SOME FACTS ABOUT GUNS IN THE U.S.

The debate about guns in the United States is clouded by too much rhetoric and too few facts. Slogans like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," or More guns, less crime," may sound as though they convey useful information, but in fact they just add further cement to already polarized and fixed positions.

Las Vegas welcome sign adorned with flowers

a week after the October 1, 2017 mass shooting 

Credit: Wikipedia 

Readers may make of them what they will, but here are a few facts about guns and how they are used in the U.S.  They come from a study published in the journal Science on 8 December, 2017.

1. The U.S. is an extreme outlier among developed countries when it comes to guns and violence. The chance of being murdered by someone using a gun is 25 times higher in the U.S. than in other well-off countries, and the rate of suicides by gunshot is 8 times higher. A U.S. male between the ages of 15 and 24 is an astonishing 70 times more likely to die from gun violence than his peer in any of the other highly industrialized countries..

2. Death by gunshot is a major public health threat in the U.S., comparable to the number of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents. One difference is that taking rational steps to reduce the risk of death or injury from motor vehicles is not highly politicized or controversial. The result is that the number of deaths per miles driven has plummeted by a factor of 25 since the 1920s.

3. You might suppose that the government would be interested in supporting research to understand the causes and possible ways to mitigate this important public-health problem, as it does with many other diseases and conditions. You would be wrong. In 1996, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, which effectively killed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) research program on gun violence.

4.Still, non-government researchers have continued to study gun violence and its prevention. These include researchers at many universities and in at least one state--California.

5. An intensive recent study by public-health and legal researchers at Stanford University, in California, and Duke University, in North Carolina, has established several factual reference points:

     --Add-on sentences for the use of guns in assaults and robberies cut the rate of those crimes by around 5 percent.

     --Laws preventing perpetrators of domestic violence from buying or possessing guns save lives, potentially thousands of them--reducing the murder rate for female intimate partners by 17 percent.

     --States with strict restrictions on carrying concealed weapons have significantly lower rates of violent crime than states with right-to-carry laws. Conversely, states that switch from restrictive to right-to-carry on average see a 9 percent increase in their homicide rates.

     --States with a high percentage of households with guns experience 3.6 times as many civilians killed by police than states with fewer households with guns.

If we have any hope of breaking out of the crippling polarization that prevents rational or even civil discourse on gun control here in the U.S., it must start with facts on which people can agree. Facts do not equal policy. But policy without facts is likely to be bad policy. And when it comes to guns, bad policy can and does cost thousands of lives.

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INCREDIBLE 3-D FLY-THROUGH OF THE ORION NEBULA

The three stars of Orion's belt and the four tracing his sword are among the most recognizable signposts in the night sky. Astronomers have know for years that the middle "star" in Orion's sword--the Orion nebula--is actually an extremely dynamic system of young stars and the clouds and cocoons of gas and dust from which new stars are still being born.

The constellation Orion

clearly showing Orion's belt and sword

Credit: Mark Mathosian 

Astronomers and visualization specialists at NASA's Universe of Learning program have now gifted us with a remarkable 3-D fly-through of the Orion nebula based on visual images from the Hubble Space Telescope, infra-red images from the Spitzer Space Telescope and state-of-the-art 3-D modeling and image processing.

You can find four versions of the fly-through at this URL. They include one in visible light, one in infrared light, and shorter and longer versions combining the visible and infrared views.

 The Orion Nebula in visible and infrared light

Credit: StSci

Remember, this is not a Hollywood sci-fi mockup, but an accurate 3-D rendition using astronomy's best images of and data about the Orion Nebula. Given that the nebula is estimated to be 24 light-years across, these  video journeys are something no human could actually make; they provide a unique, almost god-like view. Sit back, turn on your speakers, and enjoy the trip.

