Unsightly Mental Blemishes

… or at least tell me that this isn’t as wrong as it looks like to me.

The transformation of relations with Cuba suggests we may begin interacting with Cuba on a more regular and useful basis, and so occasional tidbits should be of interest.  NewScientist (21 March 2015) contributor Penny Sarchet  reports a rather small tidbit on Cuba’s health system (paywall):

Cuba does more with less. Despite having been under US sanctions for decades, people in the country have similar life expectancies to US citizens. The island has one of the highest concentrations of doctors in the world, with a family physician living every four blocks, seeing patients from their house, serving about 300 local families. Regular visits mean health problems tend to be diagnosed early and vaccination rates are among the highest in the world.

My experience with the American health system, limited as that’s been, suggests we tend to centralize doctors and require everyone to come to those centers, and while that makes sense for specialists, I do like the idea of a General Practicioner who just drops by from time to time.

In this post, I suggested the drop in oil prices is the result of an American war on Russia, hitting them where they hurt the worst.  I was a little surprised, though, when I received a promotional mail from The Motley Fool quoting Ronald Reagan’s son, Michael:

“I suggest that President Obama might want to study how Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. He did it without firing a shot, as we know, but he had a super weapon – oil… Since selling oil was the source of the Kremlin’s wealth, my father got the Saudis to flood the market with cheap oil. Lower oil prices devalued the ruble, causing the USSR to go bankrupt, which led to […] the collapse of the Soviet Empire.”

The Motley Fool goes on to promote one of their services, but only signing on to this thesis.  A little poking around found Jon Greenberg not quite agreeing:

We can see what happened with oil markets during Reagan’s time in office by looking at volume — how much was pumped out of the ground — and price. The U.S. Energy Information Administration provides the production numbers, and what we see partly backs up Reagan’s point and partly does not.

Total Oil Supply (Thousand Barrels Per Day)

For the first five years of Reagan’s administration, Saudi production fell steeply. Then in 1986 it popped up, followed by a dip the next year, and ending with another rise.

The Energy Information Administration also provides pricing data and it too both supports and undercuts Reagan’s statement. Prices fall in 1986, then recover in 1987 followed by a decline in 1988. Prices remained below what they had been in 1985. …

By several estimates, the drop in prices cost the USSR $20 billion a year. If the plan was to hurt the Soviet Union, it succeeded.

What is unclear is whether the Saudis ramped up production at Reagan’s request. We look at what the record shows on that front.

Jon is mainly concerned with history, not current events.  But Andrew Critchlow at The Telegraph connects the two and mixes in some Middle East politics as well:

Although 25 years have passed since the Berlin Wall signalled the end of the last Cold War it appears that the US and its allies are fighting Russia’s belligerent President Vladimir Putin with the same economic weapon that defeated his masters when he served in the KGB….

Such is the precarious economic situation Mr Putin has placed Russia in by pitting the country in an ideological battle with the US and Europe that Deutsche Bank expects its economy to slip into recession next year.

Of course Saudi Arabia – as the world’s only true swing oil producer – is taking advantage of the situation to reinforce its strategic importance to Washington, which appears to be moving closer to Iran. Mr Putin has also handed Riyadh and the rest of Opec the opportunity to fire a warning shot across the bows of shale oil drillers in North America, which depend of prices above $70 per barrel to remain profitable.

Matriphagy.

Medical science has completed its first successful penis transplant:

It began with a ritual circumcision for a teenager in South Africa, from the Xhosa tribe. And it ended with the world’s first penile transplant, completed in December and disclosed last week.

So far, it looks like a success. After the nine-hour procedure, Andre van der Merwe, the surgeon who led the transplant team at South Africa’s Tygerberg Hospital, was relatively confident that his patient, then 21, would eventually have a fully functioning penis. In time. Van der Merwe reckoned that it would take a couple of years for that to happen.

But just five weeks later, the patient informed him that not only was he achieving erections, but he had also engaged in intercourse. “I was shocked. I didn’t know what to say,” recalls van der Merwe, adding that he also feared that the early action might lead to a blood clot.

But this is certainly one of those medical procedures mainly motivated by traditional cultural practices, this time that of the southern African tribes Xhosas and Ndebeles.  While certainly accidents and disease can also result in the loss of the penis, just reading about this traditional practice will raise the eyebrows:

Tricking the boys, some as young as 9, into attending initiation schools; law concerning age and medical fitness are often ignored:

While many initiation schools are officially sanctioned, others are unregulated and allow bogus surgeons to operate with unsterilised blades. According to Rijken, who works in the region, 825 boys have died from complications since 1995 and many more have suffered from what he calls male genital mutilation.

Billing the parents for the cost of the school:

The family was informed that the fee for both of them would be R1,420 (US$192), a significant sum considering their only source of income is two child support grants totalling R420 (US$57) a month.

Using ostracization to sustain the practice:

In 2012, Asanda lost his penis to gangrene in a botched circumcision ritual performed by a traditional surgeon wielding the same spear on more than a dozen initiates. He was an unusual case among thousands of men hospitalized after such ceremonies in past years because he broke a code of secrecy about the tradition and spoke out in protest. For that, he endured public humiliation and even a severe beating a few months ago.

“People would just stare at me, as if I were not a man,” 25-year-old Asanda told The Associated Press. He did not want his family name published for fear of a bigger backlash from his community.

They won’t use anesthetic, though:

Steve was circumcised by a traditional practitioner soon after arriving at the school. No anaesthetic was administered; bearing the pain of the cutting is considered vital to the process of becoming a man. A disposable blade was used, but the wound was not bandaged; the only protection against infection was the application of some traditional medicine.

