Weekly Posts - 1/9/2017-1/15/2017

Monday:

A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown

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BY WALT WHITMAN

A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,

A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,

Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,

Till after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,

We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,

’Tis a large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospital

Entering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made,

Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,

And by one great pitchy torch stationary with wild red flame and clouds of smoke,

By these, crowds, groups of forms vaguely I see on the floor, some in the pews laid down,

At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen,)

I stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily,)

Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene fain to absorb it all,

Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead,

Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood,

The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms, the yard outside also fill’d,

Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm sweating,

An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls,

The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches,

These I resume as I chant, I see again the forms, I smell the odor,

Then hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, fall in;

But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me,

Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness,

Resuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks,

The unknown road still marching. 

Tuesday:

"Essential for Life"--First Complex Organic Chiral Molecule Found Near the Center of the Milky Way

Thursday:

Adam's Calendar: Oldest Megalithic Site in the Word?

Friday:

Aggressive Stem Cell Transplant Approach Halts MS for Years, But Risks are High

Saturday:

Lasers Activate Killer Instinct In Mice

Jesus with a Rocket-Laser Arm

Tim Tebow was selected in the first round of the NFL draft last night by the Broncos (pause for White Bronco jokes...). He was undeniably a great college player, but there is quite a bit of skepticism about how his skills will transfer to the NFL. In other words, he was drafted shockingly high.

Drafting a player significantly higher than his talent justifies makes sense from an economic perspective if the popular player generates fan excitement, and given that the Broncos have to stationary passing quarterbacks, in football terms Tebow might allow them to run popular Wildcat sets.

But the more interesting explanations for the pick have to do with Tebow's awe-inspiring Good Works. Tebow was selected above players with "character" issues because of his impeccable behavior.

But the question must be asked, what, exactly, has Tebow done that allows us to conclude he is a morally superior college football player? His charity works are certainly impressive, and by all accounts he participates in such activities for decidedly non-cynical reasons. I do not intend this post as a condemnation of Tim Tebow.

Jason Cole's Yahoo piece begins:

NFL teams seemed to take a strong hint just a day after Ben Roethlisberger was suspended without committing a crime. If there was a theme to the first round of the NFL draft Thursday night, it was that character was put on equal if not higher footing than talent.

Because of the controversy surrounding Ben Roethlisberger, NFL teams have placed a premium on good citizenship. The exemplar of this movement was the choice of Tim Tebow.

Tim Tebow is a good man because he uses his celebrity to aid charities. Ben Roethlisberger has a foundation that supports police dogs, and he gave generously to tsunami victims. Studying the public appearance schedule on his webpage reveals constant appearances at events that raise money for various charities.

Obviously one can donate to charities in a very earnest manner and still be so flawed that the NFL changes its drafting policy based on your behavior.

So, why the confidence that Tebow is the anti-Roethlisberger? What has he done to convince people of his purity?

I would guess, and I have no statistics to support this claim, that it has much to do with his public expressions of faith. There is still a presumption in our society that "religious" means "moral," despite endless examples to the contrary. Nevertheless, Tebow's squeaky clean image rests largely on the notion that he is incredibly religious.

The NBA's version of Tebow is Dwight Howard. So dedicated to Christianity is Howard that befor he was even drafted, Sports Illustrated wrote, "When Dwight Jr. looks at the NBA logo, he imagines a cross superimposed over the slaloming outline of Jerry West."

Howard certainly hasn't run afoul of the law, but this very devout man has hardly been the embodiment of proper morality. The mother of that child now appears on Basketball Wives. She is legally barred from discussing Howard and the show cannot even mention his name.

But the greatest irony brings us back to Mr. Roethlisberger. Both Tebow and Roethlisberger donate to charity, but Big Ben surely does that to improve his public image. It's a smoke screen hiding the deeply immoral truth about his character. We know Tebow is a good person because of his faith...

“I’ve told the Christian players that a Super Bowl ring won’t be worth what a testimony to Jesus in public will be this week,” longtime Steelers chaplain Jay Wilson said. “These players are excited to speak about their faith in Him if they get a chance.”

Several marquee players from both sides -- Shawn Alexander and Matt Hasselback from Seattle and Pittsburgh’s Antwaan Randle El and Ben Roethlisberger, with the famous PFJ (Play for Jesus) tape on his shoes -- should have ample chances to talk about their faith.

Link

Once again, this post is not meant to argue that Tebow will make the same poor choices that other high-profile Christian athletes have made. Rather, the intent is to question that reflexive assumption that "religious" means "moral." I sincerely hope that despite his obnoxious professions of faith, Tebow manages his career well. The more success he has, the more he will be able to give to those in need. Even if they have to listen to an incoherent sermon, a great many people will benefit.

