STAYING HUMAN IN INHUMAN TIMES

In 1601, Shakespeare wrote these exquisite lines about our potential as human beings:

"What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals."

 

 Michelangelo's David

the Academia, Florence

Credit: REA

Shakespeare was not the first or the last to express a grand vision of what an individual human can be. Hamlet followed Michelangelo's David--an immortal illustration of a courageous individual facing an overpowering adversary--by a century, and preceded the Age of Enlightenment by many decades. From the 1680s until the end of the next century, philosophers, scientists and enlightened leaders--including the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution--developed and advanced similar ideals, summed up by the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant as:

". . . the courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to Know! . . . Have the courage to use your own understanding."

We find ourselves today in a situation where our government, many of our leaders, and other powers  including giant corporations, are bidding or manipulating us to act in ways, or go along with actions, that are inhuman, immoral, and intrinsically disgusting. One example is the Trump/Sessions decision to separate children, even infants, from their parents for purely political reasons, with no plan in place to reunite them or even care for them adequately.

Whether you identify yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, a member of the Tea Party, an Independent, a Libertarian, an Evangelical, an atheist, an advocate of some other group or cause, or none of the above, should not make any difference; tearing children from their parents' arms is simply and terribly wrong.

In this case, the outraged response of millions of people plus rejection by the courts forced the Trump administration to change course and begin to reunite the families it had torn apart. Tragically, many families are still separated, some may never be reunited*, and many children may have been irreparably traumatized by this policy.

However, with Trump and his administration still in power, and with a Congress and, increasingly, a judiciary willing to support him, and with implacable corporations seeking to maximize profits at any cost, we can be sure that this will not be the last outrageous and morally repugnant policy that we, the citizens of the United States, will be expected to accept and implement. Whether it is the grindingly slow pace of reuniting families, the horrible conditions immigrants face in our privatized prison system, the killing of innocent civilians in drone strikes, discharging immigrant soldiers, polluting the environment, destabilizing the climate, or, perhaps the worst case scenario, going to war with Iran or North Korea, we will inevitably be confronted by stark choices between our human values and national or corporate policies.

Clearly there are many people and groups who would like nothing more than to ring a dark curtain down on the Enlightenment, and replace its ideals of the value, rights  and responsibilities of each individual human being with a mindless and amoral obedience to (their) authority. As Trump said about North Korea's absolute ruler, Kim Jong Un, "He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same."

At any given time, most of us will be bystanders or witnesses to these events. I would argue that this is not a time for passivity or inaction; we all need to speak out and act as our conscience dictates. Inevitably, however, some of us will be on the front lines of current or coming events. You may be an ICE or DHS agent, a prison guard, a lawyer being asked to justify an immoral policy, a psychologist asked to advise on torture, a pilot or flight attendant transporting immigrant children, a drone pilot asked to bomb "targets" thousands of miles away, or someone high or low in any number of organizations. If you are being asked or expected to do something that you find morally repugnant, I would plead with you to have the courage to blow the whistle, resist or refuse.

Here's a great example from a very courageous young woman who calmly stood her ground and single-handedly stopped a deportation--bravo to Elin Ersson. 

Dictators, tyrants, cult leaders and abusers of all kinds rely on followers willing to do their bidding. Let's recognize that any of us may find ourselves somewhere in their sphere of influence or line of command, and in preparation make our own declaration of independence. If, as Kant said, we have the courage to use and act on our own understanding, perhaps then we will see the results of following the better angels of our nature rather than the whims and wishes of the narcissists, fanatics, idealogues, oe the most profit- or power-hungry among us.

REA

*The latest reports indicates that it may take years to reunite many of these immigrant parents and children.  Why? Mark Greenberg, a fellow at the Immigrant Policy Institute, explains, shockingly, that ". . . there wasn't initial tracking to maintain a link between parents and their children."

The failure of the Trump administration even to maintain adequate records to eventually allow parents and children to find each other and be reunited is detailed in a recently released 25-page report by the US Office of the Inspector General. You can read the entire report here. The callous cruelty of this policy and the way it was carried out are profoundly repugnant.