The communities involved are not insensitive to the problem:

In a nearby hospital, a mother is in tears as she strokes her son’s head. He is still frail following months of treatment for a septic circumcision which also resulted in a penile amputation.

“Our children are dying like ants. I want the people doing this to be arrested and punished,” she says, angrily.

But the people involved are not about to give up their privileges without a fight:

Dr Dingeman Rijken said he had set up a website to reveal the “dark secrets of the ritual” because traditional leaders had shown “shocking” indifference and incompetence to the annual toll of death and injury.

The leaders have condemned Rijken for breaking a cultural taboo and reported his site to South Africa’s Film and Publication Board, demanding it be shut down. …

But critics argue that Rijken has betrayed their culture and should have handled the matter differently. Nkululeko Nxesi, from the Community Development Foundation of South Africa, told the AFP news agency: “That website must be shut down with immediate effect. He should respect the cultural principles and processes of this nation.”

Patekile Holomisa, a former leader of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa, took a similar view. He told AFP: “We condemn the exposure of this ritual to people who do not practise it. Women should not see what happens at initiations.”

I suppose to an individualistic culture, this doesn’t make much sense; but for those that are more communitarian, a shared, horrific experience acts as a bonding process, something you know your mates have experienced, have in this case just survived, and perhaps marks your and your group as special.  Horrific?  So much the better.  As one of those individualists, I find this horrifying; but if you’re trying to build a community, institutions such as these may be necessary to instill necessary mental attitudes.

Gah.

Andrew Sullivan of the now dormant The Dish raged against traditional Western circumcision here.

(h/t NewScientist 21 March 2015)

… but I will say I saw it tonight, and that it was intriguing, and perhaps even inspirational.  At least I feel like I should try harder to do what I do better.

BTW, it’s a documentary on a pianist.  Who gives music lessons.

Gallup’s recent poll indicates the GOP doesn’t yet have a powerhouse contender for the nomination:

Underscoring the relative weakness of the potential 2016 crop of Republican candidates compared with their forerunners in prior campaigns, the candidates with the best scores at this early stage of the 2016 campaign would rank as only third best among the 2008 field, behind Giuliani and eventual nominee John McCain, and as fourth best in the 2000 campaign behind Bush, Dole and Steve Forbes.

Certainly nothing close to Hillary in terms of being known.  It’ll be interesting to see how these numbers fluctuate as the contenders spread their message – and their missteps.  The latest declared candidate, Rand Paul, is right in the thick of things:

Correlating these numbers with the candidates as they reveal more of their agendas should give an interesting insight into the composition and collective thoughts of the GOP.

The water problems in Palestine are not, unsurprisingly, related to climate change, but rather the political climate, according to AL Monitor’s Ahmed Melman:

Israel started controlling water resources in 1948, and began impeding the development of wells and water springs, in addition to exploiting the existing resources for the benefit of settlements and agricultural purposes at the expense of the Palestinians. In the mid-1960s, Israel began exploiting the water of the Jordan River basin that feeds the Dead Sea and diverting the water to private settlements in Negev settlements south of Palestine through the National Water Carrier; it also drained Lake Hula in northern Palestine. After Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, Israeli control over water resources increased. This happened through preventing drilling, bridging springs and refraining from issuing licenses as the governing authority until it controlled 90% of Palestinian water resources using military orders and laws. The water issue was moved to final-status negotiations within the framework of the Oslo Accord due to its importance and complexity. Phase I (Declaration of Principles) of the accord, which was set at five years, included the transitional arrangements for the establishment of a self-governing interim Palestinian Authority (PA); this was to lead to a permanent settlement in order to deal with the six key issues the parties agreed to move to final-status negotiations five years from the signing of the accords.

The future of water in Palestine does not look promising and might be headed toward a catastrophe in the coming years, especially in the Gaza Strip.

PWA Minister Mazen Ghoneim told Al-Monitor, on the sidelines of the World Water Day celebration in Ramallah on March 26, “The water situation in Palestine is very complex in light of Israel’s control over 90% of water resources, in addition to its refusal to increase the amount of drinking water sold to Palestine since 1995, which totals up to 52 million cubic meters, for $55 million.”

“The biggest water catastrophe on earth is in the Gaza Strip, as 97% of the coastal aquifer water is unfit for human use because of seawater intrusion and leakage of sewage water into it,” Ghoneim said.

AlJazeera publishes Charlotte Silver’s piece:

Israel credits its use of desalination plants and drip-irrigation with enabling the desert to bloom – the iconic image reinforcing the still-lingering notion that the land of historic Palestine was a dry one, while further impressing Israel’s world audience with the young country’s wizardry with water.

Less attention is given to the Knesset report commissioned in 2002, nearly four decades after Israel’s national water carrier began diverting the Jordan river to Israeli citrus orchards in the Negev region. The report concluded that the region’s ongoing water crisis – a desiccated Jordan river and shrinking Dead Sea – was “primarily man-made“. …

In fact, Palestinians have not historically wanted for water. But the characterisation of Palestine as a desperately arid land has, as Clemens Messerschmid wrote in 2011, “naturalised” the water crisis that Palestinians experience every day. Gaza, which is currently subsisting off of a water source that is 95 percent non-potable, long served as an oasis for travellers crossing from Cairo to Damascus. This history – and more – is important to consider amid the recent enthusiastic clamour over Israel’s miraculous water surplus that promises to provide a glimmer of hope for peace and cooperation, but is, in truth, a helpful cover-up for its ongoing theft and exploitation.

