The State Department has been in the state of chaos over several days, between the Trump Transition Team failing to staff up the Executive Branch, high level officers leaving on their own accord, and so on.
And a mere hours ago, Oil Man Rex Tillerson has been officially sworn in as Security of State.
Given Tillerson’s alleged and real links to Russia and Putin, his inexperience in matters of government and international affairs, his newness, and the state of the State Department, we are moved to ask the following question:
Is anyone in the United States, in the State Department, going to do anything to save Vladimir Kara-Murza’s life?
Who is Vladimir Kara-Murza, you ask?
The Body of Boris Nemtsov, in the bag, at the location of his assassination. The Kremlin is in the background. One wonders if anyone in particular was watching out a window to see it happen.Boris Nemtsov was a strong and widely respected leader of the opposition against Vladimir Putin. In February, 2015, as he was crossing the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, a short distance away from the Kremlin, a handful of gunmen jumped out of a car and gunned him down.
Vladimir Kara-Murza was Nemtsov’s long time colleague and advisor, and to a large extent, Kara-Murza was Nemtsov’s heir apparent.
In May 2015, not long after the assassination of Nemtsov, Kara-Murza was poisoned. He nearly died, and his recovery was long and arduous. During his sickest days, while in a Russian hospital, British and American movers and shakers, mainly in the foreign service (so, for the US, that meant the State Department) acted aggressively to get Kara-Murza out of Russia and to the US. He had been living in the US, where he had a green card, and his family lives in Virginia. This worked. Kara-Murza ended up in the US where he has been recovering from his near death.
Meanwhile, a documentary has been made about the Nemtsov, and Kara-Murza decided to go back to Russia to partake in the showing of that documentary. People tried to talk him out of it, but he decided he needed to go to carry out his political activities.
This morning, Kara Murza lies again in intensive care, this time at least as sick as before, in Russia, poisoned.
So, here’s my question.
Is anyone in the United States, in the State Department, going to do anything to save Vladimir Kara-Murza’s life?
Is Rex Tillerson, who in 2013 received the Russian Order of Friendship award, and who now heads a State Department in the state of chaos, going to order immediate action to intervene as needed to save Kara-Murza’s life again? Are state department people already doing this on their own? If so, will Tillerson encourage and support that? Or order it stopped? Or what?
There have been significant wildfires in Chile since November, and they continue. These are the worst fires Chile has seen in known history, and Chile has been keeping track of its history for quite a while.
Are these fires climate change caused? Apparently so. Chile has had a rain deficit for well over a decade, though it as been extra dry for about five years. Drought experts call it a “mega-drought.” Droughts tend to have climate change links, and this one is no exception. A study from just one year ago links anthropogenic climate change to the drought.
Within large uncertainties in the precipitation response to greenhouse gas forcing, the Southeast Pacific drying stands out as a robust signature within climate models. A precipitation decline, of consistent direction but of larger amplitude than obtained in simulations with historical climate forcing, has been observed in central Chile since the late 1970s. To attribute the causes of this trend, we analyze local rain gauge data and contrast them to a large ensemble of both fully coupled and sea surface temperature-forced simulations. We show that in concomitance with large-scale circulation changes, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation explains about half of the precipitation trend observed in central Chile. The remaining fraction is unlikely to be driven exclusively by natural phenomena but rather consistent with the simulated regional effect of anthropogenic climate change. We particularly estimate that a quarter of the rainfall deficit affecting this region since 2010 is of anthropogenic origin. An increased persistence and recurrence of droughts in central Chile emerges then as a realistic scenario under the current socioeconomic pathway.
Heat on top of the drought adds to the likelihood of fires. Decreased snow pack from reduced rainfall and increasing temperatures at altitude also contribute.
Here is the Climate Signals attribution schematic for this event. Click through to climate signals for more.
I grew up in the old Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, now known to you as the State of New York. There, I carried out extensive archaeological and historic research, and along the way, came across that phrase, “the dogs still bark in Dutch.”