But why do we think Tebow is different than, say, Dez Bryant, who has a weak-character reputation because he ran afoul of the NCAA's absurd rules?

If asked most sports fans would place Dwight Howard's character above Bryant's. Yet Howard has an illegitimate child with an exotic dancer and Dez Bryant merely violated an NCAA by-law by not being forthcoming about a conversation he had with Deion Sanders.

Perhaps Bryant could have avoided his trouble with a few well-placed Bible quotes on his equipment.

Human Scum, to put it mildly...

This story has been making the rounds, and there's something uniquely unsettling about the situation.

Essentially, a judge, ruled that Itawamba School District violated Constance McMillen's First Amendment rights by prohibiting her from attending the school's prom in a tuxedo with a female date. The judge did, however, deny the ACLU's request for an injunction that would force the district hold the prom. He rejected the injuction because a group of parents promised to hold a private, wholly inclusive prom.

This turned out to be a very ugly lie. The private, "inclusive" prom was a ruse intended to distract a group of "undesirables" while the parents held another party for the "acceptable" students. Only seven students attended the prom on the date announced by the school's attorney. As if the utter vileness of the parents and other students wasn't evident in their homophobic bigotry, there's this:

Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. "They had the time of their lives," McMillen says. "That's the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn't have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom]."

The parents' deception was inhumanely cruel, no doubt, but what makes it so shocking is its personal nature. A great portion of right-wing, resentment-based politics (anti-welfare, anti-immigration...etc.) occurs at a distance. The gay marriage issue, for example, is framed as a conceptual disagreement about the institution. They say, "I just think marriage should be between a man and a woman," and do everything they can to ignore the real human suffering it causes.

And, in fact, these malicious positions are difficult to sustain when confronted with their very personal results. That's why this was so sickening.

The Mississippi case exposes parents willing to lie to ostracize certain elements of their community. And not their peers, not other adults they work with or professionally compete with, but high school kids. They focused all of their rancor on one young woman, and decided to take out a few others while they had the chance.

Targeting an individual in such a malicious manner reveals a complete vacuum of basic decency that is difficult to fathom. It's roughly the difference between the person sitting in Wyoming in 1965 arguing with his friends about the merits of segregation while being blissfully unaware of the policies actual impact, and the people in Alabama burning churches and forming lynch mobs. While both groups are advocatng similarly disgusting public policy, the ability to act very personally on such shallow bigotry defines another level of horrific human.

Perhaps these Mississippi parents should be applauded for their lack of hypocrisy. They don't simply advocate disgusting behavior at distance while happily allowing others to fight in the trenches, so to speak (see War, Iraq). No, they are the full, living embodiment of their despicable ideology.

Like the insanity surround Terry Schaivo's death, these fleeting moments when the true foundation of fundamentalism is exposed, help us understand what we're really dealing with. The opposition to gay rights in this country is not about "traditionalism" or some similarly detached concept, it is about honest-to-goodness hatred and bigotry.

Kitsch v. Kitsch

I consider myself a legitimate fan of The Onion, but their critics, located at the A.V. Club, are infuriating. They fetishize on the obscure, ranking their tastes by imagined uniqueness, not quality. The more unknown the artist, the more worthy of praise.

So, I was pleased to read one such critic, Erik Adams, putting this opinion of mine into cold, hard reality with his own words:

My Garden State experience has just as much to do with age—my first extended period of time in my hometown since leaving for college was coming to an end, and I could’t believe that a movie could capture the way my familiar corner of Michigan suburbia suddenly felt so alien. When the film became a hit, however, it came to my attention that it managed this because—like the ability to enjoy the easy, breezy indie-pop of the film’s soundtrack—that feeling is universal.

I would never dream of defending the obnoxious Zack Braff. He is the living embodiment of kitsch, as perfectly defined by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

For Braff, it's not dressing-up like MC Hammer that is, itself, funny. Rather, how funny it is that I, Zack Braff, have decided to dress like MC Hammer? It's self-referential meta-humor, never to be enjoyed as funny, but to be appreciated as the sort of thing we should think is funny.

And this leads nicely into the problem with the Onion review. Braff's movie was meaningful and important until its message was recognized as nearly universally experienced. And this, too, is an expression of kitsch. It's meta-appreciation that soured Mr. Adams on the movie, not the production itself.