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MOUNTAINTOP COAL MINING FROM SPACE

In case you believe or argue that we humans are too puny and insignificant to change the Earth--a position sometimes advocated by those who find it congenial for one reason or another to deny the reality of  human-caused climate disruption--please take a look at this video. In 30 seconds you can see the impact of 30 years of mountaintop coal mining over a 10,000-square-mile chunk of Appalachia. See for yourself:

Click here for video

Credit: Christian Thomas, Sky Truth

REA

Surprise--liberal values promote economic growth

Liberals are often accused of blocking economic growth, what with our penchant for rules and regulations to protect the environment, mitigate climate change, rein in financial speculation and predation, provide equal rights and opportunities to minorities and other disadvantaged groups and "waste" money on frivolities such as health care and education.

New research, however, shows that this belief is simply wrong--a rise in liberal values, especially respect for individual rights, preceded and predicted economic growth in a variety of countries throughout the 20th Century.

 

Surprise--progressive values boost economic growth

Image credit: Creative Commons 

As reported in the prestigious journal Science Advances, researchers at the University of Bristol, in the UK, and at the University of Tennessee in the US used large data sets on European and world values, along with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita to trace changes in secular vs. religious values and economic development throughout the 20th Century. They were able to rule out the hypothesis that economic growth came first and stimulated secularization or liberalization. Rather, increases in liberal values, especially tolerance of differences and respect for individual rights, consistently preceded and predicted growth in per capita GDP.

The authors point out that one powerful factor behind this effect is a fuller use of human resources. When the rights and value of women and other disadvantaged groups are respected, and they are included in the workforce, economic productivity surges.

The bottom line--the common presumption that progressive ideas impede economic growth is wrong. Instead, acceptance of "others," and opening doors to everyone's inclusion and development are powerful drivers of economic growth.

REA

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THE AMERICAN CENTURY: AN OBITUARY

 It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when ‘The American Century’ died, but close observers place its passing somewhere between the 9^th and 16^th of July, 2018 after a long Illness. Cause of death has been tentatively listed as complications due to ‘heart failure.’

Credit: USAF

Born in 1941, it was christened by Time/Life media founder Henry Luce just as the United States was emerging from a Depression decade marked by isolationism and severe economic hardship, and mere months before the nation would be plunged into the Second World War. The fresh and timely concept was quickly adopted, for better or worse, by key architects of the coming transformation of America’s postwar foreign policy into one of internationalism, intervention and global leadership.

            Reflecting the optimistic side of a victorious and expanding middle-class society, ‘The American Century’ grew to express a strong belief in sharing the benefits and bounty of a booming domestic economy along with the energetic promotion of democratic-capitalist ideology abroad. Despite debilitating setbacks and growing pains in the late 1960’s and 1970’s as a consequence of deep racial conflicts at home and the country’s failed policies in Southeast Asia, belief in the concept rebounded strongly in the 1980’s and 1990’s, particularly during the nation’s brief appearance as sole global hegemon following the fall of the Soviet Union.  

The 9/11 terrorist attack on the homeland, however, coupled with disastrous and inconclusive interventions abroad and a serious economic debacle in the early decades of the twenty-first century drained its reserves, leaving it much more vulnerable than many knew to the next new contagion that might come along.  Ironically, the fatal infection came from within in the guise of a virulent campaign to “Make America Great Again,” against which the national immune system proved ineffective.

With an alternative and distorted image of both the postwar world  and American values in mind, and in the service of his own much narrower and darker nationalist vision, once in power Donald Trump moved rapidly and effectively to devalue, reverse and ultimately erase the very policies Luce and other leaders of that era had spent decades putting in place to stabilize a troubled world. 

In rolling back America’s leadership promoting worldwide democracy, and in erecting barriers to free trade and the easy movement of goods, ideas and people across boundaries, demeaning and demonizing allies and carefully-constructed institutions like NATO and the EU, Trump offered in their place only a world of competition, conflict, contention—and often chaos.

 If Luce’s “Century” represented an overly optimistic missionary American spirit, often blind to its own failings, Trump’s stands for its opposite, one which is fearful, suspicious of others, anxiously hoarding its own resources, and hostile to realities which might challenge its own preconceptions. Rather than celebrating and spreading America’s political norms and the nation’s ideals of inclusion, equality and opportunity—even if imperfectly achieved—Trump celebrates their disruption, while actively generating and directing the resentments of those left behind against minorities and real or imagined aliens or other foreign elements.

   

The final blow came with Trump's public attacks on  core institutions and allies and his embrace of old foes. When the call came from Helsinki this week, it only confirmed what many had already suspected. The decedent's last words were incoherent--disjointed phrases about a missing server--and it was noted in passing that a Do Not Resuscitate order was on file. 

