes sense to you, Godspeed, eh? Apparently, there’ll be two more in this series. My goodness, I’ll have to see those as well.

If your dream of the evening is sophomoric teenage boy humor, then I can recommend The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977). A collection of vignettes working around a parody of Bruce Lee movies, it features nudity, satire, and anything else that can be linked to sex. I chortled several times. My Arts Editor moaned.

And never, ever again.

A reader comments on Michael Shellenberger’s remarks on nuclear power and its supposed superiority to other sources of carbon-neutral power:

I’m very skeptical that Shellenberger controlled for anything, and I’m always skeptical of anything written on Quillette — so much so that I have effectively stopped reading anything there. It’s an outpost for idealist, dogmatic libertarians who refuse to acknowledge any facts beyond those which make them right. Maybe in the name of time, nuclear has a place — but only if they start today, and only if people stop claiming it’s cheaper than renewables. The same improvements in nuclear expected in the future are as guaranteed as future improvements in green energy. But what’s a thousand times stupider, is that we keep ignoring the fact it would be even cheaper and faster to figure out how to consume and waste less energy. Worse, we keep arguing about all these things and doing nothing. Humanity is seriously going to kill itself.

I cannot speak to Quillette, and it’s an important facet of the discussion for readers who are not intimate with the details of the debate. Sources matter in the Age of the Web. But I am familiar with libertarians, having read their ideas for decades via REASON Magazine. They are clever, sometimes even smart – and often dogmatic.

In fact, they’re the equivalent of the progressives in terms of ‘tude.

We need a good carbon tax, as discussed here.

At a guess, The Island Of Doctor Moreau (1977) is often characterized as a cautionary tale of man attempting to play God, but for me it’s something else: a commentary on the very idea of divinity. But let’s start with the plot.

Ship’s engineer Braddock, survivor of the wreck of the Lady Vain in the Pacific, washes up on a mysterious, lush island. Eventually, he’s discovered and brought to the compound of Dr. Moreau. The servants are misshapen, Moreau’s niece (I think) Maria is beautiful but inhibited, and Montgomery, who provides the firepower backing up Moreau’s authority, is morose.

And Moreau? Domineering in the off-hand manner of a man who needs to be reminded to be domineering, he’s a researcher who cautiously reveals to Braddock his accomplishments and ambitions: to find a way to elevate animals to the level of mankind^[1]. But his accomplishments have a limit: he observes that his creations approach the level of humanity, but will slip back to a feral existence after a while. There’s now a group of them, the most important inhabitants of the island, and he has given them a set of Laws: no going on all fours, no shedding of blood, no consumption of flesh.

The punishment for breaking these Laws? Return to The House of Pain, the laboratory in which Moreau transforms the bulls, lions, tigers, and many other species into animal/humans.

Engineer Braddock kills a rogue animal/human who begs him for this mercy after breaking the Law, and in punishment for breaking the Law in turn, Moreau proposes to subject Braddock to the opposite transformation: from man to animal. Crucially, Montgomery objects, and Moreau’s rejoinder is a rifle shot to the back, killing Montgomery. Moreau has unknowingly committed a mistake, and now compounds it by ignoring the security of Montgomery’s body, for while he’s busy with Braddock’s treatment, the servants drag the body from the compound and leave it for the animal/humans to find.

When they gather, Moreau goes out to break up the imminent riot, but one of the animal/humans (perhaps a hyena), utters the pivotal phrase: The Master has broken the Law! For a brief moment, the moral of the story hangs in the balance: who stands outside the Law? Who can break it with impunity?

The answer, it seems, is no one, for the rioters fatally injure Moreau, break into the compound, free the animals still awaiting the uplift treatment, and burn the entire place to the ground. In the melee, many of the animal/humans meet their demise, often by those who they have just freed.

Keeping the hormones under strict control.

Meanwhile, before Moreau is confronted, he has been working to submerge Braddock’s humanity into his animal nature, desperate to rid his acknowledged fellow Master of the humanity which led him to break the Law. Braddock, despite physical transformations, is intransigent, engaging in a tug of wills with Moreau even as his own intellect is impaired. When Moreau is distracted by the murderous mob, Maria, who has fallen for Braddock, releases him and, as the compound goes up in flames, escape it and make their way to the repaired lifeboat of Lady Vain.

