Sometimes the most amazing things are found, like, oh, Oculudentavis khaungraae, specially protected from the elements. Not sure what that is? It’s awfully damn cool. Here’s Dr. Jingmai O’Connor talking about it.
Sounds utterly fascinating and cool until you think of a bunch of hungry ones chasing you. Then they’re flying piranhas.
Not really. They’d be good for taking care of irritating insects, though. Maybe a good pet?
If you were appalled by President Trump’s speech concerning the coronavirus on Wednesday night – I only caught clips on Colbert myself – this fumbling, mistake-littered speech which appalled our allies and the markets alike made for a gaping opening for Trump’s political opponents.
Into this, Joe Biden (D-DE) charged with a proper delivery – by presenting his own plan. A speech on the subject, clearly laying out the proper principles for dealing with a pandemic on American soil, is in this ABC News link. I was impressed, because in a way he reminded me of Obama’s initial campaign. I voted for Obama, in part, because he insisted on treating Americans as adults. The preceding Bush Administration had admonished us to keep on shopping in the face of not one, but two wars. Obama was clearly a more serious politician than Bush or, following the Palin pick, Senator McCain.
I have to agree with conservative NeverTrumper Jennifer Rubin of WaPo:
Seeing what presidential behavior looks like is enough to bring tears to one’s eyes, especially knowing a new president won’t arrive until January at the earliest. The basics of leadership — mastering the facts that give one authority, displaying empathy, being honest about the extent of the crisis without fomenting panic and giving people a sense that they will not go without care — are entirely beyond Trump’s reach. To see them on display was like finding a precious family heirloom you had misplaced.
Biden closed with a series of promises that should not have been noteworthy. However, they now stand out, a bright light at the end of our very dark Trumpian tunnel. “No President can promise to prevent future outbreaks. But I can promise you that when I’m president, we will prepare better, respond better, and recover better. . . . We will listen to experts and heed their advice. We will rebuild American leadership and rally the world to meet global threats.” He added, “And I will always, always tell you the truth. That is the responsibility of a president. That is what is owed to the American people.” What a delight it would be to have a president who did not compulsively lie.
Biden had a rare opportunity to show how he would do the job. He and his top-notch staff who helped put together the plan hit it out of the ballpark. November cannot come soon enough.
That moment when you want to roar and make the humans run, but you can feel that sneeze coming on instead.
Gorgo (1961) follows a not unfamiliar plot line. Man finds monster, man catches monster, man takes monster home for a bit of exploitation, Mama Monster catches wind and comes a-hunting … man. Throw in a dumb little boy who has mysterious knowledge and probably should have been thrown over the side of the private salvage ship (read: treasure hunter) he stows away on, two really awful monsters – I mean, the rubber feet on these beasties were embarrassing! – and a lovely destruction of London with, perhaps surprisingly, many of its inhabitants in a welter of collapsing walls, and that’s about it.
Glowing red eyes, some OK acting. No profound themes, some questionable behaviors, and that damn kid. This one was not worth the time.
To say the market seems jumpy is an understatement. Here’s the DJIA sometime in the middle of the day:
Since I took that snapshot, the markets have closed, with the DJIA just a smidgeon short of 10% down. I’m expecting a dead cat bounce tomorrow, but I won’t try to take advantage of it.
The current contretemps have been driven by the emergence of the Wuhan virus. Certainly, a few investors saw the early reports on the virus and decided to liquidate, so they’re relatively financially safe. For the rest of us, including me, it’s time to ride the rollercoaster. I believe it was Buffet who said, The wise investor, upon seeing panic in the financial streets, licks his lips and begins to plot.
Well, maybe not in so many words. But you get the gist.
However, as I mentioned in the prior post on this thread, politics also will play into the market. Our current President is a political amateur whose main gift is communicating with his base and reinforcing their grievances, with a secondary gift of using his base and the Republican Party structure to keep his Congressional allies in line. After that, he doesn’t appear to have any strengths.
That means, while the Wuhan virus is certainly the main driver of our current financial meltdown, the massive inefficiencies of the current Administration are magnifying the effect, or, in today’s case, purely driving a drop in value. Last night the President suddenly announced travel restrictions, and this is credited with driving the market over the cliff. For those investors who have been ignoring politics as either irrelevant or too painful, here are the factors that concern me:
This is going to be a rough patch, with a dip into recession, led by an Administration more concerned with reelection than with honest governance.
But, for me, the question isn’t how my 401K is doing, as my late conservative friend Jim once asked, but whether we’re going to come out of it with the least fortunate members of our society still relatively healthy, or if they’ll be broken: dead or so deeply into debt that they have no hope.
Good luck, folks, and always remember there’s someone else far worse off than yourself.