This is an incredibly odd, and in many ways very sad, approach to art, but it seems even more pathetic coming from someone who has chosen aesthetic appreciation as their profession. I'm not sure how many people on planet Earth enjoy the compositions of J.S. Bach. Having an answer to that question wouldn't affect my enjoyment of his music in any way, and what's more, how awful if it did. I can't imagine watching a movie, and before writing my opinions, investigate how it was received to insure that I haven't, gasp, agreed with others.

Popular art has always relied on image cultivation. The music is to be enjoyed, certainly, but it's far more important that one feel good about enjoying the music. This is why all counter-cultural music since the 60's has been so amusingly transparent: "You want to be seen as an individual, your taste in art is a great way to express that individuality, so please, come join all of us..."

But there is a certain poetic justice in Braff suffering at the hands of a fellow kitsch fanatic. It's as though the two do battle entirely in the ether, detached from any actual creation, making sure that they have properly gauged how people should feel about what they're doing.

Visions of Flightsuits...

I am genuinely afraid that Obama may have used the State of the Union to declare "Mission Accomplished" with respect to the economy. In a meeting with the Republican Caucus today, his explanation of why the controversial spending freeze kicks in a year from now (instead of immediately) betrays a premature conviction that the economy has escaped imminent danger:

Now, the reason that I'm not proposing the discretionary freeze take into effect this year, retro -- we prepared a budget for 2010, it's now going forward -- is, again, I am just listening to the consensus among people who know the economy best.

And what they will say is that if you either increased taxes or significantly lowered spending when the economy remains somewhat fragile, that that would have a destimulative effect and potentially you'd see a lot of folks losing business, more folks potentially losing jobs. That would be a mistake when the economy has not fully taken off.

That's why I've proposed to do it for the next fiscal year.

The spending freeze is either stupid or cynical, but thinking that everything will be perfect in a year is an astonishingly large gamble. FDR experienced the same premature celebration when after four years of successful recovery he decided to bend to political pressure and balance the budget in 1936. I think we know how that turned out.

For reasons political and for the lives of all the people who would be affected by a reinvigorated recession, I hope that Obama doesn't find himself blaming the spending freeze on a rogue Navy crew.

Amazing Development!

In a stunning revelation it appears that making women watch an ultrasound of an abortion makes them less likely to opt for the procedure.

The author of the linked piece sees this as a positive way to reduce abortions, which he rightly points out is a goal shared across the political spectrum, "...even the most ardent pro-choice advocates, including President Obama, insist that nobody is for abortion and that everyone wants to reduce the number of abortions."

He seems to be slightly confused, however, by what that means. The idea is not to intimidate and terrify women into having a child they would otherwise abort. The pro-choice movement (and I recognize I'm speaking broadly here) wants abortions to lower because the socio-economic conditions that often lead to unwanted pregnancies have been dealt with. The 90's saw numbers of abortions decrease as access to legal abortions increased. And the statistics reflect the economic nature of unwanted pregnancy and abortion, "The abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level...is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level...This is partly because the rate of unintended pregnancies among poor women (below 100% of poverty) is nearly four times that of women above 200% of poverty..."

But I do enjoy the rhapsodic surprise of the author when he notes, "Upon seeing what happens during an abortion, many women might choose to have their baby rather than go through with the abortion." Yes, and Upon seeing a video of what happens during brain surgery, many people might choose to simply die of cancer rather than allow a doctor to slice into their grey matter. It works infinitely: upon seeing a camera shot of a doctor inserting some sort of device into their rectum, men might be less likely to show up for their scheduled colonoscopy.

But again we arrive at the fundamental strangeness of the pro-life position. That same group so anxious to curtail abortions could give less of a rip about hungry children, children without access to health care or homeless children. But if one of those kids should reach an age at which they can procreate, then by God you've got their interest...until they have the child and right back to blaming them for their lot in life.

Climate Change Deniers of the Left

Huffington Post featured and article titled, "How Homeopathic Medicines Work: Nanopharmacology At Its Best." Appearing directly above important reporting on MTV's Jersey Shore, the article is a sort of rambling, discursive apology for the obviously absurd claims made by homeopaths.

The article is amusing because it asserts in its title that homeopathy works, and never bothers to substantiate that point. It is, of course, necessary to point out that homeopathy doesn't actually work. Here is an excellent point-by-point rebuttal of claims made by homeopaths. Even the acting deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine admits, "There is, to my knowledge, no condition for which homeopathy has been proven to be an effective treatment." The more stringent and detailed the trials or meta-analysis, the worse homeopathy fairs.