It is an idea that might occur to a denizen of Harlem, the kids off to Kindergarten, sitting on his stoop eating a cruller, or perhaps some cole slaw with a gherkin, and pondering the Dutch revival architecture down on Wall Street.
There was a war between the Dutch and the English in the 17th century, and as a result of that war, colonial lands were passed back and forth multiple times. In the case of the colony of New Amsterdam, the passing to the English involved the arrival of a warship on the Hudson, but they used their cannon only to wake up the governor so he could receive a letter telling him about the change. Actually, the colony went back and forth a couple of times.
But when the English took over that Dutch colony, they did not remove the Dutch, or really, do much at all. There were some old Dutch customs, such as the Pinksterfest, a bit of a happy go lucky free for all dance party with vague religious overtones, that were illegalized, because the English versions of Christians at the time didn’t like dancing. But mostly nothing happened to affect day to day life for most people. The Dutch parts of the collection of English Colonies and the early United States retained its Dutchness long enough for someone to remark of the time that even with all the political change, the new form of money, the change in monarch, all of that, the dogs still barked in Dutch.
(I oversimplify two centuries of history slightly.)
We know we are eating burritos, yet we call them tacos
I think this is a Minnesota custom but it could be more widespread. This is what you do. You get a large flour tortilla, some kind of meat or beans, tomatoes, lettuce, salsa or hot sauce, grated cheese and sour cream, and you put all that stuff inside the tortilla, roll the tortilla up, eat it, and then say, “That was a good taco, you betcha.”
The part about the tortilla, lettuce, cheese, etc. is not Minnesotan. That is widespread. But calling a burrito a taco may be more local. And, we know it is a burrito. Nobody in Minnesota ever gets confused about what they are ordering at a Mexican restaurant. In fact we’re pretty good at that. Indeed, of all the upper mid west cities, I’ll bet you that Minneapolis has one of the oldest Mexican restaurants, and there has always been a Mexican community here, though it has grown in recent decades.
But never mind the taco-burrito distinction. We Minnesotans also mix up “yet” and “still” and do things “on” accident instead of “by” accident. Don’t get me started on soda vs pop vs sodapop.
What I really want to talk about here is “Mexican food.”
Go find some hipsters and tell them, “Imma go get Mexican food, wanna come?” and you’ll find out that there is no such thing as “Mexican food,” that what you really mean is “Tex-Mex” and that if you want some authentic “Mexican food” there’s this great taco truck down the street that has authentic tacos.
So you got to get the authentic tacos. I did that the other day. Hipsters everywhere. All the tacos, though, were various meat or bean substances, some kid of lettuce, tomato, etc. with some sort of sauce, on a flour tortilla. The only difference between our home made “tacos” and these legitimate “tacos” was that our burritos are chimichanga size, and those burritos were hand size.
Don’t get me started on chimichangas.
Anyway, here’s what I want to say about Mexican food. It is Mexican, and it is not Tex-Mex. Why is it not Tex-Mex? because Tex-Mex is a made up word, a made up category of food. It was made up because people thought this stuff we call “Mexican food” was fake, an American, non-Mexican version of what they eat in Real Mexico. It was not understood that America did not invite Mexico over as long as they bring the Tacos, that things Mexican in America are not immigrated, but rather, indigenous, often. Even though many Mexicans actually do go back and forth across the US-Mexico border, the truth is, the geographical and cultural entity that gave rise to the Country of Mexico also gave rise to the Country of the United States, in part. In part for both. The Yucatan is no more Hispanic Mexican than El Passo is Anglo-American.
Both modern countries have histories that involve big areas of land, country size areas of land by European standards, that had this or that national, ethnic, or cultural thing going on, and all of that stuff contributes to the present. Native American zones were everywhere, of course, and for the region of which we speak here, that included hundreds of languages, many language groups, and numerous entirely different but often overlapping or intermingled lifeways (such as foraging, bigly civilization, and all the arrangements to be found on the small-group-forager to pyramid-building-nation spectrum).
