Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Years ago, I sat in on a family conference with a nephrologist as we discussed my mother’s condition and prognosis. As it happens, the nephrologist was covering for his partner, the regular doc. Unlike the very “up” regular guy, our substitute was rather dour.

The psychologist (in training at the time) was devastated. She was reading the emotions of the dour guy compared to his partner.

My Dad and I just shrugged at the end of the conference – there was very little new.

But it was fascinating to see how we read the information in our different ways. The psychologist in training didn’t yet understand that the information was more important than the delivery; my dad and I were/are engineers, used to looking only at information.

So it was with a sense of familiarity that I read Andrew Sullivan’s summation of Trump’s speech to Congress earlier this week:

After the terror, the smile. It suddenly beams, and the voice calms. You feel the warmth again and are momentarily overcome with gratitude and relief. Suddenly, all the man’s malice and rage and narcissism disappear and the world turns suddenly normal. And you thrill to that normality. It’s what you’ve craved for so long, and been denied for so long. You forgive. You hope. You wonder if all the fear and dread you felt only a few moments ago were just in your imagination.

I didn’t watch it – my excuse, reasonable or not, is that so many falsehoods come out of his mouth that I cannot keep up, and without accurate information, how can you possibly hope to evaluate what he is saying? But I say this only for full disclosure; my conclusion remains the same – those trying to read emotions as a primary source are, in general, always at risk of being misled. So he seemed Presidential – is that important when he’s lying? We already saw he lied in preparation for the speech – so in retrospect, why write something nice about him, especially based on an irrelevancy such as his delivery of a speech? This country exists on criticism and self-improvement, not on appearances, to be brutally honest, and so far Trump is not improving.

But what those in the press need to remember is that they’re not only reporters, they are also exemplars. Don’t write a complimentary column because he managed to read a teleprompter in a pleasant manner – no Oscar is given for that. Nor is this about Oscars, it’s about performing in the biggest arena around. So the press should say, well, we fact checked him and he lied more than once a minute – if it’s so. And then acknowledge that he was pleasant, rather than incoherently angry for a change – and point out how that changes nothing important. Then note how he lied to the press just to gain a momentary advantage – and rake him over the coals. Because this electorate needs to do more than read the emotions of someone making promises to them – they need to step up and evaluate the plans put forth, and if there’s no plan – there’s no future.

Kevin Drum mourns the paring back of one of his favorite programs in the EPA – lead cleanup:

What an idiot. This is hardly the biggest issue in his budget, and I’ll grant that the current allocation for lead cleanup is so pitiful that a 30 percent cut hardly matters. On principle, though, it’s obvious that Mick Mulvaney’s crew just saw a line item in their spreadsheet and slashed it without knowing anything about it. Nice work, folks. You get a gold star.

He suggests that the use of punishment is futile. You have to like his chart.

I wonder about the size of the standard deviation in the blood level measurements. Curious concerning lead’s effects on the body? Here’s the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry, in lesson plan format:

It must be emphasized that there may be no threshold for developmental effects on children.

• The practicing health care provider can distinguish overt clinical symptoms and health effects that come with high exposure levels on an individual basis.
• However, lack of overt symptoms does not mean “no lead poisoning.”
• Lower levels of exposure have been shown to have many subtle health effects.
• Some researchers have suggested that lead continues to contribute significantly to socio-behavioral problems such as juvenile delinquency and violent crime (Needleman 2002, Nevin 2000).
• It is important to prevent all lead exposures.

While the immediate health effect of concern in children is typically neurological, it is important to remember that childhood lead poisoning can lead to health effects later in life including renal effects, hypertension, reproductive problems, and developmental problems with their offspring (see below). The sections below describe specific physiologic effects associated with major organ systems and functions.

Retraction Watch notes the achievements of a certain Joachim Boldt:

The Annals of Thoracic Surgery has retracted two papers from the early 1990s on which Boldt was the first author – bringing the retraction tally for the disgraced German anesthesiologist to 96, by our count. Both articles were found to contain manipulated data.