What I found more interesting about the Huffington Post, however, was the creative employment of random scientific concepts to "explain" how homeopathy works, "It is commonly assumed that homeopathic medicines are composed of extremely small doses of medicinal substances. And yet, does anyone refer to an atomic bomb as an extremely small dose of a bomb? In actual fact, there is a power, a very real power, in having atoms smash against each other."

Fairly detailed technological actions must be taken to liberate energy from an atom such that a bomb is created. Were that power accessible by merely diluting a substance in water, the world would be a much more harrowing place. But this is the typical approach of a pseudo-scientist: use scientific sounding concepts and rely on the ignorance of the audience.

Hilariously, moths and sharks are then engaged to explain homeopathy:

"...it is commonly known that a certain species of moth can smell pheromones of its own species up to two miles away. It is no simple coincidence that species only sense pheromones from those in the same species who emit them (akin to the homeopathic principle of similars), as though they have developed exquisite and specific receptor sites for what they need to propagate their species. Likewise, sharks are known to sense blood in the water at distances, and when one considers the volume of water in the ocean, it becomes obvious that sharks, like all living creatures, develop extreme hypersensitivity for whatever will help ensure their survival."

Of course, both the moth and shark developed those sensitivities through billions of years of evolution. Homeopathy, by contrast, has been around about 200. It's hard to understand how humans have evolved to react to diluted amounts of, say, caffeine in the same way that sharks have developed the ability to sense blood from a long way away. There isn't even an attempt to relate these concepts in any real sort of way. Using the same logic I could argue that because moths are attracted to light, sitting in the sun must be good for my skin. It's an almost complete non sequitur.

I have always found it perplexing that in this time of astonishing medical progress people are so drawn to so-called "alternative" healing methods. Homeopathy was around two centuries ago and did very little to ameliorate human well-being. It exists now as it exists then, but the improvement in human longevity and health have perfectly mimicked advancement in scientific medicine.

In order to defend homeopathy one must engage in the same broad condemnation of the scientific establishment that climate change deniers consistently employ: There is a "conspiracy" against alt-meds. The "establishment" is withholding information. At the same time language from science is engaged in misleading and confused ways to give the appearance of legitimacy. The Huffington Post article concludes by declaring homeopathy to be "quantum medicine." They want the prestige and influence of modern science without the annoying responsibility of verifying those claims using scientific methodology.

Cuddle the gay right out...

First, this flawless destruction of a malignant pseudo-scientist should be admired:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Cohen offensively denies responsibility for the logical results of demonizing and dehumanizing homosexuals. This tactic is typically employed by purveyors of hate speech. Morris Dees, working against a similar defense, crippled the KKK by legally proving the connection between the rancorous speech of its leaders and the violence of its followers.

On the positive side, American public opinion has shifted so strongly against bigotry directed at homosexuals that Cohen and his like-minded friends in Washington have to export their hate. Unfortunately, as Maddow discussed, there appears to be at least one nation eager to live out the predictable consequences of the "homosexuality as a dangerous disease" theory. Hopefully publicizing the links between the movement in Uganda and certain members of the US Congress will shame them into using their influence to stop the travesty, but hatred is always easier to foment than to quell.

But what really caught my eye was this:


That is Cohen displaying his methods. I could spend a thousand years trying to come up with the funniest, most absurd anti-gay treatment, and I would never be able concoct something as risible as that man climbing into the other's lap. I thought he was going to attempt to breast feed. Then you add the ever-so-gentle caressing and the enraged haranguing of the conjured image of his mother and you have comedy gold.

And another pseudo-scientist engages in self-parody the moment his chimerical ideas escape the tight circle of true believers.

In Search of a Prize-Winner

I know I'm late to the party with this one, but Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize this morning. Thousands of columns and posts have already been written detailing why Obama does or does not deserve this honor, or how it portends the End Times.

My question is, rather, why not? The President has done much in his first months in office to repair the White House's relationships with governments around the world, and has, through the art of speech-making and state-craft, done perhaps even more to improve public perception of the United States as a whole world-wide. He has pushed aggressively for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, begun the process of closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, soundly rejected Bush Administration's policies that institutionalized torture and systematic violation of civil liberties, and has begun the process of ending a bloody, unjust war in Iraq.

Perhaps it still seems intuitively premature to award a sitting President the prize only months into his first term, but I fail to see who would have been a 'better' choice this year. Not only is Obama an internationally recognized symbol for the end of a thankfully brief period of 21st century neo-conservative imperialism, he is actively working to rectify the damage done over the last eight years.

Everybody's a critic

I was disappointed by this immature article that appeared at Salon. I will ignore the repeated, non substantive whining about Olbermann's tone and affect, and focus on the objections that implied some legitimate argument.