America did not become a first-Native then Anglo-European country that then had Mexicans show up to fix our roofs and run Tex-Mex style taco trucks. Mexican culture, or more broadly speaking New World Hispanic culture (or some other word, you pick) was in place, across a huge area, long before the United States took its current form, and a whopping big chunk of the eventual United States was part of that. And no, I’m not talking about Texas, or even New Mexico, or the Southwest, or the land ceded to the US in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I’m talking about a big blobby thing that includes regions from Atlantic Florida to California, from the Rio Grande to the Great Lakes, overlapping with other big and small blobby things that were French, English, Dutch, Creole, Acadian, Russian, and so on.
So don’t call what we eat “Tex-Mex” because that implies that we are America sans Mexico. We are Mexico. Even up here in Minnesota, the Cowboys sometimes spoke Spanish. A cowboy IS a Spanish-American thing. And out east, the dogs still barked in Dutch. And our northern beginnings are as French as anything else.
America is part Mexican, but not because they came to us. Rather, we come from them.
Correction: Apparently, the part about Gorsuch creating a “Fascism Forever Club” is a falsehood! Well, that’s what we get for using the Daily Mail. (In my defense, I originally rejected this story when sent to me because of the source, but then USA Today picked it up. Even thought USA Today was still citing the Mail, the truth is, the Mail is not always wrong, so I assumed USA Today journalists had some verification. Silly me.)
I quickly add that the source I have that this is a falsehood is not necessarily 100% reliable, but it does look like that part of the story does not pan out.
The rest is accurate, but way less interesting now.
When was a kid, I started an organization called the Nature Conservation Club. NCC for short. It had a badge, and a membership card, was free to join, and our objective was to stop civilization from paving over all the forests. The very first member was Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie promised to join too, but never got to it. Then a few of my friends joined, my family. But then it kind of petered out and civilization went ahead and paved over a lot, not yet all, but a lot of the forests. Kids do the darnedest things.
When I went to high school, I didn’t start a club, but Moe and Larry did. They started a “Hallway Monitor” club. They recruited a few people and volunteered to patrol the hallways, keeping the other kids in line. Their offer was refused by the administration. By the way, the administration of this school, a public version of a private prep school if you can imagine that, were politically and socially all over the place, but most of them were college professors and at least two of them were men with long sideburns (during Viet Nam that was a meaningful symbol) and one of them had a picture of Chairman Mao on his office wall, for real. Anyway, Moe and Larry (not exactly their real names) were rebuffed.
Then the fire alarms started ringing. Every day, there would be a fire alarm. Or two. Somebody was pulling the fire alarms. The fire department, we were told, indicated that they would have to close the school if the alarms kept going off because too many false alarms itself constitutes a danger. Next thing you know, the Hallway Monitor Club gets recruited by the administration to guard the fire alarms.
Most of them wore brown shirts, one of them wore lederhosen.
A few weeks later, many of us, me included, found our names on the wall, on the bulletin board, in a memo. “The following students will report to the principal.” It was a long list, and included all three or four of the ruffians we had in that school (there weren’t many).
So, we all dutifully reported to the principle, and were sat down one at a time and told how it was not OK to traffic marijuana in or near the school yard, so just in case you were doing that, please stop.
And, in their hubris, the Hallway Monitor Club founders could not resist letting it be known that they had supplied the list of names with the accusation. A few days later, Moe stopped coming to school and Larry showed up in a cast. That was the end of that.
Kids do the darnedest things.
Oh wait, I’ve got another story. This one is about the “Fascism Forever Club.”
This is reported in the Daily Mail, not the best source, and repeated in USA Today, not much better. But it looks real.
According to this information, Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch …
… both created and headed the “Fascism Forever Club” at Georgetown Preparatory School, which he graduated from in 1985, The Daily Mail reports. The school is a selective all-boys Jesuit prep school, and now reportedly costs day students $30,000 annually and boarding students $50,000.