I cannot say if the facts cited are true, or out of context.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz contributor Amira Hass writes:

So here are the facts:

* Israel doesn’t give water to the Palestinians. Rather, it sells it to them at full price.

* The Palestinians would not have been forced to buy water from Israel if it were not an occupying power which controls their natural resource, and if it were not for the Oslo II Accords, which limit the volume of water they can produce, as well as the development and maintenance of their water infrastructure.

* This 1995 interim agreement was supposed to lead to a permanent arrangement after five years. The Palestinian negotiators deluded themselves that they would gain sovereignty and thus control over their water resources.

The Palestinians were the weak, desperate, easily tempted side and sloppy when it came to details. Therefore, in that agreement Israel imposed a scandalously uneven, humiliating and infuriating division of the water resources of the West Bank.

* The division is based on the volume of water Palestinians produced and consumed on the eve of the deal. The Palestinians were allotted 118 million cubic meters (mcm) per year from three aquifers via drilling, agricultural wells, springs and precipitation. Pay attention, Rino Tzror: the same deal allotted Israel 483 mcm annually from the same resources (and it has also exceeded this limit in some years).

In other words, some 20 percent goes to the Palestinians living in the West Bank, and about 80 percent goes to Israelis – on both sides of the Green Line – who also enjoy resources from the rest of the country.

Hass finishes with:

Instead of spending time calculating whether the average Israeli household’s per-capita consumption of water is four times or “only” three times that of Palestinian consumption, open your eyes: The settlements bathed in green, and across the road Palestinian urban neighborhoods and villages are subject to a policy of water rotation. The thick pipes of Mekorot (Israel’s national water provider) are heading to the Jordan Valley settlements, and a Palestinian tractor next to them transports a rusty tank of water from afar. In the summer, the faucets run dry in Hebron and never stop flowing in Kiryat Arba and Beit Hadassah.

So it seems better management is required; but my impression is that tribalism is too strong, and tensions will continue, although there is a joint project underway to solve the water problem:

In a rare display of regional cooperation, representatives of Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement on Monday to build a Red Sea-Dead Sea water project that is meant to benefit all three parties.

The project addresses two problems: the acute shortage of clean fresh water in the region, especially in Jordan, and the rapid contraction of the Dead Sea. A new desalination plant is to be built in Aqaba, Jordan, to convert salt water from the Red Sea into fresh water for use in southern Israel and southern Jordan — each would get eight billion to 13 billion gallons a year. The process produces about the same amount of brine as a waste product; the brine would be piped more than 100 miles to help replenish the already very saline Dead Sea.

Hillary appears to be stumbling a little:

Not only is this Clinton’s weakest favorable rating of the past year, but it is the lowest since 2008 when she was competing in that year’s Democratic primary elections. Prior to that, her favorable rating sank to 45% or lower at points between 2001 and 2003 when serving as U.S. senator from New York, and to 43% at one point in 1996 when she was first lady.

The latest rating comes from an April 3-4 Gallup poll, conducted roughly a month after Clinton began responding to criticism of her use of a private email server for official business while secretary of state and as news reports continued to indicate she was gearing up to announce her presidential candidacy. The previous result is from a March 2-4 survey, conducted prior to Clinton’s March 10 press conference in which she vigorously defended her email practices.

If her next poll indicates a continued plunge, it may be an opening for potential rivals, such as O’Malley and Biden.  Eric Zuesse is convinced Hillary is doomed.

Her arrogance (or else stupidity) in having wiped clean the hard drive of the private server she had used for her emails while she was the U.S. Secretary of State adds insult to the injury already done to her incipient campaign by the earlier revelation that she had evaded the State Department’s record-keeping system and had used her private server for all of her State Department emails and not only for her personal emails. (The NYT had headlined March 2nd: “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules.”) 

MSNBC reports that potential Presidential hopeful Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is starting to avoid questions after recent misstatements:

The whole point of a presidential candidate going to the border and taking a tour alongside a far-right Republican governor is its symbolic value – public relations is the sole purpose of visits like these. It’s Republican Presidential Campaign Politics 101: the candidate shows up, he or she looks concerned, he or she shakes some hands with border guards, and he or she tells reporters about the importance of “getting tough.

But Walker has decided to remove political reporters from the equation. As Byers noted, this isn’t limited to Friday’s border tour – last weekend, the Wisconsin Republican became the sixth national candidate to visit Greenville, S.C. but the only one of the six who wouldn’t take questions from the media.

So my question is, does the press think about just not reporting on candidates who refuse to take questions?  Of course, there was the Sharron Angle candidacy of 2012, wherein her terror-stricken run from reporters resulted in nasty news reports; but you have to wonder if a public campaign, asking all news organizations to sign a pledge to not cover candidates who refuse questions, might be in order.  Sure, that’ll lead to ‘reasonable vs unreasonable’ questions, but, hey, we all need a little entertainment during the political season – and we don’t need candidates who can’t field questions and at least get the simple ones right – and know enough to say, like Governor Ventura during his candidacy, “I don’t know, but I’ll find the best person to answer that question.”

(h/t  Billionaires for Wealthcare)

One of the key parts of the GOP strategy going forward may be to never, ever say you’re sorry.  This fellow (the piece is unsigned) on Unqualified Offerings brought it up in a piece in which he suggests Governor Scott Walker may win the GOP nomination:

Apologizing or even admitting error represents weakness, period. So Mitt Romney titles his campaign book No Apology; Ted Cruz insists the 2013 government shutdown is why the GOP walloped the Democrats in the 2014 elections.

We can also see this in the public flailing about of Governor Mike Pence over the Indiana Religious Restoration Act.