In a final reminder of the old ways, a survivor, perhaps the survivor, of the animal/humans attempts to stop their escape, but after a prolonged struggle, he is killed in a manner most ghastly, and Braddock and Maria are eventually saved.

One of the most important facets of religion is the rules it proffers to its followers, rules which supposedly make them good with God. Do these rules apply to the Rule Giver? This can be answered either Yes or No.

Yes implies that even God itself is subject to greater forces than itself, thus negating the Godly attribute. This leads to issues of doubt of existence (always a problem for those in power because of their religion, since it becomes a threat to their power). Those who accept that God must have limitations must then contend with issues of cognitive dissonance, and the entire bending of the force of reason. This leaves them somewhat unstable, does it not?

No suggests that the Law can be ignored at least under certain circumstances. Any rule exists because there is an immediate lure of illicit advantage that comes in breaking it, long range consequences be damned. This makes the role model inevitable with God, then, an irresistible lure. Priests, preachers, and pastors have all been caught with their fingers in the till, and their penises where they shouldn’t be: God may say No, don’t do this or that, yet God himself is well-known for breaking many of his own laws, at least in the Judeo-Christian traditions. Whether or not they conflate themselves with God, or merely hide behind his carapace, this gives them the right to break those Laws, to the detriment of vulnerable members of society.

The Island of Dr. Moreau illustrates these contretemps, and then destroys them in the fire of their own contradictions. The initial attraction of the movie may come from the exotic thought of transforming animals into humans, but in the end the real significance is in the transformation of humanity from divine-worshiping, to being the divine, to returning to simply being human.

¹ I cannot help but wonder if they are the inspiration for Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople, which are the focus of several stories of intense moral question. Cf. “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell“, “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” and several others.

Dispensary:

1. A room where medicines are prepared and provided.
2. A clinic provided by public or charitable funds.
3. North American A facility that prepares and sells cannabis as recommended by a doctor for the treatment of a medical condition.
   ‘state-issued ID cards are good for up to two ounces of pot a month from state-approved dispensaries’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in the previously mentioned Witness For The Prosecution.

I wish I’d been able to watch and review Zephyr Theater’s production of Witness For The Prosecution last week, when it still had part of last weekend and all of this weekend to run, since that would make this review useful. Unfortunately, illness precluded that viewing. Suffice it to say, a well-plotted court drama combined with a professional production led to a satisfying afternoon. In addition, Zephyr brought in a current judge to discuss the play’s correspondence to reality, which led onwards to discussions of staging considerations, role models for juvenile delinquents, and how realistic this play was for the era, and this was truly a lot of fun.

I only wish I could tell everyone to rush out and see it, but with only tomorrow’s showing available, I fear it may be sold out and unavailable.

From KDVR.com aka Fox31 in Denver, CO:

Colorado Republicans hoping to delay the passage of bills to repeal the death penalty and overhaul oil and gas regulations have demanded an unrelated 2,000-page bill be read aloud in the Senate.

GOP state Sen. John Cooke invoked a rule Monday allowing lawmakers to demand a bill be read, delaying other action. Cooke says it was the only option minority Republicans had.

Democrats accused Cooke of pulling a stunt. They brought in five computers to vocalize the bill simultaneously at a speed faster than humans can understand.

Bold mine. So is my giggling. If you want to see the greater context from a tilted perspective, try Dartagnan on The Daily Kos.

It seems a bit dissonant, but still fascinating.

Jon Levitan and Andrew Hamm at SCOTUSblog decided to take advantage of Justice Ginsburg’s recent bout of lung cancer by conducting a study of conspiracy theorists who tweeted that Ginsburg had died, or was in a coma, and then surveying the online behavior of these same folks when Justice Ginsburg resumed her place on the bench:

Through January and February, we tracked 82 Twitter accounts with over 10,000 followers that tweeted claims or insinuations (including questions) about Ginsburg’s death or incapacity. The account with the most followers was that of actor James Woods (@RealJamesWoods), who at the time had 1.95 million followers and who tweeted on January 29, among other similar messages: “As citizens we have a right to a fully seated United States Supreme Court. The fact that #RuthBaderGinsberg [sic] is literally missing in action is troubling. Considerations of her personal well-being aside (we wish her good health), Americans need to be apprised of her viability.” This may seem like a simple inquiry, but it ignores the Supreme Court’s direct statements. An example of a more nefarious tweet comes from one user with 250,000 followers, who on February 8 tweeted a link to a YouTube video and the message: “WHISTLEBLOWER REVEALS TRUTH ABOUT RUTH BADER GINSBURG HEALTH according to unconfirmed sources Ruth Bader Ginsburg is in a medically induced coma. They’ll keep her alive until the 2020 election if necessary.”