I haven’t had time to harp on the climate change situation, but I just ran across this beautiful visualization from about a year ago, and I share it, if only as a lesson in data visualization.
The "wait-for-it" million year tour of atmospheric CO2 is back. This time with some RCPs (the future) for context. Wait for it…. pic.twitter.com/RmwOz7Dk5B
— Kris Karnauskas (@OceansClimateCU) March 9, 2020
Speaking of CO2 measurements, what’s the trend line at Mauna Loa?
Still upwards. I am looking forward to checking in on this in 6 months, out of curiosity as to whether it reflects any reaction to the slowdown in human industrial activity due to the Wuhan virus.
A few days ago, President Trump floated the idea of reducing the payroll tax (used to fund Social Security) as a way to keep the economy going. Regardless of the utility of the idea – I think it would ineffectual and reflects an unhealthy fixation on taxes and entitlements – I found this note about Senator McConnell’s (R-KY) reaction deeply amusing:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has privately told several allies in recent days he personally opposes the payroll tax cut idea Trump has endorsed, according to two veteran Republicans briefed on the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.
McConnell has made clear he “detests” pursuing this particular policy, which would probably add to federal debt and deficits, and he has said many conservative GOP senators share his view. Still, he will hear out the White House on Tuesday, they said. [WaPo]
Source: St. Louis Fed
Really, Senator McConnell? You helped pass legislation which increased the deficit by how much, and now you’re worried about the deficit?
Hypocritical at best.
In the Mississippi primary that played out yesterday, Mike Espy has won the right for a Round 2 with now-Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), having lost the special election to her in 2018 by a relatively large margin of 7 points.
Now we shift focus to November. This campaign will decide what we want the next decade to look like for Mississippi. #MSSen https://t.co/HITdZmoqDv
— Mike Espy (@MikeEspyMS) March 11, 2020
Mississippi may be the most reliably Republican state in the nation, so Espy can only be hopeful, not confident. The latest poll I can find suggests Hyde-Smith has a comfortable 10 point lead.
This has been bugging me for a couple of days, and since I run the blog to let the bugs roam free … some more email, but this time from the author to an email list to me. The author? Former Redstate editor in chief and general far right-wing personality Erick Erickson. What is he purveying? It’s in support of some newsletter he’s trying to hawk, so I shall only quote the salient parts.
What is truth? The dictionary defines truth as “the quality or state of being true.” So then what is true? The dictionary defines true as “in accordance with fact or reality.” Scripture tells us that Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life.”
What does that mean? Well, in short, it means Jesus is reality — God is real and factual and existent. Christians are to walk in that truth. We, as Christians (assuming here that you are), have an obligation to fact and reality because Jesus is fact and reality. We harm our witness for the truth of the gospel when we are unwedded from fact and reality. We cannot say the resurrection is real when we say an ascertainable, real fact is false. No one will believe us.
Note this emphasis on truth. Almost everyone loves truth. Yes?
What is not allowed is your truth and my truth. The truth is in accord with facts and people talking about their own truth are talking about emotions more often than not. That leads me to this picture that is going around on conservative corners of social media. I drew the red BS on it.
This picture is designed to minimize concerns over the Wuhan coronavirus. But it is not true. It is not the truth. If Christians are supposed to walk in truth and be grounded in truth, then to disseminate this is to sin because this is such a willful distortion of truth as to be a lie. A lot of Christians on social media are sinning.
It’s quite a lovely sentiment which makes me want to applaud Erickson. Yes, yes, take down someone on your own side! He goes on to debunk all of the paranoid remarks on the whiteboard, with which I shan’t burden you, makes some speculative historical remarks, suggests how those might apply to today, and then journeys down a path leading to an allegedly hypocrisy by the mainstream media concerning the appellation “Wuhan virus” being supposedly racist, which I have not heard from anywhere but Erickson. And that brings us to this:
But, being honest and truthful, I really do think this has everything to do with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Team Trump as adopted a universal naming convention for a virus, but because it is Trump doing it, it must be racist.
And then, of course, Erickson goes on to justify his use of the Trump Derangement Syndrome phrase in view of the objective fact that Trump himself has no love for truth, only for advantage, and Erickson did so in the most eloquent and persuasive of terms.
Nyah, just kidding. Erickson ignored the entire subject. He ignores 16,000+ verified lies. He tars his ideological opponents with a goofy phrase, covers himself in the cloak of virtuous truth, closes the rips in the cloak with thread made of the mistakes your own side has made, and struts off as if he’s been persuasive.
Alas for him, I smell hypocrite, I smell someone who decided to join the side of Father of Lies, and has shucked any devotion to truth or intellectual honesty in the process.
And that just sort of drives me crazy.