I was busy being aghast – and then discovered Retraction Watch keeps a leaderboard, presumably for those of us who never want to be without a scoreboard. Dr. Boldt is … #2. #1? A certain Yoshitake Fujii. Although, to be fair to the other contenders, RW is using multiple sources and not just their reporting, so there may be duplicates or missing data to be considered. Still, 183 is certainly a number to be … proud … ashamed … of.

“Reject universes that lead to cosmic brains“, Anil Ananthaswamy, NewScientist (18 February 2017). The last paragraph is fun, too.

“If a theory predicts that the overwhelming majority of observers are Boltzmann brains, then that theory is ruled out,” he says. But he thinks Carroll’s argument introduces an unnecessary mystique. “There is no need for fancy notions like ‘cognitive instability’.”

This story from Sarah Kliff on Vox made me chortle, if only because I can also see the Democrats laughing with glee, if behind their hands, as they pursued the rabbit. The rabbit? Why, it’s the lop-eared replacement for the ACA:

Democratic House members and Republican senators were not to be included in this process [of reviewing the bill early on]. But by Thursday morning, they decided to take the matter into their own hands.

The draft legislation was rumored to be in H-157, a nondescript meeting room in the House of Representatives. When legislators arrived, Capitol Police were guarding the entrance, and dozens of reporters were waiting outside for the much-anticipated legislation.

But the first Congress member to arrive — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who appeared to have a mobile printer in tow, perhaps to make copies of the bill — was promptly denied entry.

“We’re here asking for written copy of this because this should be an open and transparent process,” Paul said after being denied entry into Room H-157. “This is being presented as if it’s a national secret. As if it’s a plot to invade another country.”

What a wonderful story! As Matt Fuller reports on HuffPo …

Sounds like another example of GOP leaders going back on their word. Don’t these guys get it? Not only are they laying themselves open for campaign reprisals in a year and a half from the Democrats, they’re also becoming more and more vulnerable to the RINO crowd, Ryan in particular.

But I’ll bet at least half the Democrats thought it was fun to search for the treasure. I just hope they don’t end up with poo, instead, as many commentators expect from the GOP replacement.

Stephan Haggard on Lawfare covers recent events in North Korea. Perhaps most worrying is the missile test and its context:

But missile tests are not just for show; they are ultimately about the development of capabilities. The acceleration of North Korea’s testing under Kim Jong-un—neatly documented in an infographic from the CSIS Missile Defense Project—has both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. The numbers are straightforward: four tests in 2012, eight in 2013, 18 each in 2014 and 2015 and 23 in 2016. The majority of these 70 tests—42—have been short-range Scud variants. But in 2016, the tests included the long-range “satellite” launch in February, a succession of tests of intermediate-range Musudan missiles (at least one of which succeeded), an intermediate-range Nodong that landed within 125 miles of Japanese waters, and several submarine-launched ballistic missile tests, as well as a ground test of a new rocket engine. A crucial aspect of these tests is the shift from liquid- to solid-fueled engines. John Schilling explains the implications:

[Solid fuel rockets] require little maintenance, can survive rough handling and off-road transport, are less prone to leaking toxic, corrosive vapor at the slightest provocation, and even the largest solid-fuel missiles can be launched on a few minutes’ notice. That last characteristic is going to be particularly important for North Korea, as South Korea’s missiles can reach targets anywhere in the North in the fifteen minutes or so it would take to fuel and ready a liquid-fuel missile for launch.

I wonder what advantages liquid-fuel launch systems have over solid-fuel, but that’s merely an idle question.

The test resulted in a reaction by the West:

The fact that the missile was not of longer range appeared to obviate the “red line” problem created by the president’s intemperate “won’t happen” tweet. And even more importantly, the test activated the hidden lineaments of the alliance, including a Trump statement of support for Japan (although not South Korea), a phone call between then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his South Korean counterpart, Kim Kwan-jin, and a joint call by the U.S., Japan and Korea to convene a Security Council meeting.

If that is the good news, the bad news is that the test is not just a diplomatic-political signal. It is rather another step in the development of the country’s missile capabilities, which have continually been underestimated.