The author's criticisms of Olbermann's Wed., Oct. 7, special comment are honestly bizarre. He begins by complaining that while Olbermann could have, "taken on the myths against (health care reform or specific health care bills/proposals) -- instead he spent his time making solemn pronouncements."

I don't expect Mike Madden, the writer, to watch every episode of Countdown, but even a superficial knowledge of the show or a half hour dedicated to researching his highly critical posting would reveal a relentless effort by Olbermann to "take on the myths" weighing down the health care debate. In about five minutes I found Olbermann contradicting the death panel claims, Joe Wilson and the illegal immigrant whopper, and the socialism canard. These are just a few examples I found quickly on YouTube, hardly a comprehensive representation of the actual time he devoted to the issue (Here he is calling out congressmen for accepting campaign contributions from the health care industry, and here he deals with industry profits).

Were I Olbermann, having spent basically the last six months dealing with the health care issue on a nightly basis, I would be insulted by such a misguided complaint. The special comment was meant to be special. He spends every night doing what Madden thought was omitted. Olbermann attempted to deal with the issue from a more personal perspective. It's fair to criticize the effort, or say it fell short, but it's hardly reasonable to chastise the person who, along with his colleague Rachel Maddow, has spent exponentially more time debunking health care myths than anyone else on television.

Which leads to Madden's second point of contention: "...Olbermann's sudden sense of wonder at a broken system seemed misplaced somehow. The problem isn't that people don't know how messed up things are; the problem is that a handful of lawmakers appear to be afraid to do anything about it." Bolding mine.

Er, that isn't the problem, but it's certainly a large one. The Republican approach to health care, essentially the competing "plan," is the status quo--no change. They have bolstered this point by time and time again, with varying degrees of sanity, proclaiming that there is no crisis and America has the best health care system in the world.

There are at least two basic ways to strengthen an argument: add additional supporting information or undermine the opponent's stance. Olbermann wasn't expressing a "sudden sense of wonder," that's just a baseless, snarky insult, he was attempting, like Micheal Moore with Sicko, to express a debate that involves billion dollar deficits, projections of exploding costs decades into the future, and complicated tax structures, at its most basic level: how it effects people's health. When constucting an argument, that type of anecdotal evidence serves as a powerful instantiation of broader data, which Olbermann included.

The article has plenty more objectionable material, but the line that beautifully summed up the complete vapidity of the criticism was in this passage, quoted in length for comedic effect:

"The "Special Comment" took on all sorts of issues that didn't appear to have much to do with the healthcare debate. Olbermann engaged in a rhetorical battle with Winston Churchill, who had opposed national health insurance in Britain after World War II (and, Olbermann said, lost his government for it). He won the fight, for what it was worth, by digging up a Churchill quote from the 1930s where the former British prime minister insisted government had a right to provide for people's well-being. But what was the point? Churchill is dead; the healthcare reform plan isn't remotely modeled on Britain's National Health Service; the only people who think it is are the conservative opponents of reform."

It's almost impossible to write about something like that without resorting to the basest of sarcasm. I will try to avoid such. For the most part, the problems with that passage are obvious and don't require detailed explanation. I would just point out that Madden's argument, to the extent it could be dubbed such, applies to any historical reference. He seems to be advancing the idea that only events comparable in exact detail are useful for edification and analogy.

Studying the social and political battles other nations waged to achieve universal coverage is so obviously relevant that it's hard to understand what Madden was thinking when he made the comment bolded above. I can only speculate why Madden wrote as he did and why the editors of Salon read the piece and thought it was worthy of heading up their daily list of articles, but it has the feel of criticism for criticism's sake.

In the spirit of fairness, I will close by agreeing with Madden on one point. Olbermann's complaint about the term "public option" was not a particularly strong point. From Madden's article:

"Take the public option. Its trouble, Olbermann insisted, is its name. "Political speak," Olbermann said. "It is legalese. It is the ego of the informed strutting down the street and saying, 'Look at me, I talk smart.'" (Perhaps not the most cutting insult, coming in the middle of an hour-long monologue.) Instead, Democrats should have called it "Medicare for all," he said."

Madden was quite right to conclude, "Calling the public option Medicare for all "might not be literally true, but instead of terrifying, it would be reassuring," (Olbermann) said. Explaining how it would work -- or why the Senate Finance Committee is resisting putting it in the bill -- might have been a more productive use of his time."

Again, Olbermann has done the explaining on many previous occasions, but demanding that proponents of health care reform start calling the public option something it clearly isn't for PR purposes was by far the weakest element of Olbermann's comment.