In the Sessions v Tuberville Republican primary runoff scheduled for the end of March, President Trump has made his selection known:
Tommy Tuberville (@TTuberville) is running for the U.S. Senate from the Great State of Alabama. Tommy was a terrific head football coach at Auburn University. He is a REAL LEADER who will never let MAGA/KAG, or our Country, down! Tommy will protect your Second Amendment….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 11, 2020
And I expect Tuberville will win the primary. There are two questions then to be answered.
If either of the answers goes against Tuberville, incumbent Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) may find a way to victory. I suspect if Jones does win, it’ll be because the hardball tactics of Tuberville will offend the Sessions supporters to the extent that they’ll simply stay home, even in the face of team politics demands of the Republican Party.
Are American government institutions, businesses, schools and private organizations doing enough – soon enough – to protect American citizens from coronavirus? Are the measures currently taken adequate to prevent a nationwide medical care disaster and large numbers of resulting deaths? Quite probably not, and hence this posting.
First, a contrasting look at what the cities of St. Louis and Philadelphia experienced in the 1918 influenza pandemic. The graph below shows the number of deaths per 100,000 people for the two cities.
St. Louis vs. Philadelphia death rates in 1918 flu epidemic
What was the difference? It was how each city responded to the first cases of influenza showing up in their cities. The difference makes a good case showing that social distancing does work. In Philadelphia, the first case was reported on September 17 and authorities downplayed the significance of the case. They even allowed a city-wide parade to happen on September 28. School closures and bans on public gatherings did not happen until October 3, sixteen days since the first case. Meanwhile, St. Louis had its first case on October 5 and the city implemented social distancing measures two days later.
Protective measures, such as self-isolation and canceling large gatherings, will delay and decrease the outbreak peak, reduce the burden on hospitals at a given time, and decrease the overall number of cases.
Without efforts to slow the spread, COVID-19 will likely infect a lot more people than can be handled in the short term by hospitals. But if we slow the spread, and there are fewer people in need of care at the same time, there would be fewer medical shortages.
A study conducted last month from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention provides statistics about the lethality of COVID-19. Those statistics were analyzed by Business Insider.
You can see those statistics in the graph above. Younger people have a one in 10,000 (0.01%) chance of dying from the flu and a one in 500 (0.2%) chance of dying from COVID-19. So, COVID-19 is twenty times more lethal for a 15-year old than the flu. That mortality rate rises quickly as the victims get older.
For 55-year olds who contract COVID-19, between one and two of 100 will die of the disease. That’s twenty-two times the mortality rate of the flu. However, the real jump occurs in those who are 60 and above. Almost 15% (1 in 7) of those aged 80+ will die if they contract the coronavirus.
There is yet no vaccine against COVID-19. There is no cure. The only way for a 60+ year old to avoid a 3.6% – 14.8% chance of dying is to avoid the disease. The real odds of dying are the infection rate multiplied by the mortality rate. But once you contract the disease, you are far more likely to die than if you contracted the flu.
Is there any activity on Earth that a rational person would undertake with a 3.6% – 14.8% chance of dying? For comparison purposes, an American sent to fight in Vietnam had about a 0.5% chance of dying.
Given those odds, is it really hysteria to cancel fan participation at sporting events, close schools and implement other containment measures? Our only defense is distance and containment and those come with a fair amount of inconvenience. What is the alternative? Hope is not a strategy.
Talking Points Memo has the goods on disgraced Evangelical preacher Jimmy Baker:
Disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker wants you to know that, as long as you’ve got his branded “Silver Solution” on your side, the novel coronavirus epidemic sweeping the globe doesn’t stand a chance. If only those pesky federal regulators hadn’t gotten in the way!
Bakker, a once-mainstream Evangelical disgraced by a sex scandal and a fraud conviction, is now best known for his relentless merchandizing, including with his buckets of freeze-dried food.
And with viewers’ virus concerns peaking last month, he recently took to marketing a miracle cure: “Silver Solution.”
“This influenza that is now circling the globe, you’re saying that Silver Solution would be effective?” Bakker asked the naturopathic doctor Sherrill Sellman on his Feb. 12 show, holding up a bottle of the product.
Silver Solution hadn’t been tested on the current strain of the coronavirus, Sellman responded, but “it has been tested on other strains of the coronavirus, and has been able to eliminate it within 12 hours. Totally eliminates it, kills it, deactivates it.” …
The Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission told the Jim Bakker show Friday that that pitch, and several others, had crossed the line.
“You should take immediate action to correct the violations cited in this letter,” officials from the agencies wrote to Bakker’s show in a letter dated March 6.
“The claims cited above are not supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence,” the regulators added later. “You must immediately cease making all such claims.”