I must admit to not being certain how lineaments is used, with this definition my best guess:

Usually, lineaments. distinguishing features; distinctive characteristics:

the lineaments of sincere repentance.

I have to wonder why South Korea didn’t receive a supportive phone call, unless it’s its ongoing political crisis makes it a dicey proposition. Regardless, North Korea – not a permanently fractured Islamic world which is perpetually chewing on itself and faced with a mildly hostile, nuclear-armed Indian nation on its flank – will, in my neophyte judgment – remain one of the most important challenges of the Trump Administration, and one of the most volatile, where the greatest gains or the greatest losses will be seen.

skiff:

Scottish, North American

• A flurry or light covering of snow. [Oxford Dictionaries]

Heard at lunch a couple of days ago, and new to me. Yes, it also refers to a small boat as well.

Poppa! You have George Washington’s wig on your head!

Taras Bulba (1962) follows the eponymous character (Yul Brynner), a Cossack leader who loves the steppes, women, his sons, and fighting, and the escapades of his sons, who are sent to live among and learn from the Poles, the hated Poles who have betrayed and fought them over the years. Besides the casual cruelty of the Poles, one of the sons (Tony Curtis) falls in love with a young Polish noblewoman, for no particular reason that I can see, beyond a purported beauty. Eventually, he finds that he must choose between his beloved people and steppes, and the love of this woman, and inexplicably picks the woman, a choice which leads to his destiny.

This is a fairly lightweight movie – it’s not easy to discern any particularly compelling themes. While I was diverted by scenes of exotic dancing, testosterone, orgies, testosterone, the plague, more testosterone, and some impressive facial hair, I was distinctly put off by the lust, the infatuation for a strange woman who, honestly, is nothing more than pretty, a lust-ridden chase which endangers a collection of Cossacks who had shown great loyalty. It feels like an artificial subplot tacked on to a movie which lusts (but fails) for an epic historical quality.

To say it’s lightweight is not to suggest the plot lacks some complexity. Neither the Cossacks nor the Poles lack in calculation, deception, and resources, as they struggle for dominance on the steppes, and that has some value. The back and forth is certainly an important element in any plot.

But, in the end, between the lack of a compelling theme and the slack-witted lust of the son, the movie leaves one to admire the individual acting performances, and the wardrobes and makeup, while more or less avoiding the mass battle scenes and wishing the story line had a little bit more going for it.

Lawfare‘s Ryan Scoville comments on the travel habits of Congress people, including staff. I found this chart, covering the destinations of the travelers for privately funded trips, to be quite interesting:

Figure 3 shows the total number of privately funded visits to each of the top ten destinations. With nearly 1,400 visits from 2011 to 2016, Israel easily led the way and accounted for nearly a third of all of the 4,400 trips that occurred within the reporting period. Turkey was also quite high with roughly 750 visits, but other countries trailed far behind. In all, House members and staff traveled to 113 different countries.

The leading destinations seem significant as plausible indicia of congressional priorities and expertise. I imagine that, all else equal, members of Congress are more likely to appreciate the complexities of U.S. foreign relations with the countries they’ve visited. I also suspect that legislators and staff are more likely to return to the United States with greater sympathy for the policies advanced by the governments of host countries. The implication is that many members of Congress may now be particularly knowledgeable about and sympathetic toward Israel and Turkey, not necessarily because of constituent preferences or abstract ideas about the importance of U.S. relations with those countries, but at least partly because of the travel itself, which has placed members and staff in close contact with government officials, the public, and economic and political conditions in Israel and Turkey.

Israel is understandable, but I was surprised by Turkey.

Sponsor identities seem significant in the sense that they suggest the purposes of the underlying travel. AIEF, a charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC, funds delegations to promote support for Israel within Congress, while the Turkish Coalition of America and the Turkic American Federation of the Midwest do likewise with respect to Turkey. The Aspen Congressional Institute offers nonpartisan programs of education on matters of international concern. The Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE), an international humanitarian organization, appears to use the trips to promote foreign aid.