Les Adler
Emeritus Professor of History
Sonoma State University

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A slightly different version of this commentary was also published on OpEdNews.

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COSTA RICA'S ELECTRIFYING PLEDGE--A CARBON-FREE TRANSPORT SECTOR BY 2021

Costa Rica is remarkable in many ways. It's a stable democracy in an unstable region. It abolished its army in 1949. It protects 25 percent of the country as national parks or other conservation areas--the highest percentage in the world. It has a 98 percent literacy rate, a universal healthcare system, and a thriving high-tech economic sector. Renewable energy, mostly from hydropower, meets close to 100 percent of the country's electricity needs.

 La Fortuna waterfall, Costa Rica

Credit: Boris G

Now, to put the icing on the cake, Costa Rica is determined to be the first country to achieve total freedom from fossil fuels by powering its transportation sector with renewables within a few years.

Recently elected president Carlos Alvarado ran on a platform that set the goal of decarbonizing transport by 2021, the country's 200th anniversary of independence. “When we reach 200 years of independent life," he proclaimed, "we will take Costa Rica forward and celebrate … that we’ve removed gasoline and diesel from our transportation.”

It may not be possible to reach that lofty goal in just three years. However, even setting that as a national goal is an impressive step, and given Costa Rica's stellar history with respect to the environment and the quality of life of its citizens, it may well be the first country to achieve it. Hopefully, given that from 15 to 30 percent of climate destabilizing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide come from transportation, it will not be the last.

 

CARDIAC FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH? EXERCISE 4 TO 5 TIMES A WEEK

Clearly, it's not for everyone, but new research shows that if you consistently exercise for 30 minutes or more four of five times per week, chances are your heart and major arteries will stay young and flexible as you age. While less frequent exercise still has many health benefits, it seems to take high frequency exercise to keep the biggest arteries in the body from stiffening with age.

 Cardio-box class; one form of heart-healthy exercise

Credit: Universidad Europea de Madrid

The new research, published in the Journal of Physiology, studied the lifelong exercise patterns of 102 men and women 60 years old or over. The researchers divided the participants into four groups--sedentary, casual exercisers, committed exercisers and master athletes, based on how frequently they had exercised over time. The results were clear--casual exercisers (two to three times per week) showed some heart and artery benefits, but it took four or more exercise sessions per week to be associated with preserved flexibility of the major vessels such as the carotid artery.

Human heart and major blood vessels

Credit: Bryan Brandenburg 

Of course, these cross-sectional findings alone can't pin down cause and effect, and the study was not designed to sort out other factors that might influence heart and arterial health, such as the type or intensity of exercise, diet or social and economic factors. However, they strongly suggest that consistent frequent exercise can help keep a person's heart and central arteries healthy and flexible into the later decades of life.

The researchers are using these preliminary findings as a guidepost towards exercise programs that could make a positive difference to people who don't have a lifelong history of frequent and consistent exercise. Benjamin Levine, at the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at the University of Texas in Dallas, hopes not just to preserve heart health, but to turn back the ravages of time. "Our current work is focusing on two years of training in middle aged men and women, with and without risk factors for heart diseases, to see if we can reverse the ageing of a heart and blood vessels by using the right amount of exercise at the right time."

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WHATEVER TRUMP DOES, COAL'S FUTURE IS DARK

At its peak, in 1923, the US coal industry employed 863,000 people, just over two percent of US workers at that time. Today, coal employs just 50,000 workers, less than .04 percent of the current workforce. Despite Trump's claim that his administration has "ended the war on beautiful, clean coal," and will ". . . put our miners back to work," those jobs are no more likely to come back than those of the blacksmiths and farriers who shod the 25 million horses that plowed furrows and pulled wagons in the US a century ago.

The reason is simple: coal is not only dirty, dangerous and a huge source of climate-disrupting greenhouse gases, it can no longer compete economically with oil, natural gas or renewables. Forbes reports that by 2020, power generated by wind farms and large-scale solar installations will market at an incredibly low price of three cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Compare that to the 10 to 14 cents per kWh for coal-generated electricity. You don't need an economics degree to foresee the results.

The prediction by Forbes may already be out of date. In early June, 2018, the Central Arizona Project, the agency responsible for pumping water from the Colorado River throughout Arizona, signed an agreement with Origis Energy USA to buy solar power at the incredibly low rate of 2.49 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter the going rate for electricity from coal. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Northern Indiana Public Service Company, which currently generates 65 percent of its electricity from coal, plans to phase coal out completely within ten years. It will replace coal with a mix of solar, wind, energy storage and demand management. Expected savings to consumers--$4 billion over the next three decades.