If you’re wondering about the word naturopathic, Wikipedia defines it fairly harshly:
Naturopathy or naturopathic medicine is a form of alternative medicine that employs an array of pseudoscientific practices branded as “natural”, “non-invasive”, or promoting “self-healing”. The ideology and methods of naturopathy are based on vitalism and folk medicine, rather than evidence-based medicine (EBM). Naturopathic practitioners generally recommend against following modern medical practices, including but not limited to medical testing, drugs, vaccinations, and surgery. Instead, naturopathic practice relies on unscientific notions, often leading naturopaths to diagnoses and treatments that have no factual merit.
Why this Sellman dude, who supposedly endorses natural therapies, would think a colloidal silver formulation is anything close to natural is rather beyond me. Incidentally, this Skeptical Inquirer magazine cover recently crossed my desk:
Gets right to the point, doesn’t it?
So, it appears this particular Evangelical preacher, even disgraced, can’t stay himself from preying on the credulous. It’s all of a piece, in my mind, since I figure much of his audience will be Evangelicals, because redemption is – quite sensibly – a big part of Christianity. I see them as a beef cow that just keeps on giving, even though the restraints holding it in place are of the flimsiest material – imagination.
If you’re in the mood for something off the beaten path, Convento (2010) may be right up your alley. This is a documentary of a family of Dutch artists working in Portugal in an abandoned, broken down monastery. They work the land, commune with the domestic animals, scavenge the refuse piles, and build whatever pleases them to build; as the mother is a former professional ballerina, their work tends to incorporate movement.
We were enchanted by some of their works, and a little disturbed by a couple. If you like documentaries on free spirits or artists, you’ll like this.
Small farms are economic engines for the countryside. Large corporate farms are generally extractive industries. The latter are employers of labor, such as machine drivers. They provide fewer jobs both on the farm, and in supporting small towns than the more numerous small farms they replace.
I’m undoubtedly biased, having seen the changes where my mom grew up in Wisconsin. It was on a small farm, on a county road lined by many small farms. All of the former parcels of land along the county road has been converted into one gigantic soybean field. There are two employees who live in town, and who commute to the machine shed each day they’re needed. They drive giant automated tractors all day long, and then go home. There is no farm there.
Soybean field
The land is owned by, and the tractor drivers are employed by, some corporation that may not even pay income taxes in the state, since their corporate HQ is elsewhere. As a result of this kind of agricultural consolidation, small Wisconsin towns, near my mom grew up on the farm, as well as the small town father grew up in, are now almost ghost towns. They used to be busy with stores, churches, bars and schools providing for the now absent hundreds of small farms around them.
This isn’t simple pining for a life style that’s changed, or a time that’s gone. I’ve never lived on a farm or in the country. Instead, I believe there are significant benefits to society, the environment, the economy and the security of the nation in having numerous small farms, supporting numerous small towns, much like American of the early 20th century.
Family farm circa 1950
These changes were not necessarily inevitable, but were instead the result of government policies and unfettered capitalistic profit over everything behavior. But it only works that way in the short term. Long term, society suffers and then the economy suffers.
In addition to being economic engines, small farms – especially family-owned small farms – provide numerous other benefits. When you know you will likely pass your farm onto your children, you’re inclined to take better care of the soil, preventing erosion and depletion and contamination. When there are numerous prosperous small towns, there are more small business economic opportunities.
Those same towns also make community – the knowing and supporting the people around you – generally easier to achieve. It’s not impossible in large cities, but it’s a lot easier to become a lost and isolated. Not everyone is cut out for living in a big city, just as not everyone is cut out for living in a remote area. More farms and more small towns provide a much larger variety of opportunities to fit the varying dispositions and habits of the humans making up society.
The extractive, end-stage capitalism of huge industrialized agriculture produces mostly negatives for society. We should encourage a return to the more human-scale, more resilient, more anti-fragile benefits of small farms.
As I read CNN’s Chris Cillizza’s condemnation of Fox News‘ Trish Regan’s rant concerning the coronavirus being a hoax meant to injure President Trump, it seemed to me this was more than a simple defense of President Trump. But, first, Regan’s paranoid rant:
You gotta watch this, I mean……..you just gotta watch pic.twitter.com/x2ZsayVrmv
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) March 10, 2020
Yeah. I couldn’t finish it. Hell, I could barely start it. I have an allergy to such deliberate stupidity.
But it seems to me that this is more than a defense of an incompetent President. This is really about normalizing the bad behaviors of the President and his party, an attempt to legitimize a fundamentally third-rate approach to governance and society. Rather than admit that this is not a good President, they scream about it all being a hoax meant to hurt the President.
Because America’s been trained to love the victims of shadowy, hateful forces, without pausing for critical thoughts.