“Over the past week this law has become a subject of great misunderstanding and controversy across our state and nation. However we got here, we are where we are, and it is important that our state take action to address the concerns that have been raised and move forward.”

Or here:

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on Sunday defended his decision to sign a religious freedom bill into law, saying that it was ”absolutely not” a mistake.

In an interview on ABC’s “This Week” the Republican governor repeatedly dodged questions on whether the law would legally allow people of Indiana to refuse service to gay and lesbians, saying that residents of the state are “nice” and don’t discriminate and that “this is about protecting the religious liberty of people of faith and families of faith.”

As a political strategy, you want to say it’s a political miscalculation: adult human beings make mistakes and own up to mistakes; voters will recognize the immaturity (or worse) of the GOP candidates and reject them.

Sadly, I do not think this will be true, because of the underlying assumption of good knowledge, by which I mean everyone is aware of what’s going on and when public mistakes are made.  I believe there are two factors at work:

1. We’re too busy to keep track of such things.  Look at the hours we work – 47 a week, and then there’s all of our “leisure” activities, child care, etc.  How many folks keep careful, sober track of the candidates and their performance?
2. That’s the jobs of the other side.  Not any longer.  It’s hard to believe the other side, no matter who they are.  The polarization of politics leaves me shaking my head; sure, some are just ridiculous [DailyJot], but when a former Minnesota Rep indulges in ludicrous hyperbole, then I have to doubt anything anybody on either side says.  There are precious few with any stature left.  Obama I will seriously consider, as I see him as an old-style politician to whom honesty has some weight over Party loyalties; maybe Reid.  I’m not even sure of Klobuchar and Franken, my Senators, who generally seem fairly likable.  On the GOP side, there’s just no one.  They have not cultivated a reputation for honesty, for reasonable analysis.

So this will be the unintended consequence of the GOP culture cultivated over the last couple of decades: they do not have a reputation of honesty, of fair dealing, of mature government (for a glaring example, see the entire Bush years).  They have a rep of unreasoning enmity, of extremism, of a failure to acknowledge that their opponents no doubt have the future of the Nation at heart – they just throw mud.  As an independent, it’s hard to consider voting for a GOP candidate these days.

No wonder the Millenials evidence little enthusiasm for the GOP.

And the Democrats seem to have a hard time figuring out how to respond to this immaturity.

(Updated misspellings and missing links 21 September 2015)

Being a FIREFLY fan, this is interesting news….

(h/t Lee Norman)

Here’s a piece of blank verse for a rainy day:

When All the World Is Grey…

When all the world’s comprised of shades of grey
you learn to see the beauty in the differing tones;
the infinite variety of muted hue and subtle shadow,
the cleverness of light against dark,
and myriad shadings in-between.

When the earth is the grey of a winter sky,
you’re compelled to see the charm in a cozy room.
Cloud-washed walls reflect the dappled light of a leaden landscape,
as blue-white snow blankets ashy, bare-branched trees
that grow like gateposts beside a black ribbon of highway
stretching to the horizon.

When the sky holds the grey of a summer rain,
you’re allowed to feel the healing
of nature’s softly falling tears;
tears warm and wet, washing clean the dirt and sorrow and regret
of a thousand missed opportunities, a hundred misunderstandings,
and a world full of misapprehension and fear.

When all the world is grey,
you begin to see the color living deep within the tones;
the subtle blues of steel and smoke,
the effervescence of opal, pearl and nacreous shell,
the hard-edged spark of silver,
and the warmth of dusty lilac, mauve and taupe.

When all the world is grey.

–D.J. White

A DALY is a measurement of the impact of a disease on a human life.  It was developed in the 1990s, but only just recently came to my attention – I’m not sure how (I owe someone a h/t). The World Health Organization goes into more detail:

The YLL basically correspond to the number of deaths multiplied by the standard life expectancy at the age at which death occurs. The basic formula for YLL (without yet including other social preferences discussed below), is the following for a given cause, age and sex:

where:

• N = number of deaths
• L = standard life expectancy at age of death in years

Because YLL measure the incident stream of lost years of life due to deaths, an incidence perspective has also been taken for the calculation of YLD in the original Global Burden of Disease Study for year 1990 and in subsequent WHO updates for years 2000 to 2004.

Seems useful, but the charity research site Give Well has some problems with it:

The DALY metric is used to provide a single number to capture all of the health costs caused by a disease (or averted by an aid program). 1 DALY could represent 1 year of life lost (due to early death), 1.67 years spent with blindness, 5.24 significant malaria episodes, 41.67 years spent with intestinal obstruction due to ascariasis (a parasite), or many possible combinations of these and other symptoms.4 There is no way of knowing, from just how many DALYs a program is said to have averted, whether it has saved lives, prevented large numbers of minor health problems, or some combination thereof.

We feel that this creates a number of problems for donors seeking the charity that best fits their values. More in our blog series on DALYs, available here.

So Give Well would like a dimensional number; this yardstick is a little too simple for them.

I tried to discover if DALYs are used by pharmaceutical corporations to select the next disease to work on, but I found no evidence of such.  I suppose those corporations where the execs are wedded to the notion that they exist to make as much money as possible wouldn’t be interested in the concept; it would take a more idealistic executive team, such as we hear about now and then from the Millenials, to consider using DALYs.  However, in the category of other factors, companies are often driven by inner competencies, rather than external needs, and so targeted diseases are selected by a less fortunate motivation; and if they are screening drugs against a spectrum of illnesses, then it’ll be fortune that selects the disease to treat.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded research to put DALY numbers to a variety of diseases.  The results are provided here by the venerable journal The Lancet, and requires a free registration.