The last bit of wee sensationalism seems to be par for the course. What did Jon and Andrew find?

The accounts that we tracked and attempted to contact all have some measure of influence. We limited our search to accounts with more than 10,000 followers because we wanted to see how popular users — who are, presumably, concerned about their reputation and image — would react when confronted with the fact that conspiracy theories they pushed had been refuted. Only 16 percent publicly acknowledged Ginsburg’s return. Those who did not (80 percent of the accounts we tracked) have chosen to ignore or actively dispute evidence of her return to the court. (As explained, 4 percent of the tracked accounts were removed from consideration.)

This isn’t the first time that conspiracy theorists have targeted the Supreme Court, and it won’t be the last. We don’t want to draw any broad conclusion about conspiracy theories and how they evolve once their core arguments are proven wrong. We simply were interested to see how those who pushed this specific talking point reacted when the facts changed.

It’s an interesting, if unsurprising, commentary on those who are popular – they want to stay popular, and they’ll feed their audience the requisite red meat to satisfy that egotism. For most of them, truth or facts don’t play into that equation, all that matters is keeping their followers happy, which then leads to self-importance.

Sure, not all of them fell for it, but most did. It’s an interesting case study, and I enjoyed reading it.

A reader comments on the report on the attempt to spread nuclear technology to the Middle East:

On the one hand, I’m impressed that Saudi Arabia has read the writing on the wall for petroleum, and are busily transitioning away from powering their country using fossil fuels. They’re investing big in nuclear and renewables, it seems. On another hand, it would be some nice schadenfreude to see them stuck with a huge nuclear albatross around their neck. But on yet another hand, they’re clearly trying to serve multiple purposes, both wean themselves off oil and make themselves a nuclear weapons power, to stave off both Israel and Iran. And of course, the current administration and too numerous a cabal of rich old white guys don’t give a flying fuck about the survival of civilization in this world if it means they have a few more millions of dollars as bragging rights.

Yes. Saudi Arabia is an unapologetic theocracy, and since theology is rarely corralled by rationality, it makes me a little nervous to think of any theocracy having a nuclear weapons capability. Oh, I suppose we could argue that Pakistan is the counter-example, and I hope existential threats are enough that they won’t lob a nuclear missile at their similarly armed adversary, India, but the collateral damage issue makes this entire approach to managing nuclear-armed countries more than a little iffy.

Somewhat to my surprise, the attempt to stymie President Trump’s rearrangement of the government’s finances in order to finance his wall has passed the Senate. I had figured that the self-preservation instincts of the Republican Senators would override their good sense when it comes to being Senators. I think this is probably indicative of Senators who feel they are safe, even if they are modeling a “bad behavior” for their supporters, which is to dissent from the leader, although some may be simply contemplating retirement.

Even more surprising was the number of Republican Senators who broke ranks despite the brazen threats of the President.

The Senate delivered a high-profile rebuke to President Donald Trump over his signature agenda issue Thursday when 12 Republicans joined Democrats to overturn the President’s national emergency border declaration. [CNN]

High confidence or lots of retirements – or maybe a few have decided they’ve had enough of delusional shit, eh? But the most interesting was Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who Steve Benen has some fun roasting:

After the Democratic-led House passed a resolution to block Donald Trump’s emergency declaration, it was not at all clear whether it would pass the Republican-led Senate, and at least at first, many GOP senators were reluctant to stick their necks out. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), to his credit, said he’d put principle over party. …

A week later, Tillis was unwavering. Defending his position, the Republican added, “It’s never a tough vote for me when I’m standing on principle.”

That’s not a quote that stands up well.

It was easy to admire the North Carolinian at the time for ignoring the pressure and doing the right thing – right up until today, when Thom Tillis flip-flopped. Twelve Republicans broke party ranks and supported the resolution, but Tillis, less than three weeks after taking a bold and principled stand, was not among them.

I had expected at least one of the four GOP Senators (Rand, Collins, Murkowski, and Tillis) who had announced their plan to vote for the resolution to collapse under pressure from the President, and Tillis proved to be the weak link. Not that I was inclined to do so, but I won’t be looking to Tillis for principled stands in the future. I wonder if Tillis is fatally compromised at this point.