“In political circles, our tireless President Gorsuch’s ‘Fascism Forever Club’ happily jerked its knees against the increasingly ‘left-wing’ tendencies of the faculty,” a Georgetown Prep high school yearbook states, according to The Daily Mail.
Kids do the darnedest things.
I’m not going to say anything about this at this time, other than to ask the following question. Why are the disqualifying things disqualifying only to Democrats and not to Republicans? Why?
Write your answer in the box below. Thank you very much.
Congressional Republicans, voting party line, will end an important provision protecting streams and rivers from coal waste, and a requirement that oil companies report payments to Foreign Governments. The former is blatant hippie punching anti environmental evil. The latter is a fully expected out come if you elect a Russian puppet president, and appoint a Secretary of state whose main job will be to exploit Russian oil fields. So, if that happened, and this happened, then everything is falling nicely into place for the oligarchs, both American and otherwise.
The House has already voted as of this writing, the Senate will be voting shortly, so there is still time to call your Senators
The Sierra Club has set up that will patch you through to your Senators: 888-454-0483.
This is from Feb 1 press release from the Center for Biological Diversity:
House of Representatives Votes to Block Rules Protecting Rivers From Coal Waste
Also Votes to End Requirement That Oil Companies Report Payments to Foreign Governments
WASHINGTON— In a party line vote, the U.S. House of Representatives today voted to rescind Obama administration rules to protect streams from coal waste and requiring mining and oil companies to report payments made to foreign governments. The vote was done through the Congressional Review Act, a rarely used statute allowing Congress to overturn federal rules enacted with the past 60 legislative days. It has not been successfully used since 2001.
“House Republicans just sold out America’s clean drinking water and efforts to combat international fraud in order appease Exxon and coal companies,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Polluting streams with coal waste is disgusting, dangerous and life-threatening to rural people. There will be hell to pay if Senate Republicans go along with repealing these common-sense rules that save lives and prevent corruption.”
The Stream Protection Rule was instituted by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement to provide greater protections to streams from toxic coal mining waste. It would reduce pollution in 6,100 miles of streams while reducing coal mining output by less than 1 percent.
The requirement that U.S. mining, oil and natural gas companies report payments made to foreign nations was established by the Securities and Exchange Commission under the authority of the Dodd-Frank Act in order to reduce international fraud. Set to go into effect in 2018, the rule was aggressively, but until now, unsuccessfully attacked by Exxon under the leadership of Rex Tillerson.
And here is another press release from a coalition of organizations who have been fighting over this issue for some time:
CONGRESS IS ATTACKING CLEAN WATER SAFEGUARDS IN ORDER TO PROTECT THE COAL INDUSTRY
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the House of Representatives will use an obscure tool, the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to dismantle the Stream Protection Rule (SPR), which protects clean water for communities living near mining sites. The Senate is expected to vote on the House bill tomorrow.
SPR gives communities in coal country much needed information about toxic water pollution caused by nearby mining operations. It was finalized by the Obama administration in late 2016. The modest and long overdue rule also provides these communities basic protections from the devastating impacts of mountaintop-removal coal mining on water and public health.
This safeguard helps to ensure that coal companies don’t profit off of the destruction of drinking water supplies. Unfortunately, leaders in Congress have targeted the SPR in a blatant attempt to put industry profits before public health. Repealing this commonsense protection through the CRA is a heavy handed tactic that will put many communities at risk now — and could constrain future administrations from acting to protect public health and drinking water in these communities.
A broad coalition of public health, environmental, and conservation groups opposing the CRA, released the following statements:
“Nobody voted against clean air and water in the last election. Regulatory safeguards that keep our air and water safe from toxic pollution are crafted using a democratic process and based on the best available science”, said Trip Van Noppen, President of Earthjustice. “Any attempts to dismantle them using the Congressional Review Act should be opposed. These attacks have the power to fundamentally undermine the very goals of our environmental laws by trying to cripple future attempts to enforce protections for our air, water, and lands.”??