This is a article written from the outside perspective, so Ryan offers no concrete reasons for the visits. As Turkey’s turn towards authoritarianism, not yet complete, is very recent there’s no reflection of the event in the data – it’ll be interesting to see how that changes over the next couple of years.

The GOP‘s redistricting plans suffered another blow when SCOTUS ruled that race cannot be used to guide redistricting, as noted by Lyle Denniston on the Constitution Daily blog:

The trial court had ruled that, if race was used without violating any other redistricting rules, it was valid. Only such a conflict, that court said, makes the use of race unconstitutional as a form of discrimination.

That is the result the Supreme Court overturned. Even if a new map satisfies all of the customary requirements for new districts, the map may still be unconstitutional if race was the guiding factor. Conflict with traditional principles might help prove that predominance, the Justices ruled, but that is not necessary to show unconstitutionality.

In the practical world of redistricting, that declaration by the court is almost certain to compel state legislatures to be newly cautious in how race is considered. While the court has never barred all use of race as a redistricting factor, and in fact has conceded that legislators always are aware of it because minority voters tend generally to vote for Democratic candidates, the new ruling and prior decisions on the subject give the predominance factor heavy weight when a new map is challenged as having been based on racial gerrymandering.

The vote was 7-1, and the holdout, Justice Thomas wanted to go even further down this road. This appears to me to be a strong rebuff to the GOP redistricting plans. That said, I’m glad to have never been given a task like this – between partisan howls and the apparent lack of either accepted process or even goal, it makes me wonder if the use of easily changeable district lines really makes sense. Unfortunately, there are problems with other approaches that come right to mind – but I suspect someone out there thinks they have the perfect solution to the problem, I just haven’t run across it, yet.

My reader comes up with more information on PSCK9:

I can’t speak to how well PCSK9 works on damaged hearts, because my husband’s artery blockage was discovered before any heart damage (perhaps just a few days before, given that they rushed him into surgery on a SUNDAY). He was extremely lucky to have a wonderful GP and great cardio team at the U of M. … from what I’ve read, PCSK9 dramatically reduces cholesterol levels for virtually everyone who takes it. His cardiologist, the brilliant Dr. Daniel Duprez, feels that its use is directly responsible for the dramatic drop in cardiac surgery (i.e., repairing blockage and heart damage).

As for PCSK9 being affordable … that’s a relative concept. In the US, it costs $14,000 a month. It’s clearly more affordable in Europe, where it has been approved for a while. Dr. Duprez feels that the US price will drop when American usage is more common. But that won’t happen until the insurance companies allow more people to use it. It’s a Catch-22.

For more PCSK9 information, see Dr. Duprez’s report, “Clinical efficacy and safety of evolocumab for low-density lipoprotein cholesterol reduction”: https://www.dovepress.com/clinical-efficacy-and-safety-of…

For a cheaper, more accessible alternative to statins, Dr. Duprez “kind of” recommended foods with added plant sterols/stanols. (He’s not into fortified foods, but if insurance won’t pay for drugs and you can’t tolerate statins, well….. ) We’ve tried the products from Step One Foods, which I really like because they’re all real food. Unfortunately, my speshul snowflake hubby has a reaction to the stanols/sterols as well. But most people don’t. More info here: https://www.steponefoods.com/…/alternatives-to-statin…

I can’t resist this one even though the source I’m quoting evidently suffered a production catastrophe, which I’ll reproduce.

Virtue Epistemology:

Epistemology, of course, is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and provides the criteria for evidential warrant – it tells us when it is, in fact, rational to believe or disbelieve a given notion. Virtue epistemology is a particular approach within the field of epistemology, which takes its inspiration from virtue ethics. The latter is a general way to think about ethics that goes back to Aristotle and other ancient Greek and Roman thinkers.

Briefly, virtue ethics shifts thjat e [sic – perhaps the] focus from questions such as “Is this action right/wrong?” to “Is the character of this agent virtuous or not?” The idea is that morality is a human attribute, which has the purpose of improving our lives as individuals embedded in a broader society. As such, it does not yield itself to universal analyses that take a god’s eye-view of things, but rather starts with the individual as moral agent. [“The Virtuous Skeptic,” Massimo Pigliucci, Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2017), offline only]

Mediaite reports on Trump’s hasty use of political capital:

CNN reported Wednesday on a senior administration official admitting that the White House intentionally misled reporters ahead of President Donald Trump‘s congressional address in order to get generate positive press coverage as part of a “misdirection play.”