Can they ever make up their minds?  First they expunge our favorite dinosaur from the science books:

But then, in 1903, Elmer Riggs said that classification was wrong. He based his premise on the number of sacrum bones (where the tail attaches to the spinal cord) of each dinosaur, according to Wired magazine. The Apatosaurus sacrum has three bones, while the Brontosaurus had five. Instead of being a different species, Riggs contended the Brontosaurus was a younger version of the Apatosaurus.

… and now they’re dragging the poor guy back from the grave …

Both were long-necked and long-tailed creatures, among the largest to roam the Earth in their time. But now an extensive study published online in the journal PeerJ, finds that there are considerable differences between the two — enough, the researchers say, to conclude that they belong to separate groups.

A team of paleontologists spent five years researching and analyzing hundreds of different physical features of dinosaur specimens. The study’s lead author, Emanuel Tschopp from the New University of Lisbon in Portugal, says, “Generally, the Brontosaurus can be distinguished from Apatosaurus most easily by its neck, which is higher and less wide,” according to Scientific American.

Tschopp tells the magazine that while both dinosaurs are massive and robust animals, Apatosaurus is “even more extreme than Brontosaurus.”

Yes!  All of us middle-aged dinosaur junkies with our affection for “thunder lizard” may soon rejoice — Brontosaurus may be back!

A whimsical search of the Internet for Surveys for favorite dinosaur yielded tantalizing hints, but results were as hard to come by as some dinosaur species.

The Dinosaur society is here.

A Facebook correspondent, in response to a post concerning an increase in citizens identifying as political independents, requests

Now show a chart that shows people who actually vote.

This leads to this interesting article discussing precisely this subject, also published by the Pew Research Center.

Among Republicans interviewed in October, 17% did not identify as Republicans in November. Among Democrats interviewed in October, 10% no longer identified as Democrats. Of those who declined to identify with a party in October, 18% told us they were either Democrats or Republicans when we interviewed them in November. Overall, 15% of voters gave a different answer in November than they did in October.

We also see party affiliation changing in understandable ways over time, in response to major events and political circumstances. For example, the percentage of registered voters identifying as Republican dropped from 33% to 28% between 2004 and 2007 during a period in which disapproval of President George W. Bush’s job performance was rising and opinions about the GOP were becoming increasingly negative.

Similarly, the percentage of American voters identifying as Democrats dropped from 38% in 2008 – a high point not seen since the 1980s – to 34% in 2011, after their large losses in the 2010 congressional elections.

The Roper Center provides a chart of the information for the 2012 Presidential Election, entitled “How Groups Voted,” which I take to mean exit polls.  I’ve extracted this outtake:

For 2008, Roper provides this information:

In 2004, Roper provides this information:

For 2000, Roper provides this information:

From these few data points it appears the Republicans are suffering as both the Democrats and the Independents gain at their expense.  Of course, as the Pew report points out, loyalties can be variable, depending on the success of the Party, fidelity (or lack thereof) to espoused principles, and even the American belief that the grass is always greener with someone else in charge.  Still, given the aging demographic of the GOP, this trend is not surprising.  The interesting part will be the adjustments the GOP will make in order to stay viable as a national force.  Some have suggested the redrawing of voting districts is one of their early strategies; this can be of limited effectiveness since it’s easily detectable and can be taken to court, as in this Texas example.

The Pew Research Center is out with a poll measuring party membership:

The biggest change in partisan affiliation in recent years is the growing share of Americans who decline to affiliate with either party: 39% call themselves independents, 32% identify as Democrats and 23% as Republicans, based on aggregated data from 2014.

For both parties, youth is the future.

Millennials continue to be the most Democratic age cohort; 51% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 35% who identify with the GOP or lean Republican. There are only slight differences in partisan affiliation between older and younger millennials. Republicans have a four-point lead among the Silent Generation (47%-43%), the most Republican age cohort.

Not so good news for the GOP.  If these trends continue … but of course, both parties will adjust to attract new adherents.  The problem for the GOP is that they have become a haven for positions unpopular with the Millenials.  I suspect the first problem will be inflexibility, as the partisan politics practiced by the GOP on the President, even in the foreign policy arena, have been well-publicized by the GOP and its supporters for decades now.  Their raucous approach may now be circling around to bite off their tails.  After that, particular positions will fall: gay marriage, ObamaCare.  However, possibly the most difficult will be ridding themselves of the perception that they do not relate well with reality.  When will they discard their objections to climate change? I know that, prior to the Gingrich era, I had respect for the Republicans – they raised objections, they voted against Democratic bills, but they also understood that governing was an important duty, not a game to be played and won.  They had interesting ideas, and they conducted themselves honorably.  21st century Republicans dig in their heels, refuse to permit judicial appointments on the most slender of grounds, and are profligate with the public purse when they are in control, feeding the special interests supporting them.  Taking the military budget as a proxy for defense industry subsidization, the Council on Foreign Relations provides this chart:

The Democrats, on the other hand, must learn how to better promote their successes.  How many of them ran on the successful passage of ObamaCare?  Not many, especially in heavily contested areas – and they lost the House, and then the Senate.  Of course, they might have anyways, but taking the opportunity of an election to provide further education on ObamaCare would have been the brave and right thing to do.  That, and pull in their own profligacy, are two of the challenges they face.

A former colleague of mine happens to have run for State legislature seats, and has attended caucuses of both Parties.  His observation is that the most extreme attend these meetings: in the Republicans, anti-taxer who won’t hear a word for a tax; in the Democrats, every possible cause you can think of needs government funding, preferably unlimited.