“This is an unconscionable attack on basic clean water safeguards for communities already devastated by toxic pollution from coal mining,” said Bob Wendelgass, President and CEO of Clean Water Action. “Everyone has the right to know what is in their water and every community deserves access to clean water. Congress should reject any action that puts industry profits before protections for drinking water and public health.”
“This attempt to scrap the Stream Protection Rule is a clear case of putting polluters’ profits ahead of the basic well-being of vulnerable communities, and we must do everything we can to stop it,” said Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club. “No matter who you are or where you live, you have a right to clean water — but this shameless attack puts families and communities at risk.”
“The Stream Protection Rule protects both clean drinking water for people and habitat for endangered species and other wildlife,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, President and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. “We can’t have a bountiful natural heritage without securing clean water. Legislators who attack this rule through the Congressional Review Act are voting in the interest of big polluters, not local communities or future generations.”
“The potential devastation if the Stream Protection Rule is struck down is unimaginable,” said Aimee Erickson, Executive Director of Citizens Coal Council. “In the 25 states with active coal mining, nearly 100% of the drinking water comes from surface and groundwater that feeds into both public and private water supplies. These water supplies serve 11.4 million people in some of the poorest areas of the nation, where poverty levels in some areas reach nearly 43 percent.”
“Republican leadership has wasted no time in rewarding Big Polluters by attempting to roll back the historic environmental progress made under President Obama. Undoing this critical Stream Protection Rule that helps prevent coal mining companies from dumping toxic waste into drinking water would be outrageous on its own, but this extreme attack goes even further by blocking the Department of Interior from ever issuing rules that allow communities living near mining operations to know what’s being put in their water or to hold these polluters accountable for the increased rates of cancer, birth defects, and other health problems that have been linked to their waste”, said Gene Karpinski,
President of the League of Conservation Voters. “With communities across the country increasingly alarmed by contaminants like lead, flame-retardant chemicals, and many other pollutants showing up in their drinking water, shredding safeguards for clean water is the exact opposite of what Congress should do. We call on Congress to do what’s right by standing up to Big Polluters and rejecting this radical attack on clean water.”
“The politicians in Washington, D.C. are out of touch with Alaskans. Across our great state, Alaskans want healthy wild salmon streams,” said Bob Shavelson, Advocacy Director of Cook Inletkeeper. “But the political elites don’t get it—they take money from the coal corporations and ignore the will of the people.”
“Think about it: spiking a rule that tells coal companies they can’t poison our water sources, harm our landscapes or kill fish and wildlife with their waste,” said Scott Slesinger, Legislative Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is a polluter-motivated attack on the American people.”
“Appalachia has already lost 2,000 miles of streams to mountaintop removal mining. It’s crucial we protect what is left”, said John Suttles, Director of Litigation and Regional Programs for SELC. “Congress is placing coal-mining profits above the health of the people in Appalachia and the basic right to clean water.”
“National parks and people stand to lose if Congress succeeds in dismantling the Stream Protection Rule,” said Theresa Pierno, President and CEO of National Parks Conservation Association. “The rule safeguards waterways from toxic pollution produced by mining operations. Millions of Americans visit national parks in the Southeast each year, for activities such as bass fishing at Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area or white water rafting at New River Gorge National River each year. Will they continue to visit and spend millions of dollars in surrounding communities, if polluted waterways greet them upon arrival?”
“Mountaintop removal has devastated Appalachia’s land and water, and it continues to threaten the health and wellbeing of residents throughout the region,” said Tom Cormons, Executive Director of Appalachian Voices. “Appalachian communities are actively working toward a stronger economic future, not dominated by a failing coal industry. We are counting on Congress to do what is right for the people of Central Appalachia by preserving the Stream Protection Rule.”
To cut to the chase, there are two reasons I recommend this book. First, the specific programming projects used in the book are a good match for most people, because they are bare bones (but highly developed) exemplars that are fairly adaptable and together cover a wide range of applications and use requirements. Second, the book is well written and organized, the first part very serviceable as a reference book, covers both Python 2 and 3 but focuses on and encourages you to learn 3 (which you should) etc.