Most observers think the matter is dead, now, as Trump has promised to veto this attempt to neuter him. (It’d be quite the mystifying maneuver if he signed it.) As neither chamber reached the required supermajority to override the veto, it’d seem to be a dead horse.

But I wonder. Speaker Pelosi’s no one’s idiot, despite the idle wishes of the extreme right-wing. I think this horse may be ridden a little further by bringing up the legislation again in the House, along with heavy messaging concerning the potential for abuse and the importance of being on the right side of history in view of the legislators’ legacy, and perhaps a few more semi-terrifying musings upon the things a Democratic President might use such power (a subject I may have to mutter a bit more about tomorrow) to advance, and we might see quite a few Republican House members flip from their previous No vote to a more statesman-like Yes vote.

The No voters would then see both of those No votes, the one they’ve already presumably cast against the resolution, as well as the future No vote, used against them in the elections. While the cast-iron-stomach Republican base would be unbothered by the aspersions, it would affect moderates Republicans as well as Independents who might be undecided and looking for a reason to vote against the incumbent.

Perhaps Speaker Pelosi doesn’t want to abuse her opponents across the aisle, but I don’t think so. I think she’s a long term planner. We’ll see how much more mileage she can get out of this issue.

Ronna Romney McDaniel was appointed RNC chair by President Trump, so this tweet is understandable.

The latest SDNY fishing expedition is another example of blue-state liberal prosecutors carrying out their vendetta against @realDonaldTrump.

Let’s be clear: These are investigations in search of a crime – and their harassment has gone on for far too long.

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) March 12, 2019

But let’s be real clear: all investigations are in search of a crime. Some find them, some don’t.

If you’re not a mushroom eater, it may be time to change your mind. From IOS Press and the National University of Singapore:

Abstract: We examined the cross-sectional association between mushroom intake and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) using data from 663 participants aged 60 and above from the Diet and Healthy Aging (DaHA) study in Singapore. Compared with participants who consumed mushrooms less than once per week, participants who consumed mushrooms >2 portions per week had reduced odds of having MCI (odds ratio = 0.43, 95% CI 0.23–0.78, p = 0.006) and this association was independent of age, gender, education, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, physical activities, and social activities. Our cross-sectional data support the potential role of mushrooms and their bioactive compounds in delaying neurodegeneration.

If you’re wondering if a ‘portion’ is ridiculous, Melissa Breyer has the lowdown:

A portion was defined as around three-quarters of a cup of cooked mushrooms with an average weight of 150 grams (five ounces). Which is pretty remarkable; often times studies like this are using extracts, or the amount to be consumed is unrealistic. Here, they found that even a single small serving of mushrooms weekly may still be beneficial to reduce chances of MCI.

So I suppose there’ll be a stampede to grow and eat mushrooms. For a recent birthday, a nephew gave me a “log” of mushroom spores. Here’s a pic or two, after having been dressed up with some decorative tree bark by my Arts Editor, and quickly fruited:

And, supposing this study is confirmed, will we soon be whistling through our noses about the sudden and dangerous decline in mushroom populations? I shan’t be surprised.

I just had to laugh after reading Gary Sargent’s description of the maneuvering by the GOP to not, not, NOT vote against President Trump when it comes to his self-admitted faux-national emergency:

A few Republicans believe that with this declaration, Trump is abusing his power, so they are threatening to vote to terminate it. They currently have the numbers to succeed. But Trump would then have to veto the measure. This would get him and his voters very, very angry, which is intolerable.

So Republicans have hit on a solution: They may try to pass something designed to create the impression that they care about the general issues raised by Trump’s declaration — while leaving undisturbed the actual abuse that Trump is in the process of committing. …

The Post and the New York Times report that Senate Republicans are negotiating a measure that would limit the power of presidents to declare national emergencies, by requiring a congressional vote every 30 days to keep them going.

This measure would not terminate Trump’s national emergency, and the 30-day provision wouldn’t even retroactively apply to it. As Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) put it, this would allow Republicans to “express their concern” about Trump’s use of the emergency power, while simultaneously giving them a “way to express their support for the president.”