The truth of the matter is that, per usual, Congress is offering criticisms of the President’s efforts, even as it works on its own offerings. This has happened practically since day 1, and it is a good thing.
Let me repeat that. It is a good thing to offer criticism.
Sure, they have to be earnest and fair, which is more than can be said for some such criticisms from any Congress you’d care to name; there’s always some extremist bomb-thrower who wants to make points with the extremists back home. Left, right, top, bottom, they always exist.
But hardly anything improves without critique, whether internal or external. And with Trump reportedly firing the team that would have been in charge of the response, he makes an easy target for gentle correction.
Unfortunately for him, Trumps and their cult never makes mistakes, do they? So he’s stuck. He’s stuck having to defend a bone-headed decision, and he’s elected to with As a businessman … and I don’t even have to finish up that quote, do I? It implicitly and completely indicts him as not understanding his job – and not being interested in finding out what it might entail, because it’ll just make him look worse.
So what is our part in this drama? To understand what’s going on behind such rancid dramas as Regan’s, and call it what it is.
I never thought of this:
A study of nearly 200 strandings of healthy grey whales over the past 30 years has found that the animals are four times more likely to strand themselves during solar storms.
Jesse Granger at Duke University in North Carolina and her colleagues think that radio frequency noise produced by the storms interferes with the magnetic compass of whales, preventing them from sensing direction.
But her team has shown only a correlation between the two events, Granger stresses. “This is not direct evidence,” she says.
We still know little about how whales navigate in largely featureless oceans during their long migrations. It is likely that they use magnetoreception as many other animals do, but this is difficult to demonstrate.
To investigate, Granger and her team looked at 186 instances where individual grey whales with no signs of any injury or interaction with people had become stranded, presumably due to navigational errors. They found strandings were twice as likely on days with more sunspots. [NewScientist (25 February 2020)]
Assuming they got this right, it makes a lot of sense, of course. Sunspots are magnetic in nature:
Sunspots are dark splotches that mark cooler patches on the solar surface. They correlate with areas of intense magnetic activity that are breeding grounds for violent outbursts of matter and radiation from our star. If it weren’t for the protective hull of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, these solar flares and coronal mass ejections would rapidly fry life on our planet. [NewScientist (14 September 2013)]
But I wouldn’t have guessed the intensity at this range could vary so much as to confuse, perhaps even blind those creatures using magnetoreceptors for navigation.
In philosophy, one of the subjects of contention is whether or not we can know the sensations that another creature is experiencing, with the iconic example being the sonar-locating bat. I’d add whales to the list. Do their magnetoreceptors still detect the sun when they’re at depth, chasing their meals?
Oh, OK, grey whales are baleen whales, meaning they are filter feeders mostly eating plankton. Still, I had to have the poetic touch, no?
My Arts Editor directs my attention to this article in the Independent:
China, where the [COVID-19] outbreak began, has nearly 80,000 cases of coronavirus, by far the largest number of any country, with nearly 2,900 deaths.
Nasa’s maps compare pollution levels between the first three weeks of the year and 10-25 February.
The space agency’s scientists said the fall in pollution was first apparent near Wuhan, the source of the outbreak, but eventually spread across the country.
“This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event,” said Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre.
She said she had seen a decline in nitrogen dioxide levels during the economic recession of 2008 but said that decrease was more gradual.
It’s fascinating how quickly mankind’s pollution begins to fade, and does give me a little hope for the future. NASA pollution maps, just because they’re dramatic:
Blow, boys, blow, your audience is all the way across the continent!
Something to Sing About (1937) is a light-hearted tale of a New York City hoofer, Terry Rooney, taking his talents to Hollywood, leaving his band – and his fiancee – behind. When, at the end of his first movie, he feels like a failure, he flies his fiancee to Hollywood, marries her as she comes off the plane, and they take a long honeymoon in the South Seas.
Meanwhile, his movie becomes a smash, and the studio is nearly melting down when they can’t find Rooney to sign to a long term contract. When Rooney, Mr. & Mrs., finally return, a riot occurs when he’s recognized by the public.
The serpentine coils of Hollywood now become clear as it’s commercially impolitic to let the world know that heart throb Rooney is married, and his new wife is ready to play along in the interests of building a financially secure future, but they both find the charade wearing. And then when a gossip columnist claims Rooney is actually about to marry his ridiculous co-star … !
It comes down to following one’s heart, staying honest, and making spectacular entrances in the several dance numbers to which we are treated – or must endure if dance isn’t your thing. Anything profound is carefully covered in frosting, and it’s a lot of fun if you like licking frosting.
Enjoy!