Multiple reports Tuesday indicated that Trump would embrace a more moderate tone on immigration and would announce that he was willing to negotiate granting millions of illegal immigrants legal status. Most of those reports, cited to a “senior administration official,” came immediately after anchors lunched with Trump. Some of those outlets then just attributed the claim to the president himself.

But when it was time for Trump to actually give the speech, he said nothing of the sort. CNN’s Sara Murray complained the next day about “the bait and switch that the president pulled when it came to immigration yesterday. He had this meeting with the anchors, he talked about a path to legal status.”

Multiple news organizations are now reportedly wondering why they should ever trust Trump again. My feeling is that the Trump Administration has, at the very best, a very flawed conception of planning. They have four years ahead of them, if they’re lucky, and they just lost any last hope they had of gaining positive coverage from the mainstream press – all for a momentary uptick in positive coverage.

Are they that desperate? Or do they really believe their own fantasies that the mainstream press is about to roll over and die? About all they can really expect is that they won’t lose anyone in their base – they’ll probably not hear about it, and if they do, they’ll figure the press deserved what they got. After all, by wide report, his base thinks he’s doing wonderful and don’t understand why he’s not receiving plaudits from the press.

I gotta say, Patrick Stewart and Colbert doing a parody of Waiting For Godot was awfully damn good right up until they tried to make it into a Trek parody.

Godot always struck me as being a bit about being Godless. I wonder if a similar play could be written about being too … Godful.

Great skill!

I’ve been noticing occasional comments in various media about how Steve Bannon, White House senior aide, sees himself as a Leninist out to destroy the (sometimes administrative) state. However, the interest seems to be mostly along the lines of drawing mildly useful parallels with the Bolshevik Revolution, such as Anastasia Edel does here in Quartz.

But is that an end in itself? Certainly, it’s not hard to believe – some do seem to think that all 300 million of us running around without rules can make it fly with no end. But I’m doubtful in the Bannon case. I’m going to spin a little story which, while not backed by irrefutable research, does fit the facts as are currently advertised. Let’s start with beginnings.

Bannon was the Executive Chair of Breitbart, a web site notorious as an “alt-right” site – or, less euphemistically, a site devoted to white nationalism, even white supremacism. We can assume, therefore, that he’s a white nationalist. Now, who lives next door to a white nationalist in the metaphorical neighborhood?

That’s right. The white slaveowner.

And what happened to the American slaveowner? They were deprived of their most important possessions – their slaves, who did much of the work needed in the South – first by law in the North, and then by force in the South, when they attempted to secede from the Union in order to preserve their foul power over people, purely on the basis of skin color. (See here for a meditation on the true soul of the supremacist of any color.)

And what deprived them of their position on the mountain top? The common answer is the North, but I would fine this down a bit. The tool used to spike the cannon of foul oppression was … the Federal Government. It proved to be, once a succession of incompetent generals were finally cleared from the ranks, an efficient tool for coordinating the necessary efforts, and more importantly, to focus the intellectual repudiation of the entire pile of rubbish used to prop up the American White Nationalist movement of the latter half of the 1800s.

If I may speculate, for Bannon, the Federal Government is more than a symbol of the North, it’s the tool used to “oppress” (I can barely type that without laughing at him) Bannon and all of his fellow White Nationalists, all the way to that murderous wretch, Dylann Roof. And now Bannon, ensconced at the heart of the thing he hates, now works to eviscerate it, while keeping his other bugaboo, the Islamic world, at bay. So he suggests a bloated military budget be inflated yet again, while destroying the various departments that might bind his efforts, especially that of Education, and the EPA. The first, because education is his foe, as a white nationalist, while the second is more likely to infringe on his “right” to do anything he so wishes. He even has tentatively assaulted the Judiciary, although that is a bastion difficult to breach; it may yet bring him down.