In other words, Republicans are openly and unabashedly stating that the whole point of this exercise is to give the very same senators who profess deep concern about Trump’s national emergency a way to support it, while also appearing to care about the underlying issues it raises. (Republicans must vote on whether to terminate Trump’s emergency, which they will do on Thursday, because the House already voted to terminate it, and under the law the Senate must act as well.)

Yeah? If they’re honest, they’d be talking about simply cashiering this law that lets Trump rearrange the country’s finances. Retroactively. Maybe a new version, but only after responsible, sober, public debate, none of this writing it in private shit. From either side, either.

But, and far more importantly, we’re starting to see the peak toxicity of Team Politics. All it takes is a dim bulb of a leader, and you’re set for a ride you won’t believe. But these poor Senators, they can’t vote against Trump, and it’s not necessarily because of the base.

It’s because if they demonstrate disloyalty, that tells their perhaps reluctant supporters that it’s OK to dissent.

Republican power is built on, among other things, team play. It’s all for one, but don’t complete that quote, because the other half doesn’t always apply, especially if someone up the line from the guy you just voted for makes a decision that doesn’t work for you. You’ve been taught the liberals are evil, and you’d better vote conservative.

It’s a sad and damning commentary on the conservative mindset these days.

I continue to be fascinated by Kevin Drum’s quest to blame extraordinary levels of crime on environmental lead, and he’s found another study to bolster his case:

Brian Guinn of the University of Louisville decided to do his doctoral dissertation on the lead-crime hypothesis. Since lead was fully removed from gasoline more than two decades ago, the main source of lead poisoning today comes from residual lead dust trapped in topsoil. So first he mapped topsoil lead levels in Louisville:

Then he measured violent crime in each area and found a strong relationship with lead levels. As you’d expect, the relationship weakened once he controlled for income, education, race, etc., but the relationship was still there…

Fascinating. I wonder if this sort of study has been done for the Twin Cities area. And I also wonder about the political blowback it might face. Anti-poverty advocates who place the blame for poverty on unfair political power structures might take strong umbrage at a finding of high levels of lead in the topsoil of those communities, with an implicit finding that the community has lead-based neurological disease. After all, their favorite political theory then goes down the toilet, even if it is actually true.

On the other hand, it’s yet another brick in the wall for environmental purity advocates.

Lead in the environment continues to be an interesting area to keep an eye on. Go, Kevin!

Nice restaurant. Don’t get the cod, though.

Calling Paul Temple (1948) is one of those light-hearted British murder mysteries. Temple is a former Scotland Yard inspector, who has married Stevey and moved into detective fiction writing. They’re attending a high-class restaurant with an old colleague of Temple’s, Chief Inspector Forbes, when the restaurant’s singer, having written a note to the Chief Inspector claiming to have knowledge about the ‘Rex’ murders, collapses and dies on stage. She’s founds to have poison in her exotic lipstick. ‘Rex’ is inscribed in her makeup room.

This launches Paul and Stevey into the mystery of why 4 women have been murdered, with the word ‘Rex’ involved in each. We move from the Egyptian Dr. Kohima, to his assistant Mrs Trevellyan, and onwards to half the population of Canterbury, dodging bombs and bullets, and indulging in a casual bit of racism in the form of the surprise return of their stereotyped Burmese servant, Rikki.

Sadly, this all becomes a little too opaque and contrived. The condition of the film didn’t help, as the audio track had been damaged in this print. Paul and Stevey have some chemistry going on, but it’s not really enough to hold it all together, and to tell the truth, in the end I wasn’t really clear who really was the criminal. Nor did I care.

A sad thing to have to say.

A reader writes concerning the notion that going to a one-payer system might have unforeseen consequences for the development of health therapies:

A large amount (most? I’m too lazy to go research it) of pharmaceutical research is paid for by us, the taxpayer, through the government. NIH sponsors a lot of other medical research. So I don’t buy that we wouldn’t have these products, procedures and drugs if the USA didn’t allow private corporations to extort the US populace over health care. I don’t buy that at all. Costs in other nations for procedures done the world over (and most likely not invented here) is a fraction of what they cost here. There is gouging and profiteering on every level of our health care system. Every. Level.

I do not contest my reader’s point concerning basic research – but it’s also incontestable that U.S. companies spend $ billions trying to bring these therapies to market, and often fail. The lure for the businessman, which is often far different than for the researcher, is the immense profits, and those immense profits, if attained, pay for all those failed attempts.