Let me go back to that first reason and expand a bit.
Why do you want to learn Python, why do you want to program stuff?
You need to automate or otherwise develop an interactive project. You need to manipulate data live, interact with the computer, etc. You have some data in a text file (or some other form) and you need to access it and turn it into derived numbers, or pictures, graphics, etc. You want to generate web output. Perhaps there is some web scraping in there. Maybe you are doing all this together.
The book begins with eleven chapters on how Python works, and is fairly detailed. If you work through this in detail, and actgually do the recommended exercises, you’ll be a python programmer before you hit Chapter 11.
The second part includes three fairly well developed projects. One is an interactive game that is pretty sophisticated (for a scripting language an not using a GUI). The second uses some of the more powerful mathematical and graphical libraries in Python to manipulate, graph, plot, etc. data. This section also covers working with API’s including Git. This is probably the chapter you’ll come back to the most.
The third project leads you through developing a web application using Django.
A classic use of this book is that you are a scientists who uses R (r-cran) and you suddenly realize that more development of tools is happening in Python than in R. Switching from R to Python is hard to do emotionally, but easy from a programming perspective, because Python is a better programming language. You don’t really want to leave R, but you know that it is time to branch out, and at least, see what you can do with Python. This crash course does not give you the full range of knowledge to switch you from sophisticated use of R to equivalent use of Python, but if you can’t currently program in Python, do this, then do that using more sophisticated resources.
It has been interesting to see, over the last few years, No Starch Press, which produces this book, growing and producing future classics that should be along side the more traditional O’Reilly Press programming books. Python Crash Course: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming is one of those books, equal to or replacing something like Learning Python, 5th Edition, but at close to half the price.
Python is easy to use and learn, yet it is also very powerful. Much of the power comes from the powerful libraries that exist, which can be imported and used for a wide range of things. Python itself is a very simple implementation of an interpreted language, with a simple command line interface. Because of these two things, the actual installation and running of Python is very easy and sometimes very difficult at the same time. Here’s the thing. As a single user who may do some complex stuff, which would describe you if you are like me, you might want a pretty fancy development environment and lots of libraries and stuff. But at the same time, you really don’t want complex virtual environments and collaboration tools. The thing is, as the various free or paid add ons or resources you can get to enhance Python’s power get more complicated, they assume that you are moving from a hobbyist or student to a corporate environment with multiple collaborators and the need to keep projects separate more than you really want. At some point, someone will tell you, “Oh, if you want to do that, just install ______” where the blank is the name of a snake or something. You go in stall it, and find out you have to take a class to know what the first button to press is.
So, that is a complaint I have about the Python world. This book does come with a web site that has on it current and important information, updated, on how to handle some of these problems with installing and configuring your programming environment, using a thing called “pip” which helps you install libraries and stuff, and how to get matplotlib and some other stuff running without having to take that class.
You will also find source code used in the book and some other cool resources on that page.
Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Variables and Simple Data Types
Chapter 3: Introducing Lists
Chapter 4: Working with Lists
Chapter 5: if Statements
Chapter 6: Dictionaries
Chapter 7: User Input and while Loops
Chapter 8: Functions
Chapter 9: Classes
Chapter 10: Files and Exceptions
Chapter 11: Testing Your Code
PART II: Projects
Project 1: Alien Invasion
Chapter 12: A Ship that Fires Bullets
Chapter 13: Aliens!
Chapter 14: Scoring
Project 2: Data Visualization
Chapter 15: Generating Data
Chapter 16: Downloading Data
Chapter 17: Working with APIs
Project 3: Web Applications
Chapter 18: Getting Started with Django
Chapter 19: User Accounts
Chapter 20: Styling and Deploying an App
Afterword
Appendix A: Installing Python
Appendix B: Text Editors
Appendix C: Getting Help
Appendix D: Using Git for Version Control
View the detailed Table of Contents (PDF)
View the Index (PDF)
Web site here, though not much there yet, this was JUST announced seconds ago.