Adduce:
to give reasons why you think something is true:
- None of the evidence adduced in court was conclusive. [Cambridge Dictionary]
Noted in “Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Optimism, Explained,” Kevin Drum:
Why is President Trump so obsessive about insisting that the coronavirus is no big deal, everything is under control, no worries, etc.? It seems self defeating. Obviously the virus is going to do what it does regardless of what he says, and Trump’s Pollyanna routine is just going to make him seem ever further out of touch the worse things get.
Maybe. But I have another theory. This is not something that I believe Trump has thought through, but something that he’s adduced via pure, subconscious animal cunning, of which he is well endowed. Here it is: …
I’m not entirely sure Drum’s usage is adroit.
I read with fascination this NewScientist (29 February 2020, paywall) article on how we potentially carry the seeds of our self-destruction … in our own DNA:
STRANGE fevers and unusual infections are common among the people with HIV who come to Avindra Nath’s clinic for treatment. But when one young man showed up in 2005 struggling to move his arms and legs, Nath was baffled. Although the man had been diagnosed with HIV a few years earlier, his new symptoms matched those of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neuron disease. In an attempt to get his HIV under control, Nath convinced him to start taking antiretroviral drugs. Much to everyone’s surprise, his ALS symptoms improved too.
ALS is caused by progressive deterioration and death of the nerve cells that control voluntary movement. What triggers this destruction is unclear, but recovery is rare. Puzzled, Nath, who ran an immunology clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, began searching the medical literature. There he found other people with HIV and ALS whose ALS symptoms improved with antiretrovirals – drugs that stop viruses replicating. Could this neurological condition be triggered by a dormant virus hiding in our DNA, brought back to life by HIV?
This question doesn’t only hover over ALS. Increasingly, we are waking up to the possibility that conditions including multiple sclerosis (MS), schizophrenia and even type 1 diabetes may in some cases be triggered by ancient viruses buried in our genomes. Under certain circumstances, they revive and start producing mutated versions of themselves, triggering the immune system to attack and destroy neighbouring tissues.
If retrovirus is a new term for you – it was for me – here it is:
A retrovirus is a type of RNA virus that inserts a copy of its genome into the DNA of a host cell that it invades, thus changing the genome of that cell.
Once inside the host cell’s cytoplasm, the virus uses its own reverse transcriptase enzyme to produce DNA from its RNA genome, the reverse of the usual pattern, thus retro (backwards). The new DNA is then incorporated into the host cell genome by an integrase enzyme, at which point the retroviral DNA is referred to as a provirus. The host cell then treats the viral DNA as part of its own genome, transcribing and translating the viral genes along with the cell’s own genes, producing the proteins required to assemble new copies of the virus. It is difficult to detect the virus until it has infected the host. At that point, the infection will persist indefinitely. [Wikipedia]
And then the NewScientist article suggests that something activates the viral DNA, which then stimulates and maybe overstimulates the immune system into attacking the host’s body.
As someone with a controlled case of gout, which is an auto-immune disorder, I’m more than a little fascinated with this. Could I be infected with a retroviral which has disabled the body’s equipment for making the enzyme which I lack, which is responsible for dissolving the uric acid crystals which occasionally form in my toe joints, and potentially elsewhere?
I hope I find out, even if no cure is found. Just the idea that a virus can get into my DNA is totally weird.
I expect the market is going to be entering a jittery period as oil prices are set to swoon over the next few days. This is, according to this CNN/Business report, due to an oil market share war, implemented by dropping oil prices charged to customers, between Saudi Arabia and Russia:
Why are oil prices crashing?
Saudi Arabia, the world’s top exporter, launched a price war over the weekend. The move followed the implosion of an alliance between the OPEC cartel, led by Saudi Arabia, and Russia.
The kingdom and Russia came together to form the so-called OPEC+ alliance in 2016 after oil prices plunged to $30 a barrel. Since then, the two leading exporters have orchestrated supply cuts of 2.1 million barrels per day. Saudi Arabia wanted to increase that number to 3.6 million barrels through 2020 to take account of weaker consumption.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin, worried about ceding too much ground to American oil producers, refused to go along with the plan and his energy minister, Alexander Novak on Friday signaled a fierce battle to come for market share when he said countries could produce as much as they please from April 1.
Why did Saudi launch a price war?
Simmering differences over how best to manage global oil markets spilled into the open at a meeting between OPEC and Russia in Vienna on Friday. After Russia said it was ditching the alliance, Saudi Arabia warned it would live to regret the decision, sources who attended the meeting told CNN Business.
I am looking forward to seeing how President Trump reacts to this contretemps. Here are the relevant factors:
But we can dig a little deeper here, can’t we? I mentioned above that economic health isn’t the province of the Executive, and here we see why it’s foolish for any President to point at the market, or unemployment, or any economic figure and take credit for it – because these measurements are not measuring things that he or she can control!