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AN INFECTIOUS IDEA -- A VIRUS-LIKE PROTEIN MAY BE CRUCIAL TO LEARNING AND MEMORY

We've all heard the phrase, "an infectious idea." It turns out that this may not just be a metaphor--new research has revealed that a virus-like protein in all of our brains may be vital for learning and memory.

"If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck," the saying goes, "it probably is a duck." So, no matter how surprising it is, finding a crucial protein in the brain that looks like a virus and acts like a virus raises the intriguing possibility that our ability to learn and remember may stem from a chance infection of some ancestral four-legged creature by a retrovirus 350 to 400 million years ago.

The protein in question is called Arc. It's found in animals as different as flies, mice and humans. It's been known for some time that Arc is important for learning and memory. Mice lacking Arc forget what they've learned within 24 hours, and lack the kind of brain plasticity that lets young animals, most notably human children, soak up new information quickly and easily. Arc continues to be important for learning and memory throughout life, and impaired Arc functioning is associated with autism, amnesia and Alzheimer's disease.

Arc (long purple proteins inside the perimeter of the vesicle) can encapsulate and deliver its own genetic material to brain cells (light green branching blobs) in a manner similar to the way in which viruses infect host cells.  

Credit: Jacobo Lopez, Yi-Chu Su, Hugo Vaca

Jason Shepherd, a neuroscientist at the University of Utah, and his colleagues first suspected that something was different about Arc when they found that the protein self-assembles into structures called capsids that look like a lunar lander or the HIV retrovirus. Intrigued, they found that not only can the Arc capsid jump from cell to cell like a virus, it also transfers its own genetic material in the form of messenger RNA into the new cell.

Learning takes place when interconnected brain cells are activated at the same time. Intriguingly, the researchers found that when neurons "infected" by Arc are activated, they release newly minted Arc capsids. This suggests that the transfer of this virus-lilke protein from cell to cell may be a previously unknown and unsuspected mechanism for learning and memory.

Neuron expressing Arc and transferring it to other neurons

Credit: Elissa Pastuzyn 

“We went into this line of research knowing that Arc was special in many ways," says the study’s lead author, postdoctoral fellow Elissa Pastuzyn. "But when we discovered that Arc was able to mediate cell-to-cell transport of RNA, we were floored. No other non-viral protein that we know of acts in this way.”

Geneticists have been able to trace back the history of the Arc proteins found in all mammals. Sometime between 350 and 400 million years ago, a primitive four-limbed creature, or tetrapod, was infected by a retrovirus that left some of its genetic material in the animal's DNA. That chance addition to the mammalian genetic code has apparently proven extremely useful, perhaps laying the groundwork for the success of our mammalian ancestors, and even for our remarkable capacity for learning and remembering.

REA

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You can read more about this research at this URL.

The scientific article describing this research can be found in Cell, January 11, 2018.

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WARNING CONCERNING ACETAMINOPHEN IN PREGNANCY

Acetaminophen is one of the most widely used headache and pain relievers in the world. It's sold alone under brand names such as Tylenol and Paracetamol, or in combination with other ingredients  as Exedrin, Dristan and many others.

Credit: iStock

Acetaminophen is officially authorized for use during pregnancy. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 65 percent of American women use the medication at some point in their pregnancy.

However, several new studies raise red flags for pregnant women and their children.

A new study from Mt. Sinai Health System, in New York City concludes that pregnant women should limit their use of acetaminophen in any of its forms. The study found that expectant mothers' use of acetaminophen in early pregnancy (8-13 weeks) was associated with delayed language development in their daughters when tested at the age of 30 months.

Delayed language development is important in its own right, and because it tends to predict a range of neurodevelopmental problems in children.

""Given the prevalence of prenatal acetaminophen use and the importance of language development, our findings, if replicated, suggest that pregnant women should limit their use of this analgesic during pregnancy," said Shanna Swan, PhD, Professor of Environmental and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the study's senior author.