  
 Four Corners coal generating plant, San Juan, New Mexico

Credit: Lyntha Scott Eiler/National Archives and Records Administration

This isn't the case just in the US. According to CleanTechNews, the renewable energy sector employed 10.3 million people worldwide in 2017, adding 500,000 new jobs in the previous year. Large renewable energy projects are currently being bid and contracted at three cents per kWh or less in Dubai, Chile, Abu Dhabi, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, utilities closed 30 coal-fired plants in 2017 in the US alone, and more in the first months of this year--more than 270 since 2010.

High desert wind farm

Credit: Winchell Joshua, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Hammering one more nail in coal's coffin, on June 13, FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, voted unanimously not to approve Trump's attempt to use a law dealing with energy distribution in a national emergency to keep coal and nuclear generating plants on life support.

Sorry, Donald, neither the US nor the rest of the world is going back to "beautiful, clean" coal, no matter how many clean air and clean water regulations you remove.

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Update: Here's a link to an article pointing out that in many areas it's now cheaper to get energy from a brand-new wind or solar installation than from an existing coal-powered plant.

And here's another report that 75 percent of existing coal-fired generating plants can no longer compete with renewable power sources.

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ELON MUSK'S MEGA-BATTERY SAVES SOUTH AUSTRALIA $35 MILLION IN FOUR MONTHS

Last year, Elon Musk made the State of South Australia an offer they couldn't refuse. He promised to install the world's largest lithium-ion battery in 100 days and at a bargain price in order to store surplus power from the Hornsdale Wind Farm and use it to stabilize South Australia's power grid.

The crash project has been enormously successful. In the first four months of operation it saved the state government $35 million (Australian dollars, equal to $26.3 million US). That's an amazing return on investment, given that the project cost the state just $50 million (37.5 million US). It looks as though it will pay for itself within its first 18 months.

Hornsdale Power Reserve battery with three of the Wind Farm's 105 turbines in background

Credit: David Clarke 

The giant battery's primary function is to stabilize the frequency of electricity flowing through the state's power grid. When a generator or transmission line goes down, the grid frequency drops until backup power can fill the gap. If there's insufficient backup, disruptive brownouts or blackouts occur. But even if a backup plant comes on line or power can be purchased from a neighboring grid, the price of that stopgap power can soar. A grid operator might have to pay $10,000 or more per megawatt-hour, compared to a normal price of $150 or less.

Most of the $35 million that the huge battery saved the South Australian government came from the battery's ability to switch on and re-stabilize the grid extremely quickly--within 200 milliseconds, far faster than other kinds of backup power plants. According to RenewEconomy, the battery now commands 55 percent of the stabilization market in South Australia, and has reduced the cost of back-up power by a stunning 90 percent.

By the end of 2018, the savings surged to an estimated $40 million.

Critics of renewable energy cite intermittency--the fluctuating supply of energy from wind and solar--as a major obstacle to the urgently-needed transformation to renewables. Although the Hornsdale project shows convincingly that batteries can solve the short-term back-up power problem, the battery doesn't store enough energy to make coal or gas power plants obsolete. But it's clearly a step in the right direction. South Australia agrees, with several giant battery projects being developed in the state, and several more in other parts of Australia.

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Here's an interesting and extremely positive follow-up to the above story. Basically, South Australia's continuing development of carbon-free energy, including storage, has been an incredible success.

FEWER STROKES FOR SAUNA FOLKS

It turns out that Finns and other sauna lovers have been right in touting the health benefits of frequent sauna bathing. A long-term study that followed more than 1600 middle-aged Finnish men and women for 15 years found that people who took saunas 4 to 7 times a week had roughly one-third the risk of stroke compared to peers who took just one sauna a week.

That risk reduction was similar for men and women, for people of different ages and social-economic status, and for people with other medical conditions.

Modern sauna

Credit: bainsdumarais.fr

Most people associate saunas with Finland, where it dates back at least to the year 1112 and is still extremely popular. However, we know that the ancient Romans also valued similar heat treatment, as shown in the caldaria  or hot rooms in the public and private baths found throughout the Roman Empire. Many traditional societies also valued heat treatments, often combined with aromatic herbs, as part of healing ceremonies. Examples can be found in the temazcals found throughout Mesoamerica in archaeological sites, codices, and in current use, as well as in the sweat lodges traditionally used by Native Americans.