Are the Millenials going to find this appetizing?  Does it even make sense to ask a loosely knit (if at all – the whole “generation” thing has never made much sense to me) group such a question?  The next few years – and their polls – should be quite interesting.  So will the creaking as the Parties try to adjust, against the howls of the old-timers.

I’d never heard of these.  Description here.

Over the last few months the archaeological world has been subjected to the horror of the deliberate destruction of ancient artifacts and even cities by the ISIS terrorist group.  However, it may not be all about the destruction, as Catherine Brahic reports in NewScientist (14 March 2015), “Can we save history from ISIS vandals?” (paywall):

THE Islamic State’s latest propaganda video shows fighters smashing statues and artefacts that are thousands of years old in the Mosul Museum, Iraq. The destruction is shocking, but maybe it is not random.

Archaeologist Katharyn Hanson of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has examined the video and points out that valuable objects are missing. She says that despite what the IS fighters say, they are not destroying everything.

The missing objects will likely be sold for a healthy profit on the black market, using international crime networks. Just how much money ISIS generates for its military campaign from looted art is still debated. Some believe the sale of ancient art is a key revenue stream for the terrorist group. Others, including Hanson, argue that ISIS makes far more money from oil stolen from pipelines and ransoms paid for hostages. Either way, treasures are being lost forever.

Nor is looting confined to ISIS:

“Looting is happening everywhere and anyone with a shovel is doing it,” says Michael Danti, an archaeologist at the University of Boston. “All the jihadi groups are doing it, factions within the Syrian regime are doing it, and there are stories of factions within the Syrian opposition doing it. It’s very tempting, and lucrative. Some people are trying to feed their families, others are buying weapons.”

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the archaeologists, but if this is how you feed a family, it’s even easier to empathize with the desperate citizens of Syria – and far more understandable than the ISIS destruction, which appears to be more about entrenching power and destroying a mythos at odds with their own ambitions.

The Penn Cultural Heritage Center is leading an effort to preserve Syrian archaeological treasures here.

Iran has been a bugbear for successive sessions of Congress ever since the Iranians booted out Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi for (in popular opinion) being the catspaw of the United States, engaging in torture, etc (Feb 1979).  The taking of American hostages in November of the same year was, of course, traumatizing to anyone who loves their fellow countrymen; and for those who believe in America’s Manifest Destiny, exceptionally offensive.  I was just coming of age during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and I do recall the shock of screaming anti-American crowds, the overwhelming of the guards, and then the long crisis, the failed rescue raid, and finally the almost silent release of the prisoners as Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter.

Since then, simply pulling various memories of Iran out of my head, I recall the Iran-Iraq War, including the reports of the horror of gas warfare, the sacrifice of the youth of both nations for the egos of the leaders, and all the other horrors that go along with quasi-religious wars; I remember the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution, and the shocking way his death was mourned (for those who are not aware, as I recall the videos, his body was manhandled by mobs who carried it over their heads, before he was finally buried), which really brought home the idea that some people are really different and are truly heartbroken when a leader dies (I was already quite cynical about such matters); the execution of one of the initial leaders of the revoluion, a large jawed chap who had served as a news announcer during the crisis – I regret to say I do not recall his name.

The Iranian nuclear program began in the 1950s during the reign of the aforementioned Shah, went dormant when the Revolution took place, and was quietly revived in the 1990s.  This became public in 2002, and ever since there’s been dispute about the nature of their nuclear program; a short history is here.

Thus, concern about the Iranian nuclear program is understandable, and not entirely unmerited; since Pakistan and India, long term enemies, became nuclear powers and thus able to seriously damage, if not completely obliterate each other, not to mention seriously damage their neighbors, the jitters surrounding any other power regarded with not only suspicion, but outright paranoia, will certainly lead to a certain amount of disturbance.

However, the GOP’s reaction to a deal being assembled by a Democratic Administration can strain credulity to the breaking point.  Here’s a survey of some opinions, minus the well known Bachmann broadside.

Time gives a summary of the deal here.

Iranian President Rouhani:

“Some think we should either fight with the world or surrender to other powers,” he said. “We believe there is a third option. We can coöperate with the world.”

Thomas Friedman at the New York Times reports,

President Obama invited me to the Oval Office Saturday afternoon to lay out exactly how he was trying to balance these risks and opportunities in the framework accord reached with Iran last week in Switzerland. What struck me most was what I’d call an “Obama doctrine” embedded in the president’s remarks. It emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that “engagement,” combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-à-vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities — like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.

Politico reports Saudi Arabia is giving cautious support.  Peter Beinart at The Atlantic writes in “What’s the Alternative to Obama’s Iran Deal?”

Benjamin Netanyahu insists that opposing Thursday’s framework nuclear deal with Iran doesn’t mean he wants war. “There’s a third alternative,” the Israeli prime minister told CNN on Sunday, “and that is standing firm, ratcheting up the pressure until you get a better deal.”

There are three problems with this argument. The first is that even some of Netanyahu’s own ideological allies don’t buy it. …

The second problem with Netanyahu’s argument is that it’s based on bizarre assumptions about Iranian politics. According to Netanyahu, if the United States walks away from the current deal, Iran’s desperation to end global sanctions will lead it to scrap its nuclear program almost entirely. But Iran’s nuclear program is decades old and enjoys broad public support. Even Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of the reformist Green Movement, declared in 2009 that if elected, “we will not abandon the great achievements of Iranian scientists. I too will not suspend uranium enrichment.” … Rouhani’s hardline opponents, who benefit politically and economically from the sanctions, fiercely oppose such a deal. Netanyahu thinks a more aggressive American posture, coupled with a demand for near-complete Iranian capitulation, will make Tehran accept terms that today not even Iranian doves accept.