Please note that they are accepting donations. Click through to the donations page to give a donation!
Alternate logo here:
To find out about other marches in your area, if you can’t get to DC, for now, look at March for Science “follow” list, here. They will be putting info up at a later time, apparently.
Well, not my placenta exactly, but … well, someone’s?
Did you now that the placenta that is born out of a female primate’s body is an organ of the infant also being born? It is the first body part you lose. I use the term “primate” here because, even though all the “placental mammals” as we are called share some basic reproductive gestational anatomy, there are major categories across the mammals in this area, and primates are distinct from, for example, carnivores. These differences are of course very important when one is considering placentophagy. I mean, you wouldn’t confuse a walnut with an orange when picking a snack, why would you confuse a dog placenta with a monkey placenta?
In humans and mice, and presumably therefore in all mammals, the placenta and the rest of the embryo/fetus have growth patterns that are controlled at some basic level by two distinct developmental genes, each of which has the property of methylation. This is an epigenetic phenomenon for those who like to see that word in use. Here’s what happens. The gene that engenders growth of the placenta is turned on by dad’s allele, turned off by Mom’s. The gene that engenders growth of the rest of the embryo is turned on by mom, off by dad.
The idea here is that mom and dad have difference interests in the outcome. Mom wants to have an optimal (not maximal) number of offspring, so she parses out energy appropriately. Dad wants to have more offspring than mom, using a number of different moms if possible. Thus, he wants the growing embryo and fetus to suck as much energy out of each mom as it can.
The Placenta is the energy-sucking organ. It insinuates itself greedily into the blood supply of the mother, like an alien internal parasite. The mother’s body resists the introduction of placental tissues into her blood supply, the placenta fights back, and the result is a compromise which usually works out. Part of that compromising system, over long term evolutionary time, has been them other’s systematic turning off of the gene that she provides instantiating the growth of the placenta. Dad counters by turning off the fetus/embryo gene. And so on.
Anyway, should I eat my placenta or not?
Across cultures, there are many different practices associated with child birth that have to do with the placenta. Among one group I worked with in the Congo, the Placenta is buried under the threshold of the hut in which the birth happens. This is done by the father. That, and having a sharpened arrow handy to cut the cord, are his only jobs during child birth. But nobody eats the placenta.
I normally don’t pay a lot of attention to the “complementary and alternative medicine” literature, thought I am sent regular notices of various publications. Today, though, something came across my desk that I thought you’d be interested in. I’ll give some of the basic results, you can draw your own conclusions. Feel free to comment below. The topic is, of course, placentophagy.
The Paper:
Schuette Stephanie A., Brown Kara M., Cuthbert Danielle A., Coyle Cynthia W., Wisner Katherine L., Hoffman M. Camille, Yang Amy, Ciolino Jody D., Newmark Rebecca L., and Clark Crystal T.. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. January 2017, 23(1): 60-67. doi:10.1089/acm.2016.0147.
Methods:
Two cross-sectional surveys with questions regarding placentophagy practice were distributed to healthcare providers and patients. The provider survey was distributed via email listservers to international perinatal professional organizations and to obstetrics and gynecology, nurse midwifery, family medicine, and psychiatry departments at three urban hospitals. Patient surveys were administered in person at an urban hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
Key results that jumped out at me:
Higher income, higher education, and whiteness seem to be associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in placentophagy, with various degrees of effect.
The most likely kid of provider to suggest considering this practice are midwives, with all the other kinds of providers (physicians and nurses, mainly) being in the main unlikely to suggest it. Sample sizes are small, but 100% of the 66 OB/GYN’s asked said no, they would not suggest this. For nurses, with only 16 in the sample, two thirds said no, they would not, and one third were neutral. Non said they would suggest it. Among Midwives, only 17.6% said they were unlikely, and 29.4% said likely, the rest being neutral.