Prehispanic temazcal

from the Codex Magliabecchi

Reduced stroke risk is not the only benefit from sauna bathing. You can read about a wide range of research-supported physical and mental benefits here and here too. This seems to be one area where ancient and traditional knowledge is holding up under current scientific scrutiny.

I don't know about you, but after my next workout, I'm heading for the sauna.

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PORTUGAL GENERATES A SURPLUS OF RENEWABLE ENERGY -- WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

Portugal, home to 10 million people, surged to the front of the pack in terms of renewable energy in March of this year. Using a combination of hydro, wind and solar generation, it produced more than enough electricity to power its 3.6 million households, plus businesses, industry and transport. It exported a surplus of 4.8 percent of its electricity--878 gigawatt-hours--to other European countries.

Portugal's use of renewable energy in March kept 1.8 million tons of climate-destabilizing CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Many other countries, including Sweden, Costa Rica and Germany, are moving rapidly towards meeting all or most of their power needs with renewables. You can read about Scotland's successes here.

Portugal's Alto Minho Wind Farm Under Construction

Credit: BBC News

Portugal's per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is $30,300 per year, just about half that of the United States ($59,500). If they can do it, why can't we?

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FASCINATING VIRTUAL EXOPLANET TOUR

Just a quick link to let you know about a beautifully done interactive virtual reality video taking you to six of the thousands of exoplanets astronomers have discovered. While you explore, conditions on each planet are explained by a researcher studying it. Produced by the University of Exeter in the UK with the help of animators Engine house VFX, it's been viewed by more than a million people so far. Great fun.

What the surface of Trappist 1f migh look like

Credit NAPA/JPL

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THE COP WHO DIDN'T SHOOT--A CANADIAN OF COURSE

The contrast couldn't be greater. When Canadian police officer Constable Ken Lam tracked down Alek Minassian, the suspect charged with running down multiple pedestrians in Toronto on April 23, Minassian did everything he could to provoke the officer into shooting him. Minassian held an object that looked like a gun in his hand and pointed it towards the officer. He twice reached towards his pocket, then quickly raised his hand as if he were pulling and pointing a gun.

Minassian tries to provoke Canadian police officer to shoot him

Credit: CBC.ca

"Kill me," Minassian demanded.

"No. Get down," the officer replied.

"I have a gun in my pocket."

"I don't care," said the officer. "Get down."

You can view the video here.

In it, the officer calmly turns off his car's siren, holsters his gun, advances towards the suspect with his baton raised, and arrests him. No shots fired. No violence. Absolute professionalism.

I can't help but compare this with the dozens of videos I've viewed of similar situations here in the United States. Videos in which far less threatening situations escalate in seconds and conclude in a barrage of shots and a dead body, often found to be unarmed. Here's an example, one of far too many.

The US has about ten times more citizens than Canada. Canadian police kill an average of 25 people a year. US police kill more than 1000 people every year. According to a recent study, that represents more than 50,000 years of life lost (YLL), most of it by the early deaths of young Black men. Clearly, something is very different about police-suspect relations in the US and Canada (and most other developed countries).

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You can read earlier posts about police killings in the US here and also here.

WHAT "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" REALLY MEANS

I finally get it. To use the current phrase, I'm "woke." I've come to understand what Trump and his supporters mean when they shout "Make America Great Again!"

I've been confused since I first started seeing MAGA on signs and baseball caps and hearing the chant. What Trump was selling--fear, anger, belligerence, racism, xenophobia--didn't seem great to me. But something obviously resonated with his fans.

To me, great is the superlative of good. When I think of something great, it evokes images of the best of something positive, creative, constructive, beautiful; Usain Bolt is a great sprinter, the Beatles were a great band, Moby Dick is a great novel, Casablanca a great movie. You get the idea.

But what I've come to realize is that to Trump and his friends great has a very different meaning. Synonyms would be powerful, dominant, commanding, controlling, top dog, boss. To him and them, a great nation doesn't have to be democratic, just, equitable, prosperous, peaceful, inspiring, sustainable or anything else good. It just needs to be powerful--ready, willing and able to throw its weight around. The biggest, meanest bully on the block.

You can read a succinct and frightening corroboration of this from some Trump associates here.