Acetaminophen is found in many over-the-counter medications

Credit: Dome Poon

An international team of researchers followed 754 women who were part of the Swedish Environmental Longitudinal, Mother and Child, Asthma and Allergy study. Both the number of acetaminophen tablets taken early in pregnancy and measured concentration of the drug in the mothers' urine were strongly correlated with girl's later language development.

The effect was striking--girls whose mothers took acetaminophen more than six times in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy were six times more likely to show delayed development of language than girls whose mothers had not taken any of the drug, and the daughters of the 25 percent of mothers with the highest urine levels of the drug were 10 times more likely than those in the lowest 25 percent.

This is the first study to show this effect. As professor Swan points out, further research is needed to corroborate or modify the findings. Still, given the importance of language development in childhood, women who are or may be pregnant should certainly take notice.

In addition, three separate studies, just released, found that a mother's exposure to acetaminophen during pregnancy may reduce the number of eggs tucked away in their daughters' ovaries, and so reduce their eventual fertility. Although these studies were in mice rather than humans, researchers view it as significant for humans as well. "Although this may not be a severe impairment to fertility," says Dr. David Kristensen, at Copenhagen University Hospital, in Denmark, "it is still of real concern since data from three different labs all independently found that paracetamol may disrupt female reproductive development in this way, which indicates further investigation is needed to establish how this affects human fertility."

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The Swedish/Mt. Sinai study appears in the journal European Psychiatry, 10 January, 2018

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THE "BULLY'S PULPIT"

This post by Les Adler first appeared on OpEdNews, January 5, 2018.

In the past year, Theodore Roosevelt's characterization of the presidency as a "bully pulpit" for moral leadership and political uplift has been twisted into something far different and far more dangerous.

Not content with his campaign of schoolyard name-calling against political rivals ("little Marco," "crooked Hillary"), Donald Trump, as president, has graduated into using his elevated position to issue demeaning taunts about North Korean dictator "little rocket man," to intimidate him, and most recently into declaring twitter-warfare with him by comparing the size of their respective nuclear buttons. A bad joke at best; at worst a terrifying threat of planet-scale nuclear annihilation demeaning to the Office and ultimately destructive of America's remaining stature as a trustworthy world leader.

 

Teddy Roosevelt, who first identified the presidency as a "bully pulpit"

Credit: Martin/(Image by guano)

He has employed that same presidential pulpit to regularly disparage the integrity of entire government agencies such as the CIA, FBI and the Justice Department, railing against responsible government officials and news media ("fake news") when they won't accede to his latest whims or accept his version of "alternative facts." In a stream of attacks against minorities, immigrants and legitimate protestors, he has turned the moral force of the presidency against those who are often most vulnerable, further dividing rather than uniting the nation.

 These are the actions of a bully, the likes of which the country has not seen on the national stage since the meteoric rise and fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950's. In that pre-internet world, McCarthy, like Trump today, showed an instinct for manipulating the national media, managing to dominate news cycles and public attention by stoking public fears about foreign and domestic 'enemies' hard at work undermining major national institutions.

Significantly, the career of the country's most infamous demagogue ended not with a bang but with a whimper. Censured at long last by the Senate on December 2, 1954 by a bi-partisan 65-22 vote for inexcusable and insulting" conduct "unbecoming a senator," Joe McCarthy slowly lost political influence, sank deeper into alcoholism, slunk off the public stage and died in 1957 at the age of 48.

His fall followed a three-year reign of terror in which he increasingly misused his position as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to attack, publicly indict and essentially persecute and ruin the names and careers of those called before the committee. Aided by his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, and protected by political allies in congress as well as the climate of fear his attacks engendered, McCarthy's fame soared despite his wild, often unproven charges, use of innuendo, outrageous lies and his technique of bullying and browbeating witnesses.

 Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn

Credit: Wikipedia.org/Creative Commons

Two decisive moments in his downfall stand out in the historical narrative, both important lessons to heed in handling bullies of any stature. McCarthy's ultimate unraveling came in an attack on the integrity of the U. S. Army for allegedly coddling subversives and led directly to the nationally televised clash between the Senator and the chief lawyer for the Army, Boston attorney Joseph Welch. In front of an audience of millions, after watching McCarthy attempt to smear a young attorney in Welch's practice, Welch finally pronounced the unforgettable judgment which at long last publicly captured McCarthy as the bully he was, "Have you no sense of decency, sir. At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

The second also occurred on national television, on March 9, 1954, when the highly respected broadcaster, Edward R. Murrow, directed an entire "See It Now" program to an exposure of McCarthy for the publicity-hungry bully he was. Using McCarthy's own words, Murrow examined and rebutted the Senator's extreme charges and methods, clearly and reasonably laying-out for his national audience the Senator's use of lies, distortions and half-truths--and their corrosive effects on our national life and international reputation.

In summing up, Murrow spoke eloquently both to his era and presciently to those of us in the far future who might be confronting similar challenges:

"This is no time," he stated, "for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. We proclaim ourselves the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

Senator McCarthy, for all the damage he did domestically and to America's reputation abroad, did not have the power to start a war, much less risk a nuclear "exchange."  President Trump does have that power! And now his intemperate and belligerent tweets from that much-diminished "bully pulpit" have put us all at risk.

It is past time for those in positions of responsibility and power--particularly those in the President's own party--to directly confront the challenge Trump represents in the name of the welfare of the nation and the world.

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A TALE OF TWO BULLIES

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the two bullies who have bothered me the most were both named Donald T.

The first Donald T. was the biggest bully at my elementary school. (I'm not providing his full name in the hope that he's changed). Taller and beefier than most of the kids, he  seemed to enjoy creating fear and causing pain. In class, when the teacher's back was turned, he pulled girls' hair and punched other boys. At recess, he and his mini-gang liked to single someone out, chase him or her down, taunt, push and punch them, and then scatter before a teacher could intervene.

 A bully in action

Credit: http://bullyingproject.com/bullies-and-victims/

I remember reading comments by a naturalist who pointed out that when predatory animals are on the hunt they are not fearful or angry--they don't show any signs of negative emotions. Instead, they are alert, goal-oriented and aroused in a positive way; you might say they're at the top of their game.

Donald T. and his buddies were like that. Singling out the day's victim, the chase, circling their prey, and the pushing and pummeling were clearly fun for them. Especially if someone really panicked or started to cry, the gang's reaction was not shame or remorse, but gleeful laughter.***

My training and career were in psychology. I'm well aware of the characterological propensities, vulnerabilities and unfortunate developmental events that may turn a child into a bully. However, the existence of such contributing factors doesn't provide much comfort to a bully's victims. I'm also very aware--and wary--of what seems to be our natural human propensity to blame victims for what happens to them. So, on balance, I don't find it particularly helpful to empathize with bullies or try to excuse their behavior.

That brings us to Donald T. number two, the bully-in-chief of the United States.

 Trump and followers at a rally

Credit: Gage Skidmore

I never paid much attention to Trump until he emerged as a presidential candidate. But once I saw him in action, all of my bully-alarm-bells went off. Nothing he's said or done since then has changed that first impression (and a lot that he's said and done has deepened and strengthened my belief that he is a damaged, disturbed and dangerous individual).

I recently read an article from the Washington Post by social scientist Bella dePaulo, entitled "I study liars. I've never seen one like Donald Trump," that clarified why I find Trump so disturbing. DePaulo used the Post's Fact Checker feature to study the more than 1,600 lies or "misleading claims" that Trump emitted during his first 298 days in office--about six whoppers per day. The sheer number of lies he told was "remarkable," but, according to dePaulo, what really set Trump apart was the number of "cruel lies, told to hurt or disparage others."