But he has little to lose in the effort. White nationalists and supremacists are barely on the bottom rung of society, unless they hide their tendencies; and rare is one that achieves conventional success.

So there’s your bed-time speculation for the day. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be proven wrong. But understanding where he may be going with this is as useful, if not more so, than drawing parallels with Lenin’s approach, which worked well in that world – but that world is not this world.

[EDIT: 6/5/2017 fix typo]

General Mattis, Secretary of Defense, is proving to be quite conventional, Lawfare reports:

The White House said on Monday that President Trump will propose a $54 billion increase in military spending, to be financed primarily by cuts in the budgets of other agencies, including the State Department.   White House officials said that “foreign aid” will face a significant decrease.   Secretary of State Tillerson should strongly and publicly resist cuts to the State Department budget.   As the press has reported, Defense Secretary Mattis supported full funding for the State Department when he was in uniform, and it is even more important that he do so now.

In 2013, when he was CENTCOM Commander, Mattis said “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately. So I think it’s a cost benefit ratio. The more that we put into the State Department’s diplomacy, hopefully the less we have to put into a military budget as we deal with the outcome of an apparent American withdrawal from the international scene.”

Based on reports of top White House aide Bannon wanting to destroy the administrative state, this must be a little annoying. After all, you don’t want your foreign enemies clambering over the walls while you’re busy eviscerating your domestic enemies for good, so you increase defense funding, while removing funding for all those other agencies you dislike.

That might get in the way when you try to implement your white nationalist policies.

Mattis remains a reassuring pick.

This is one of those stories that makes you bite your lip. From SFGate:

In a victory for gun advocates, a federal judge said Monday that California appears to have violated freedom of speech with a law allowing public officials — including legislators who voted for gun-control laws — to prevent online posting of their addresses and phone numbers.

The issue arose in July when a pro-gun blogger posted the names, addresses and phone numbers of 40 lawmakers who had supported firearms restrictions that were signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. The restrictions included a ban on possessing guns that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition and a requirement of background checks for buyers of ammunition. The law also required that the buyer’s address and phone number be put into a state database.

The blogger, “Publius,” who obtained the legislators’ information from public records, declared in his posting that “these tyrants are no longer going to be insulated from us.”

After several lawmakers received threatening phone calls and messages, the legislative counsel’s office contacted WordPress, the blog’s online host, and demanded removal of the information within 48 hours. The office cited a state law, passed in its current form in 2005, that allows state officials to have their addresses and phone numbers removed from the Internet if they fear for their safety.

The judge suggests the plaintiffs are likely to win, and I can see why: the author of free speech cannot be held responsible for the actions of others unless the free speech alleges fallacies, such as yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater that is not afire. Despite the blogger’s unfortunately aggressive turn of phrase, no doubt brought about by decades of anti-government paranoia propaganda from the right-wing, there is little to criticize. Unfortunately, that paranoia has produced a divided citizenry on the subject, and therefore suggesting that the emergence of a leftist authoritarian government that could not be thrown off by an armed citizenry could still be thrown off by a united citizenry would not be an effective argument.

But, certainly, the threats, illegal as they are (and I certainly hope the perpetrators are caught, convicted, and locked up, if only for being idiots who don’t understand how we should be a cordial society), are meant to intimidate our representatives – an attempt to sway them from following their best judgment in making public policy, which is their job.

Their first step should have been to bring suit against the new law. Standing should be no problem, and then a Constitutional question can be plopped into the lap of a judge.

The right question. Not this nightmarish problem.

But they should have taken another path and tried to supply an answer to the problem California is presumably trying to solve – how to stop gun violence. Giving in to their base natures in this manner betrays their side and makes the debate – the search for a proper course – that much more difficult.

NewScientist (11 February 2017) reports on a fascinating new finding with regards to cancer:

When older cells naturally stop dividing, they become “senescent”. These kinds of cells also pump out a slew of chemicals that cause inflammation, which can damage surrounding tissue. Senescent cells have been linked to a growing list of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis and heart failure.