So when Trump tweets, "Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart,'" his supporters love it. He's demonstrating his and, by reflection, their dominance.

Or for another data point, check out this list of despots and dictators whom Trump admires.

Or this tweet:

"North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"

I get it. Our nukes are bigger and more powerful than yours. MAGA!

Credit: R.J. ORIEZ/U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO

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Trump outdid himself with his latest MAGA tweet to Iran:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

5:24 AM · Jul 23, 2018

VOICES OF AMERICA

The contrast couldn’t have been greater. Flashing on one screen were the rigid faces slogans and fear-mongering screed of NRA spokesmen, culminating with the iconic image of the now long dead Charlton Heston holding a rifle above his head and chanting “From my cold dead hands!” 

On the other and on the live stage below were the young, amazingly eloquent and life-affirming faces and voices, one after another, of high school students and others from across the country who gathered in Washington, D.C. yesterday to ignite nothing less than a true Childrens’ Crusade to take back their country from those same few but powerful “cold dead hands” whose choke-hold on American politics for decades has prevented any reasonable gun-control legislation.

 March for Our Lives, Washington, DC 3/24/18

Credit: Rosa Pineda/Creative Commons

Combining a healthy blend of passion and reason, their repeated call, “Enough is Enough” as well as the spoken and unspoken theme underlying all their messages--“Choose Life-- reflected, at times, both the religious fervor and sophisticated political sensibility which characterized and energized the Civil Rights, Free Speech and anti-war movements which transformed America more than a half-century ago.

Dominating both the rhetoric and the blizzard of signs being waved in the bright Washington sunshine was a truly refreshing and deeply American faith in the power of individual citizens to effect change. While calling for a ‘revolution’ in politics and society, and while calling-out, sometimes by name, politicians who reflexively do the bidding of the NRA and the powerful gun lobby, these young citizens assumed and asserted their right to protest, demand and, most importantly, achieve the change and protection from gun violence they and a great majority of others want and need from their government.

Nowhere in sight was the cynicism, resignation and apathetic acceptance dominating the current political scene. Nor the angry, demeaning tweets and name-calling. Instead, the flavor was one of optimism and hope. Of belief that the system, though corrupted by deceit, wealth and privilege, could be reformed by the sheer will of the people expressed through the ballot box. With the Capitol dome as backdrop, and tens of thousands of marchers cheering and chanting in front of them, along with sister demonstrations occurring across the nation and world, at that moment it truly seemed possible.

Why the massacre at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High has produced this level of response when all the others, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas and elsewhere have quickly faded from public consciousness, with only “thoughts and prayers” from elected officials as a result, is still unclear. As are the ultimate political and policy outcomes that will emerge from this latest tragedy. What is clear, however, is that a corner seems to have been turned in what has appeared up to now to be an intractable debate. Suddenly, room and pressure may have emerged for the passage of effective legislation on background checks and the availability of assault weapons.

The voices were neither fearful nor divisive, not nationalistic or exclusionary, but

fresh, authentic and full of promise—a hopeful and idealistic America we’d almost forgotten and which we’ve longed for and needed to hear again.

Les Adler

WHAT'S THAT SMELL? YOUR POLITICS MAY FOLLOW YOUR NOSE!

You've arrived at your current political stance through a thoughtful integration of your family values, personal experience, education, moral development, and social and economic observations, right?

Not very likely, implies new research about the relationship between how people react to body odors and their politics. If you are disgusted by smells such as sweat or urine, you may very well be drawn to authoritarian political leaders like Donald Trump.

 Trump shows his disgust

Remember Trump's reaction to Hillary Clinton's bathroom break during the last Democratic debate?

“I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting . . ."

I have no way of knowing if Trump's frequent verbal and facial expressions of disgust--at women, immigrants, minorities, blood, sweat, breastfeeding, people eating, babies, reporters, weakness and who knows what else, are genuine or feigned. But either way, he knows his audience.

Evidence for a link between finding body odors repugnant and authoritarian politics and despotic leadership comes from a series of studies carried out by researchers in Sweden and Greece. They used a carefully designed set of questions to measure the degree to which online participants reported being disgusted by scenarios involving exposure to other people's bad breath, sweat, urine, feces, etc.--their Body Odor Disgust Sensitivity (BODS). 

The researchers also measured participants' authoritarian attitudes on a 15-question Right-Wing Authoritariansm scale (RWA). As the following item from the scale indicates, it taps into desire for a strong leader, support for traditional values, and a punitive attitude towards "others" perceived as a threat:

"Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us."