If you can’t point at potential profits to carry the cost of your failures, who invests? It’s an interesting question. Do we then make it all a government operation and let the taxpayers cover them? In some respects, such as vaccinations and anti-venom drugs, as I’ve noted elsewhere, this may actually be a net positive for the system. But for novel therapies for maladies which have proven difficult? That conclusion isn’t nearly as clear. Unlike some, I like the idea of using a methodology of setting medical research priorities through some other method than where the biggest profits might be found – but I could be wrong. Maybe profit-dowsing is more effective.

Unforeseen consequences. It’s worth worrying about.

Today, Steve Benen has published a lovely graph which depicts the beginning of the destruction of one of the Republicans’ favorite idols, the Laffer Curve, as a universal panacea:

Naturally, an argument can be made that an initial blip of bigger deficits will occur, before the magic of the Laffer Curve brings in the riches to the government coffers – but I doubt that’s going to occur, especially given the nature of the tax cut on corporations which is causing these initial deficit increases.

But I would argue that this also illustrative of the basic struggle between the philosophy that greed is good, aka libertarianism, vs collective actions. The activities of the first two years of the Trump Presidency have been little more than unrestrained giveaways to the corporate world, both in terms of corporate tax reductions and in reductions for corporate C-suite personnel, aka the elite, and the corporate world is about the use of greed to accomplish societal goals – a generally successful venture, but one requiring monitoring as it tends to get out of control. In this case, it appears the fox is guarding the hen house.

This unfettered pursuit of wealth, power, and prestige, so reminiscent of the degenerative, and disastrous, phase of the secular demographic cycle discussed in Secular Cycles (Turchin), is the driving force behind the current trend on the graph, above. I do not mean to tar all of the private sector with the brush of all-consuming greed, but the immense financial power of the big companies, when used with greed rather than service at heart, has the power to cause immense damage.

It turns out the descriptive Too Big To Fail, a perennially popular phrase, is profoundly wrong. Too Big To Exist is a far better encapsulation of the dangers of such large, powerful entities – and the further dangers when they are run by greedy and ambitious characters. It also suggests that something needs to be done to eliminate such entities from our society, preferably through monopoly-busting and the like. This may turn out to be one of Obama’s biggest failures.

The up & coming question may be When will our national debt begin to affect our economy in a deleterious manner?

It’s fairly common these days to run across mentions of “anonymized data” while at medical facilities, which is to assure you that your privacy won’t be violated if they’re permitted to use your bodily fluids and parts for research. But is this right? Chelsea Whyte in NewScientist (2 March 2019, paywall) reports not:

Stripping records of information like names, addresses and social security numbers was once enough to keep it from being identifiable, but that changed about 20 years ago.

“There was this notion that was useful for decades, that if you redact certain types of information, it becomes quite hard to trace back records. And it actually worked quite well,” says Erlich. “But as we got into the era of big data and large-scale internet resources, it became true that it’s hard to anonymise any big data.”

The myth of genetic anonymity persists, however, because it is useful. It gives researchers access to a wealth of information without having to seek informed consent.

Research of human subjects in the US is governed by the Common Rule, which applies to all federally funded research. This rule is rewritten periodically to bring it in line with current ethical standards and take into account new technology. This happened in January, but the rulebook still doesn’t count DNA as identifiable information. “Many people wrote opinions saying that DNA is identifiable and that we should treat it this way,” says Erlich. Instead, the new language explicitly says DNA isn’t identifiable.

There are clear benefits to allowing this, because it is a good way of sampling the entire population. For example, if you have blood drawn at the doctor’s office and there is a bit left over after your tests are done, it could be stripped of identifiers and put into a repository where it can be used for research without you ever knowing about it. But increasingly, people want control over the use of their data.

I feel guilty that I don’t get worked up over this sort of thing. Maybe it’s because it didn’t occur to me that this is all true, and I’m a little put out. Certainly, corporations want to avoid health liability issues, and this might allow them to do so.

But, in the end, it’s really about the medical profession asserting something that has become a profound falsehood. The bit about the Common Rule was particularly disappointing, especially in the light of a number of recent prosecutions for crimes that were considered cold cases, but solved through DNA studies and using commercial sites to trace relatives.

I’d advise that the next time you’re reading some sort of statement about your data being anonymized, even if it’s not medical data, beware. Anonymization seems to be going the way of the unicorn, at least so long as we live in a data-rich society.