Oh, sure, we can talk about regulations and sputter about the burden they place on the private sector, but the truth of the matter is that regulation is, at best, a grey area, a tug of war between Congress and the Executive, and anytime Congress wishes to do so, it can implement or erase regulations – if it can get enough members to vote for it.
The Executive is responsible for implementing the laws passed by Congress. The Executive is not responsible for the economy.
But our current President has hugged markets to his breast, and dry-humped them to stroke his ego. What will he be doing as the markets plunge again and again? Will he pick MBS or Putin as his soul mate? Will he proclaim USA Great Again because we produce a lot of oil?
Yep, President Amateur has some challenging days ahead of him.
The Texas Tribune has a fascinating article on the recent primary in Texas on Super Tuesday, and who is threatening to sweep to judicial power:
In Democratic judicial primaries last Tuesday, Dayna beat David, Jane trounced Jim, and Colleen got more support than John, David and Brennen combined. Is that all there was to it?
Men have dominated Texas courts for decades. Now, in Democratic-controlled areas of the state, they seem headed for extinction.
The corrective for years of gender inequity on the bench has proven rather simple: voters.
Women have disappeared from the high-octane Democratic presidential primary. But in down-ballot, low-information races, Texas Democrats are increasingly, consistently backing women over men. In last week’s Democratic primary, women won more votes than men in all of the roughly 30 gender-split contests for high court, court of appeals and district court, according to results from the Texas Secretary of State. Rarely was it even close.
Thus signaling the continuing transition of society in Texas. If you’re outraged by the male power structure, then this may sound like a good thing. I, however, take a neutral position, because for me competence is more important than gender. Consider this bit:
In many races where women triumphed, both candidates were highly qualified. But panic has set in among attorneys and judges about some surprising female victors.
Austin attorney Madeleine Connor had run four times unsuccessfully and three times as a Republican before last week, when she triumphed in the Democratic primary for 353rd District Court in Travis County over 10-year incumbent Tim Sulak. Sulak had held events with U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett and Cecile Richards; Connor was on the state’s short blacklist of “vexatious litigants,” and in January, a federal judge ordered her to pay $43,000 in sanctions for a string of repetitive lawsuits filed against board members of her utility district.
Illustrating the dangers of ‘blind voting.’ Indeed, elective races for judges’ seats simply illuminates the dangers of the entire process of electing judges: either it turns on ideological issues which may not be compatible with current or future law, thus forcing the winner to either contradict the law or break their promises; or the voters use irrelevant criteria for casting their vote.
I remain firmly ensconced in the “appoint the judges” chair.
Of course, partisan politics can also swamp the judicial appointment process. Consider this report on the recusal of Chief Alaska Supreme Court Justice Bolger, on a trial concerning the legality of an attempt to recall Governor Mike Dunleavy (R) for allegedly ignoring the specified process for appointing judges, as noted by Alaska Public Radio:
Bolger heads the Alaska Judicial Council, which nominates judges for the governor to select from. In response to Dunleavy’s refusal to select from the list of names submitted by the council, Bolger issued a statement saying that Dunleavy’s office didn’t seem to understand the Alaska Constitution’s requirements around the appointment of judges, and added that “the governor must appoint one of the candidates nominated by the council.”
Another of the recall campaign’s grounds is that Dunleavy violated the state’s “separation of powers” doctrine by using his line-item veto to cut the judiciary’s budget, in response to a decision by the Alaska Supreme Court that upheld protections for abortion. Months later, Bolger gave a speech at the Alaska Federation of Natives’ annual convention where he asked participants to push back against “political influence” of the courts.
Presumably, none of the prospective nominees were sufficiently anti-abortion for this Republican governor, and his retaliation was quite stinging.
The point is that I’m not pushing a panacea; we can screw this up as an appointment as well. In the end, though, I think an appointment process has a better chance of producing independent judges devoted to interpreting the law – rather than who-knows-what sort of candidates that the electorate knows so very little about. While I don’t know the specifics of the Alaskan mess, it’s safe to say someone decided to play politics rather than governance.
I enjoyed – morbidly, of course – this discourse on how oceans and land react as the climate warms in this interview with Harvard geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica on Pocket:
Some of your research follows from the attraction of ocean water to ice sheets. That seems surprising.
[Mitrovica] This is just Newton’s law of gravitation applied to the Earth. An ice sheet, like the sun and the moon, produces a gravitational attraction on the surrounding water. There’s no doubt about that.
What happens when a big glacier like the Greenland Ice Sheet melts?
Three things happen. One is that you’re dumping all of this melt water into the ocean. So the mass of the entire ocean would definitely be going up if ice sheets were melting—as they are today. The second thing that happens is that this gravitational attraction that the ice sheet exerts on the surrounding water diminishes. As a consequence, water migrates away from the ice sheet. The third thing is, as the ice sheet melts, the land underneath the ice sheet pops up; it rebounds.