Two separate studies showed a statistically significant link between body odor disgust sensitivity and authoritarianism--desire for a strong leader and traditional values plus a punitive stance towards threatening "others." A third study found a similar link between BODS scores and support for Trump, who was then just a candidate.

Interestingly for those who are still struggling to understand exactly whom Trump appealed to and why, the correlation between BODS and authoritarianism was strong enough to fully explain the link between BODS and support for Trump.

The implication is that, real or feigned, Trump's frequent and emphatic expressions of disgust at a wide variety of targets mirrored, authorized and amplified similar feelings among many Americans--and perhaps got them all the way to the voting booth.

The researchers hypothesize that this link may represent an exaggerated expression of a kind of social immune system--a reflex to avoid potential contamination. They write:

"From a behavioural immune system perspective, prejudice can be seen as a social
discriminatory behaviour partly motivated by the fact that pathogens represent an invisible
threat, and individuals with high levels of disgust sensitivity might be more likely to avoid
foreign people, and to promote policies that avoid the contact with them, because they are
perceived as potentially spreading unfamiliar pathogens, different hygienic or food habits."

They say that forewarned is forearmed. So the next time you see a politician making a disgusted face or voicing his or her disgust towards some other person or group, it might be time to step back, hold your nose, and realize that someone is trying hard to bypass your brain and send a message that goes straight from your nose to your finger pushing a "DONATE" button on your screen or a "VOTE" button in the voting booth.

Politics may stink, but we don't have to let the smells push our buttons, or determine which buttons we push.

WE'RE SO CLOSE TO ERADICATING POLIO

As followers of zerospinzone.blogspot.com know from previous posts, I'm enthralled by the goal of not just treating or curing diseases, but eradicating them entirely.

Among human diseases, smallpox was the first to be wiped away, with the last case of a natural infection by this once devastating scourge occurring in October, 1977.

Polio, a paralyzing and sometimes fatal disease that struck down more than 500,000 people per year, most of them children, as recently as the 1940s and '50s, will hopefully be the next to go. Starting with the development of the Salk inactivated virus vaccine in the early 1950s and the Sabin attenuated virus oral vaccine in the early 1960s, polio has been eradicated in country after country, continent after continent, through massive, sustained, costly and often extremely difficult public-health efforts.

 An infant receives the oral polio vaccine at a mobile clinic in Afghanistan, February 15, 2017

Credit: World Health Organization (WHO)/ S.Ramo

This enormous international effort has been incredibly successful. So far this year, only three cases of polio have been diagnosed worldwide, all in war-torn Afghanistan. In other words, the wild polio virus that once circulated freely throughout the world, has now been caged and almost completely destroyed, and now may hang on in just one small corner of one country.

It will still take intense surveillance and continued mass vaccination programs to strike the final blow against this deadly disease and ensure that it can not flare up anywhere every again.

But the world is so very close. What an accomplishment it will be.

REA

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TRUMP AND PRUITT'S EPA GUTS RESEARCH ON TOXIC CHEMICALS AND KIDS

I maintain a computer file with hundreds of scientific articles about the effects of toxic substances on children.

Arsenic and lead in drinking water. Pesticides and other Persistent Organic Pollutants in the air we breathe, clothing, furniture, building materials, you name it. Some common drugs taken during pregnancy. Hormones and endocrine disrupting chemicals in food, plastics, toys, just about anything that could go into a child's mouth. Chemicals used in fracking that get into the air and water. Fire retardants, fungicides, and many other classes of chemicals. Not to mention the impact of the cocktail of these chemicals that many people carry in their bodies, in breast milk, in their blood.

 Credit: DES Daughter

These articles detail the impacts of these toxins on developing children still in the womb, on infants, children, teenagers (and adults too). Autism, attention deficits, abnormal brain activity, birth defects, impaired sleep, impaired learning, reduced IQ, disruptions in the reproductive system, infertility, obesity, cancer, breathing problems, kidney and liver damage--all of these and many more impairments and diseases have been linked to various chemicals that find their way into our children's bodies.

Like research on smoking decades ago and on climate change now, much of this research is controversial or marginalized. The suspect chemicals have important uses in agriculture, energy production, medicine, and many other activities, and add billions of dollars to the economy and to the bottom lines of giant corporations. The companies that manufacture and sell these substances are strongly motivated to keep selling them, and are willing to spend huge sums to question, hide or suppress research that threatens their bottom line, carry out or fund research aimed at sowing doubt about such threatening findings; and in many cases demean or threaten researchers who are brave enough to research these links.