Marco Demaria at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands wondered if senescence might be responsible for the long list of side effects associated with chemotherapy. “Most people have fatigue, and most of the time this becomes chronic,” he says. “Some people have muscle weakness, nausea, dizziness, problems with their bones or heart damage for example.” Such side effects can occur for months after treatment has finished.

To explore the effects of senescent cells, Demaria and his colleagues genetically engineered mice so these cells would fluoresce. They then gave the mice cancer, and one of four common chemotherapy drugs: doxorubicin, cisplatin, paclitaxel and temozolomide.

Chemotherapy increased the number of senescent cells in the mice. “We saw senescence everywhere: in the liver, lung, heart, skin and fat,” says Demaria.

In another trial, they gave the mice a drug known to kill senescent cells, and the mice didn’t show the health problems shown by the first group. Unfortunately …

“If we had a drug that we could use in humans, we could lower the toxicity and improve the efficacy of chemotherapy,” says Demaria. At the moment, there isn’t an appropriate drug that could be trialled in people. The drug given to the mice can cause a fatal shortage of blood platelets in humans.

But at least there’s a target. Chemo-fatigue is a fairly awful side effect.

Misophonia:

Misophonia, literally “hatred of sound,” was proposed in 2000 as a condition in which negative emotions, thoughts, and physical reactions are triggered by specific sounds. It is also called “select sound sensitivity syndrome” and “sound-rage.” [Wikipedia]

Seen in “Why the sound of noisy eating fills some people with rage“, Tiffany O’Callaghan, NewScientist (11 February 2017):

Olana Tansley-Hancock knows misophonia’s symptoms only too well. From the age of about 7 or 8, she experienced feelings of rage and discomfort whenever she heard the sound of other people eating. By adolescence, she was eating many of her meals alone. As time wore on, many more sounds would trigger her misophonia. Rustling papers and tapping toes on train journeys constantly forced her to change seats and carriages. Clacking keyboards in the office meant she was always making excuses to leave the room.

I hope he has nothing in his teeth.

The Robe (1953) is the predecessor to the previously reviewed Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) and dramatizes the plight of the Roman tribune responsible for executing Jesus, the fictional Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton). Troubled by the unexpected guilt caused by the crucifixion, he suffers a breakdown. His emperor, Tiberius, chooses to send him in search of the robe of Jesus, to destroy it and thus his guilt. Instead of destroying it, it cleanses him of his guilt, and he transitions to Christianity, a choice which has its own price.

The decision to follow Marcellus is a smart choice, as it permits insight into the Roman court, which begins with the Emperor Tiberius and later transitions to the terrible Caligula. The primary lesson we learn is the preoccupation with personal advancement and catering to one’s personal desires will lead to strife as no one is considering how to really preserve the State, not least this nasty bit of work, Caligula. Marcellus himself is a sot and a gambler with little regard for anyone besides his future wife, Diana.

In contrast, the Christian sect comes across as humble. No one is scrambling for power, glory, or even wine. Marcellus impulsively gives a little boy his donkey; the little boy then gives the donkey to a crippled boy, no prompting needed. A crippled woman glows with happiness, despite her condition, at the word of Jesus. A reprimand of the villagers by the leader for taking advantage of Marcellus for his ignorance concerning the price of cloth is not delivered with a whip or even a raised voice, but simply a reminder of how their teacher, Jesus, would have requested merely a fair price for any clothe he would have sold. Thus we gain a vivid lesson in how the film makers (or, more likely, the author of the novel on which this is based, Lloyd C. Douglas) see the advantages of the philosophy espoused by Jesus, and the self-destructiveness of the Roman state.

In mitigation of the above, the fact that the Christian village must rely on the sword of Marcellus himself when the Romans unexpectedly attack is a suggestion, specious as it might be in a movie, that the philosophy of Jesus may be lacking in the all-important department of self-sustainment. But is it fair to criticize a philosophy based on the message of a fictional story that’s been run through the Holllywood ringer?

Probably not.