Finally, there’s a third, less well-appreciated flaw in Netanyahu’s argument. He assumes that after walking away from the current deal, the United States can “ratchet up the pressure on Iran.” In fact, the pressure will likely go down.

Yes, Congress can pass additional sanctions. But more American sanctions alone won’t have much effect. After all, the United States began seriously sanctioning Iran in the mid-1990s. Yet for a decade and a half, those sanctions had no major impact on Iran’s nuclear program. That’s largely because foreign companies ignored American pleas to stop doing business with the Islamic Republic.

Assuming the facts are as presented, this refutes Netanyahu without addressing the virtues of the deal itself.

Ben Caspit, an Israeli columnist, comments for the AL Monitor:

On the evening of April 2, when Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini faced the press, Jerusalem was shocked into silence.

First, the very fact that a framework agreement had been reached ran counter to all Israeli assessments, according to which the deadline would be postponed once again to the end of June (the original deadline). Second, the principles of the agreement surprised Israeli officials and especially the political echelon. No, there isn’t a single person around Netanyahu or Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon who will concede that the agreement is a good one, but several of its elements make it anything but the “bad agreement” that Israel has insisted all along would be produced.

AL Monitor talks to Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amos Yadlin, formerly the head of Israeli military intelligence:

“It depends on how you look at it,” he said. “If we aspire to an ideal world and dream of having all of Israel’s justified demands fulfilled, then of course the agreement does not deliver. It grants Iran legitimacy as a nuclear threshold state and potential to eventually achieve nuclearization. It leaves Iran more or less one year away from a nuclear weapon, and Israel will clearly not like all of this.

“But there’s another way to look at it that examines the current situation and the alternatives. In this other view, considering that Iran now has 19,000 centrifuges, the agreement provides quite a good package. One has to think what might have happened if, as aspired to by Netanyahu and Steinitz, negotiations had collapsed. Had that happened, Iran could have decided on a breakout, ignored the international community, refused to respond to questions about its arsenal, continued to quickly enrich and put together a bomb before anyone could have had time to react. And therefore, with this in mind, it’s not a bad agreement.”

The Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, remains unhappy, however.

Over at The American Conservative, W. James Antle III opines

How do you say trust but verify in Persian? For the truth is, the framework for a nuclear deal with Iran is only partly about the technical details. It is also a matter of trust.

Assuming a final agreement really resembles what the State Department outlined publicly, it will have its weaknesses. Iran will remain a nuclear threshold state. The Islamic republic will be allowed to maintain a vast nuclear infrastructure, and the deal’s success depends on the ”P5+1″ group’s ability to detect and penalize Iranian cheating in a timely fashion. …

The deal has to be evaluated against plausible alternatives, not an ideal outcome. It was in the absence of any deal that Iran went from having a little over 16o [sic] centrifuges in 2003 to 3,000 in 2005, 8,000 by the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency and 22,000 by 2013.

This seems fairly reasonable to me, acknowledge there are problems, but this is progress and we should appreciate it.  He goes on to comment on the alternative,

Critics of the deal don’t like it when it is suggested that the failure of diplomacy makes war more likely. They borrow one of Obama’s favorite catchphrases and call it a “false choice.”

This would be more convincing if leading Iran hawks weren’t already calling for bombing Iran or saying war is our best option.

But …

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been quoted as saying, “If you think the war in Iraq was hard, an attack on Iran would, in my opinion, be a catastrophe.”

CNBC is not happy:

The agreement significantly reduces the number of Iranian centrifuges and other nuclear infrastructure, but only limits Tehran’s ability to quickly “break out” from these restrictions and accumulate enough fissionable material to create a nuclear weapon in less than one year. Theoretically, we are told that is enough time for the West to detect Iranian violations and respond — but it is not.

The National Interest’s Zalmay Khalilzad is not happy.

… there are four reasons why this agreement is flawed and poses significant risks:

First, using the so-called fatwa by Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei as an indicator of Iran’s true intentions— present and future—is a mistake.

Second, even if President Obama is correct that the agreement puts Iran one year away from producing enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon, it entails substantial risks.

Third, the president is counting on the efficacy of inspections—believing that Iranian efforts to cheat or deceive will be discovered and exposed in a timely manner, allowing the United States and its partners to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Fourth, the framework agreement assumes that if Iran violates the deal, the sanctions that were lifted can be re-imposed—or can snap back into place.

Mr. Khalilzad has some significant experience with Middle East affairs, having been Ambassador to Iraq, and should perhaps be taken a trifle more seriously.

The Washington Free Beacon, relying mostly on unnamed arms control experts, believes the deal is unsustainable:

Despite promises by President Obama that Iranian cheating on a new treaty will be detected, verifying Tehran’s compliance with a future nuclear accord will be very difficult if not impossible, arms experts say.

“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will not be effectively verifiable,” said Paula DeSutter, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation from 2002 to 2009.

But David Corn at MotherJones has the temerity to roundup a number of named experts who think this is sustainable:

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former national security aide to Sen. John McCain, and a former director of intelligence assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense: “[T]he proposed parameters and framework in the Proposed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has the potential to meet every test in creating a valid agreement over time…It can block both an Iranian nuclear threat and a nuclear arms race in the region, and it is a powerful beginning to creating a full agreement, and creating the prospect for broader stability in other areas. Verification will take at least several years, but some form of trust may come with time. This proposal should not be a subject for partisan wrangling or outside political exploitation. It should be the subject of objective analysis of the agreement, our intelligence and future capabilities to detect Iran’s actions, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) capabilities to verify, and enforcement provisions if Iran should cheat. No perfect agreement was ever possible and it is hard to believe a better option was negotiable. In fact, it may be a real victory for all sides: A better future for Iran, and greater security for the United States, its Arab partners, Israel, and all its other allies.”