Still, this body of research has been used by governments around the world, and by the US, to develop legislation to ban some of the most deadly chemicals, reduce and control the use of many others, and protect the health of children and adults.

In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been one of the major sources of funding for research on the impacts of known or potential toxins, through its National Center for Environmental Research (NCER). The NCER funded millions of dollars of research on the risks to children from potentially dangerous substances. Until now, that is.

Trump's appointee to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has decided to kill the NCER, as announced on February 26, 2018. The gutting of the program is couched as an efficiency measure, but is in line with Trump and Pruitt's goals of reducing regulations and risks for corporations, unfortunately at the expense of America's children.

In 1965, comedian Tom Lehrer satirized the extent of pollution that Americans were then being exposed to in the song "Pollution" on his album That Was the Year That Was. The song opens with:

If you visit American cith
You will find it very pretty
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don't drink the water and don't breath the air!

The EPA was created five years later, in December of 1970. Over the years, it did a lot to clean up America's polluted rivers, lakes, industrial sites, cities and skies. However, under Trump and Pruitt, we seem to be turning back the clock to those bad old days, when, as Lehrer concluded:

So go to the city, see the crazy people there
Like lambs to the slaughter
They're drinking the water
And breathing the air

Advanced Artificial Intelligence--Friend or Foe

When I learned last December that AlphaZero, an artificial intelligence developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind, had soared from a completely "blank slate" to superhuman play in Chess, Go, and Shogi (a Japanese variant of chess) in a matter of hours, just by playing against itself, I realized that artificial intelligence is advancing far faster than most of us realize, and to superhuman, and potentially dangerous levels of capability.

You can read my description of AlphaZero's explosive mastery of Chess, Shogi and Go on OpEdNews or from an earlier post on zerospinzone.

AlphaZero's prowess led me do a lot of reading and research about the pace of AI progress, especially in the rapidly advancing areas of deep learning by deep neural networks.

 Image from the mind of Google's Deep Dream Generator

Credit: Robert Adler and DeepDreamGenerator

What I found out is that it's much worse than I thought.

Multiple groups worldwide are researching and developing increasingly powerful AI agents. These artificial intelligences have already surged past humans in many specific areas--not just games, but face and pattern recognition, medical diagnostics, reading comprehension, drug discovery and many other areas. Looming just ahead are AIs that will be smarter--possibly many times smarter--than any human in every important area. Not to mention super-intelligent AIs that can design and create other AIs that are even smarter, leading to an "intelligence explosion" whose impacts and risks are impossible to predict.

As several of the experts who have looked into this most deeply have pointed out, less intelligent species--think chimpanzees, gorillas or our close cousins the Neanderthals--typically don't fare well once a more intelligent species emerges.

A few farsighted individuals and groups have started to look into "the control problem"--how we might be able to create superhuman-but-friendly AIs, agents that will keep our best interests at heart even as they grow smarter and smarter. This turns out to be an extremely challenging problem. Meanwhile, hundreds of much better funded research groups--including many developing AI for military use-- are rushing ahead without giving the risks from the AIs they are developing much if any thought.

If you would like to look into this potential existential risk a bit further, here are some resources:

Center for the Study of Existential Risk (Cambridge, UK): cser.ac.uk

Deep dreaming: deepdreamgenerator.com (site where you can create your own “deep dreams.”

DeepMind: deepmind.com

DeepMind Ethics and Society research group: deepmind.com/applied/deepmind-ethics-society/

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky: yudkowsky.net

     “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk”             (2008)

      Can be downloaded at: intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf

Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford): fhi.ox.ac.uk

Future of Life Institute (Boston/Cambridge): futureoflife.org

The 23 Asilomar AI Principles: futureoflife.org/ai-principles/

James Barrat: Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (2015)--excellent introduction to these issues

Machine Intelligence Research Institute, MIRI (Berkeley): intelligence.org

Nick Bostrom: www.nickbostrom.com

     Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2016)--a challenging factual, analytic, and philosophical work examining these developments in depth

OpenAI: openai.com

Pedro Domingos: The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (2018)

I'd suggest starting with James Barrat's extremely well-researched book, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.

And for a super-deep dive into the issue, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. 

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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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