OK, for all that, this flick is a bit of a clunker. Burton’s performance is a trifle brittle. If it had changed as he converted to Christianity, it might have been more convincing, but the changes were … minor. I was unconvinced. Then the use of violence to rescue Demetrius from the torture chamber of Caligula once again throws doubt upon the philosophy of Christianity. It’s a long movie, 135 minutes in an era that didn’t make long movies. Most of the other acting performances are highly competent, but not particularly moving, with the exception of Jay Robinson, whose Caligula is madcap genius. I can still hear his shrill, evil voice in my head.

Is this a movie to be Recommended? No, for it didn’t pick me up and swirl me about. The story is truly predictable, and it drags on and on. But there are plenty of facets to enjoy, from the vistas (I would have liked to see this on the big screen) to Michael Rennie as Peter (perfect casting)  to Caligula to the actual crucifixion scene, when the Romans are playing dice as the men on their crosses are dying. If you have some time to burn and don’t mind a predictable story, then this may be worth your attention.

Concerning excess heat, a reader wonders about materials science:

There are substances which absorb heat and then give up photons later, which can then be converted into electricity. I wonder if that would be an option?

I believe those are called thermoelectric materials.

The thermoelectric effect refers to phenomena by which either a temperature difference creates an electric potential or an electric potential creates a temperature difference.

According to Wikipedia, they are being used, or at least researched, only for niche applications. I wonder if the requirement of a temperature difference would be a limiting factor in terms of the required scalability.

A few years ago, I had considered suggesting the use of thermoelectric materials for the design of the next generation of credit cards. That would obviate any attacks from a distance, resulting in a requirement that in order to break a credit card, one would have to possess it. In combination with a potent encryption scheme, they might be unbreakable. But the credit card companies chose to go with a computer chip on the card instead.

I wonder how many ways that can be broken.

As Turkey sinks into the religious state morass, Europe has been caught off-guard. As Zülfikar Doğan reports in AL Monitor, Turkey’s Religious Affairs Department, Diyanet, and the Turkish imams under its supervision strongly supported President Erdogan during the attempted coup. Their next mission?

The issue of spying imams led to diplomatic tensions first between Turkey and the Netherlands, and then with Germany and Austria. The crisis escalated when the German police searched the residences of four Turkish imams on Feb. 15.

In a report submitted to the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission investigating the coup attempt, there were references to intelligence information provided by imams posted abroad. Diyanet-appointed imams collected intelligence from 38 countries, primarily about the Gulen movement.

Reports submitted by the spying imams covered all Gulenist activities, the names of their adherents and their photos in European, Central Asian and African countries. After the Diyanet reports to the parliamentary inquiry were leaked to the media in December 2016, the first reaction came from the Netherlands. Diyanet reports revealed that official Turkish religious personnel were collecting intelligence about Turkish expatriates praying in 145 mosques in that country. Yusuf Acar, the religious affairs attache of the Turkish Embassy in The Hague, was accused of guiding local imams. The Turkish government was asked to recall Acar, and it did.

Germany and Austria had related incidents. However, it appears Erdogan is convinced there are Gulenists everywhere.

Media organs close to the government said the spying imam crisis was a ploy of Western countries to support and protect the Gulen movement.

It will be interesting, in twenty years, to find out if Erdogan’s paranoia is justified. Right now it appears he’s thrashing about and harming strategic relations, slowly falling into the image of so many dictators who worried more about their power than their nation.

Concerning statins research, a reader writes:

PCSK9 drugs are available for humans now. And they work. They’re common in Europe and have caused cardiac surgery rates to fall by at least one third. But US medical insurance won’t pay for these drugs. Ask me how I know. Spoiler: I’m married to a man who has had quad-bypass surgery and can’t tolerate statins. Yet his insurance refuses to pay for the PCSK9 drug that his cardiologist – the top doctor at the U of M – has prescribed. The cardiologist’s nurse told us that her heart breaks when a patient dies even though there’s a medicine that could have prevented it. I only hope that my husband isn’t one of them.

I wonder if the author of the article missed some information on economical PCSK9 drugs. I’m also interested to hear that reducing PSCK9 is a viable option even after a patient has suffered heart damage.