Kori Schake at FP writes an article entitled “I’m a Republican and I Support the Iran Nuclear Deal”:

1. The inspection provisions are solid. According to the details of the agreement that have been released so far, the deal provides for continuous inspection of all of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities. It also challenges inspections of any suspect facilities, and calls on Iran to sign up for the IAEA Additional Protocol, which increases short-notice inspections and IAEA access to establish greater confidence in an absence of cheating. If these are all carried out, they would amount to a robust verification regime. The inspection provisions would dramatically increase the United States’ ability to know what is happening in Iran’s nuclear programs, to judge the extent of their militarization efforts, and to anticipate “breakout” toward a nuclear weapons.

William Kristol at the conservative The Weekly Standard writes an editorial, “Kill the Deal“:

But it’s important not to lose sight of the whole, even as one goes after its most vulnerable parts. The whole of the deal is a set of concessions to an aggressive regime with a history of cheating that will now be enabled to stand one unverifiable cheat away from nuclear weapons. In making these concessions, the U.S, and its partners are ignoring that regime’s past and present actions, strengthening that regime, and sending the message that there is no price to be paid for a regime’s lying and cheating and terror and aggression. …

It is now up to the members of Congress to do their duty, on this delicate and momentous occasion. It is up to members of Congress to refuse to accede to this set of concessions made by our current executive magistrate, concessions that would put one of the world’s most dangerous regimes further along the road to acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons.

Fox News publishes “What Saddam Hussein tells us about the Iran nuclear deal“:

President Barack Obama correctly has pointed out that the impending Iran nuclear deal depends for success upon United Nations inspections.  He also said, incorrectly, that “…Iran has also agreed to the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history.”

The President seems not to remember the inspection regime for Iraq following the 1991 Kuwait war.  And that inspection regime did not work, for reasons that included both Saddam’s behavior and that of the U.N. Security Council.

It’s not entirely clear to me how the one paragraph relates to the other; I also recall the Iraq War, and the belated discovery that Iraq indeed did NOT possess Weapons of Mass Destruction, despite the assurances that he did — all over the repeated assertions of UN inspectors that he did not.  So if the deal is even more robust than the Iraq deal, I find it hard to get upset.

Finally, the indictment of Democratic Senator Menendez, a critic of the deal, has drawn some conspiracy theories out of the woodwork like salt draws water out of beef, this one from conservative Breitbart.com:

“If you had written this in a ‘House of Cards’ script, it would have been thrown out. The idea that the president’s most powerful democratic critic of the Iran deal goes down, indicted just before the deal is announced, nobody is suggesting a connection, but it sure does have an impact and it will it will be harder for Republicans to get a veto-proof majority to challenge the deal.”

The above quote from Jon Karl.

And, as an addendum, Egberto Willies at the Daily Kos chimes in with a quote from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson:

I am not one to go immediately to war. I would go to some sort of containment policy. And try to do something about it through that policy rather than going to war. But I know what my political party wants. My political party, at least some of them—the 47 for example who signed the letter to the Ayatollah—they want war.

I have been unable to find a second source for the above quote, but it does fit the pattern of the good Republican Colonel speaking his mind, not his ideology.

That’s a more interesting survey result.  By measuring the more extreme candidates of both parties, we get a measure of how extreme each party may really be.  This is important in an era where party zealots – those most likely to be extreme – control the parties.

We’ve redesigned the layout of the blog based on initial experience and visual appeal – that is, how it appeals to our sensibilities.  It’s not entirely how I’d like it – the author line appears to have a hideous “blavatar”, and I don’t care about categories.  On the other hand, the block quote area is much improved and Deb’s aesthetic judgments have resulted in a vast improvement in the blog.

Please let us know if there is something else we can fix.

Michael Bond at NewScientist (14 March 2015)  reports (paywall) on the numerical models used by the UK Meteorology Office via an interview with head of the Numerical Methods division, Ken Mylne.  I found this part of the Q&A interesting for reasons having nothing to do with the weather:

From 2011, the Met Office started presenting rain forecasts using probabilities. Was that controversial?
We’d been debating it for a long time. The Americans have been putting out probability of precipitation forecasts for many years, and it’s quite accepted there. The argument in favour is that often you cannot – for good scientific reasons – say definitely that it will or will not be raining. So you are giving people much better information if you tell them the probability of rainfall. While we recognise that some people find probabilities difficult to understand, lots of people do understand them and make better decisions as a result.

I’m located in Minnesota and have been for a long time, and I cannot remember when the local weather stations did not offer probabilities of precipitation in their forecasts.  Mr. Mylne suggests that a portion of the population may not understand probabilities, and therefore they had not offered those estimates in the interests of not confusing the audience.

My thought is this: if your expectations of an audience is low, that’s where they’ll perform.  If you want to see improvement, expectations must be set higher.  Any teacher, I’m sure, will tell you that.  Statistics and probability can certainly become frustrating subjects once you get beyond the basics, but basics is really all we present for the weather forecasts – so present it and let the audience know they can learn the basics if they are interested.

Nowadays, you can get in as deep as you like in any subject, as the Web lets experts freely share their knowledge with anyone.  Ever wonder why?  They often have problems of their own that they hope someone else may have an answer.