So what is the combined impact of the ice-sheet melt, water flow, and diminished gravity?
Gravity has a very strong effect. So what happens when an ice sheet melts is sea level falls in the vicinity of the melting ice sheet. That is counterintuitive. The question is, how far from the ice sheet do you have to go before the effects of diminished gravity and uplifting crust are small enough that you start to raise sea level? That’s also counterintuitive. It’s 2,000 kilometers away from the ice sheet. So if the Greenland ice sheet were to catastrophically collapse tomorrow, the sea level in Iceland, Newfoundland, Sweden, Norway—all within this 2,000 kilometer radius of the Greenland ice sheet—would fall. It might have a 30 to 50 meter drop at the shore of Greenland. But the farther you get away from Greenland, the greater the price you pay. If the Greenland ice sheet melts, sea level in most of the Southern Hemisphere will increase about 30 percent more than the global average. So this is no small effect.
The convolutions of physics can be surprising – it certainly surprised me. I tried to find a gravity map of Greenland, but the best I could do was some NASA gravity maps that are not focused on Greenland, but are fascinating nonetheless.
Credit: NASA VIsualization Explorer
This one graphically illustrates how much larger the mountains of South America are than the American Rockies, doesn’t it? The red, of course, indicates stronger gravitational attraction.
The Human Monster (1939, aka The Dark Eyes of London) is an exploration of how unmitigated human greed leads to disaster. Dr. Orloff is an insurance broker, who has lost several clients of late. They’re found floating in the Thames, much to the benefit of a local charity. Client Henry Stuart is having financial problems, and, in return for a loan, he makes Dr. Orloff the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. It’s only after he’s signed it that he reveals that he has a daughter.
This upsets Dr. Orloff. Why? You know why. Relatives complicate a simple matter of murder. Still, Orloff lures Stuart to the stalking grounds of his favorite minion, the blind man Jake, one of many blind men inhabiting the Dearborn Home for the Destitute Blind, because Orloff’s already invested a good sum of money in Stuart, and soon Stuart is done in, becoming another corpse in the river.
His murder is investigated by a Scotland Yard detective whose name has slipped my mind, assisted by a Chicago visiting policeman by the name of O’Reilly, and the Scotland Yard detective is really quite clever, noting that the water in the lungs of Stuart does not match the generally polluted mess that is the Thames. I actually remarked that it felt a bit like the old CSI series. Soon enough, the daughter emerges, and, angered at her father’s death, is used by the detective to gather information at the Home.
Eventually, after a twist and turn or two, Orloff has killed another blind man, Dumb Lou, who had worked closely with Orloff and Jake the killer, and when Jake realizes that he and the other blind men are merely being used by Orloff to increase his wealth, it’s Orloff’s turn to meet the murderous rage that he had so often employed in pursuit of mere money, all while Stuart’s daughter, shockingly ineffectual as she’s tied up by Orloff (my Arts Editor was yelling Kick him in the nuts!), must look helplessly on. Too bad about the daughter, up ’til then she’d been charmingly forward and brave.
The surprising complexities and bits of humor of the story are unfortunately obscured by the poor quality of this print, and a slower pace may have benefited the presentation. Still, it was a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half, fingers full of popcorn, eyes glinting with bodies. Enjoy, especially if you’re a Bela Lugosi fan.
I see that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is hard at work, ensuring his future will be spent sitting on the throne:
Saudi authorities have detained three princes including King Salman’s brother and nephew on charges of plotting a coup, the US media reported Friday, signalling a further consolidation of power by the kingdom’s de facto ruler.
The detentions cast aside the last vestiges of potential opposition to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and come as the kingdom limits access to Islam’s holiest sites in a highly sensitive move to contain the fast-spreading coronavirus.
Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, a brother of King Salman, and the monarch’s nephew Prince Mohammed bin Nayef were accused of treason and taken from their homes early Friday by black-clad royal guards, the Wall Street Journal reported citing unnamed sources.
The Saudi royal court has accused the two men, once potential contenders for the throne, of “plotting a coup to unseat the king and crown prince” and could face lifetime imprisonment or execution, the newspaper said. [AL Monitor]
If you’re the type that gets appalled at the messy operations of liberal democracies, take your mind off of those wacky liberals and consider just how much fun it would be to have folks in black uniforms show up in the middle of the night and take someone you love away.
Just because they’re inconvenient to the ambitions of a “Prince”.
I feel quite sure that the Prince will ascend to the throne and rule with an iron hand in the traditional velvet glove, and will be considered impregnable.
Right up until he takes it in the neck. It’s hard to repress naked ambition, as MBS himself should know.