Here's one example:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs, is bending over backwards in apologizing for the minor hit they took at Crooked H. Anna Wintour, who was all set to be Amb to Court of St James’s &; a big fundraiser for CH, is beside herself in grief &; begging for forgiveness!

7:24 AM - 28 Dec 2017

In one tweet, Trump manages to demean and disparage Vanity Fair (on its last legs and bending over backwards apologizing), Hillary Clinton (crooked), and Anna Wintour (beside herself with grief and begging for forgiveness).

Here's another:

Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill &; Crooked-USED!

5:03 AM - 12 Dec 2017

Senator Gillebrand is a lightweight, a total flunky, begged Trump for contributions, "would do anything for them," and is disloyal, crooked and used. That's a lot of venom to pack into 140 characters, but Trump has obviously mastered the art.

Trump is especially fond of depicting people as begging him for favors, as documented here.

By now, Trump has bashed through so many norms and revealed his pathologies so blatantly and in so many ways, that the fact that he loves to put others down as a way of building himself up is no surprise, nor that the enormous prestige and responsibilities of the presidency have not caused him to temper his behavior. What's more worrisome is that he seems to revel in the cruelty, which means he's not just a bully but a sadist (for examples, click on these links from Alternet, USA Today, the Irish Times, the Chicago Tribune, the book Fire and Fury, and the DailyKos).

But what I find most concerning is that 35 to 45 percent of Americans remain faithful to the bully-in-chief even as he sneaks money out of their pockets to give to giant corporations and the richest one percent. As of January 5, according to the Rasmussen poll, 44 percent of likely voters approve of Trump's job performance, and a remarkable 29 percent strongly approve.

On my grade-school playground, only a handful of sycophants ran with Donald T., basking in the reflected light of his cruelty. But if a third of the kids had rallied around him, joined him in scapegoating, isolating and tormenting one child after another, modeled themselves after him, my sunny and happy elementary school would have become a dark and dangerous place.

I don't know about you, but I don't like where this train of thought is taking us.

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7/17/18--one place is has already taken us is the inexpressibly cruel separation of parents and children at the U.S border, apparently without any mechanism in place to re-unite them.

10/4/18--we saw another ugly glimpse of the sadism of Trump and many of his supporters in his taunting of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi. As Atlantic author Adam Serwer puts it, "the cruelty is the point."

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*** For a remarkable example of "the gleeful joy of bullying" check out this video of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1393208622054842368

or you can watch the whole premeditated sequence in this longer video. The most striking part starts at 10:30:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK6XEqG3UgE

US POLICE KILLED 1129 PEOPLE IN 2017

The database Mapping Police Violence reports that police in the US killed 1,129 people in 2017; an average of three people every day. The number is unacceptable but not surprising--US police officers have killed more than 1,000 people every year for at least the past three years.

As has been the case for many years, the color of your skin matters a lot, with Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans being killed a far higher rates than whites, independently of whether or not they were suspected of a violent crime or were armed.

One out of 1,129

 Credit: Vimeo.com

As has also been the case for many years, the US is an extreme outlier compared to other countries. As documented by the Guardian, US police kill more people in a few days than police in other countries do in years.

Our nation's current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is doing everything he can to make this situation worse. He's ended an Obama-era federal police oversight program that had cut the police killing rate in cities with some of the worst rates of police killings. Trump too is doing his best to make things worse by repeatedly demeaning and besmirching the patriotism of the NFL players protesting police violence, along with the Black Lives Matter movement.

How about a national new year's resolution to save 500 lives by cutting the rate of police killings in half? Even if we were to accomplish that, US citizens would still be at far greater risk of being killed by their police than people in other countries, but at least it would be a start.

It can be done. Studies have shown that police departments that require officers to use all other means before shooting cut their killing rate by 25 percent, as do departments that require that all use of force be reported. Simply banning chokeholds and strangleholds cuts police killings by 22 percent.

It can be done, but not with the kind of leadership currently coming from Washington.

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You can read earlier posts on this subject here and also here.

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