The survey looked at multiple locations but with enough in Denver and Chicago to identify a vague pattern: A provider in Denver is slightly more likely to thing this a good idea.
The study looked at history of mental health diagnosis. 7.4% of those with no such history said they would consider placentophagy. 24.3% of those with such a history said yes. Across the board, asking about what form they would consider eating the placenta in, or if they thought there was this or that benefit, those with a history of mental health diagnosis generally thought it was good, low risk, and they would try a variety of methods.
There is no evidence that placentophagy has a benefit.
Neil Gorsuch is a significant and meaningful choice for SCOTUS. The image above is not fake, it really is his Harvard Law yearbook photo. If he was a Democratic pick, that one image would end him. Since he is a Republican pick, democrats have a Big Tent instead of a spine, and Republicans have no ethical floor to avoid crashing into, he will be confirmed.
Judge Neil Gorsuch speaks, after US President Donald Trump nominated him for the Supreme Court, at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2017. President Donald Trump on nominated federal appellate judge Neil Gorsuch as his Supreme Court nominee, tilting the balance of the court back in the conservatives’ favor. / AFP / Brendan SMIALOWSKI (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)He is a very conservative judge, probably more conservative than anyone who has been on the court in recent memory or possibly ever.
Gorsuch is a Geroge W. Bush appointee (10th circuit, May 2006). He is famously the son of Anne Gorsuch-Buford, who was EPA Administrator under Reagan, forced to resign after being shown ineffective in actually protecting the environment.
Gorsuch produced an op-ed in the ridiculously conservative National Review, in 2005 (NR 2/7/05), criticizing liberals, in which he wrote,
“But rather than use the judiciary for extraordinary cases, von Drehle recognizes that American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education. This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary. In the legislative arena, especially when the country is closely divided, compromises tend to be the rule the day. But when judges rule this or that policy unconstitutional, there’s little room for compromise: One side must win, the other must lose.”
He has been very active in the Federalist Society, a libertarian and conservative group of lawyers and judges.
Gorsuch has fairly direct ties to the Anschutz Foundation. He wa a member of the Walden Group (a company) which was registered to Cannon Harvey of Colorado, and the Harveys (Cannon and Lyndia) were or are friends of Gorsuch according to a 2008 financial disclosure report. Harvey was an officer and member of the board of directors of Anschutz, and Anschutz funds directly and indirectly anti-science organization ssuch as the Heritage Foundation, extremely conservative groups like the Goldwater Institute, supports Right to Work (think Wisconsin), and has seemingly funded anti-LGBTQ efforts. According the Huffington Post (1/5/17),
“The 77-year-old entrepreneur, who is the chairman of the Anschutz Corporation, is listed as a key ‘enemy of equality’ in an infographic produced by the Washington, D.C.-based LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans. The infographic indicates that Anschutz has donated thousands of dollars to the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the National Christian Foundation, all of which have been staunch opponents in the fight for LGBTQ equality, through the Anschutz Family Foundation.”
This has been disputed by the Anschutz Foundation CEO. At the very least, esposure of this possible connection may have caused Anschutz to withdraw support form anti-LGBTQ groups. This has little do do with Gorsuch per se, but as background, we can see that he hangs with, and supports, the most conservative groups and folk. That together with his anti-Liberal screen regarding judicial legislating places him firmly at the borked end of the judicial spectrum, at least.
Here is some background (from a backgrounder compiled by a group of experts) on his positions in various important areas, provided in a white paper by :
Gorsush on The Environment
In an August 2016 concurring opinion to a case involving residency for undocumented immigrants, Gorsuch wrote a “blistering” 23-page critique of the Chevron Doctrine, which he believes gives far too much power to administrative agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Chevron Doctrine allows judges to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation when the law as written by Congress is “silent or ambiguous.” The doctrine arose from the 1984 Supreme Court decision Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council and is frequently cited in litigation regarding environmental regulations. In his work on the 10th Circuit, Gorsuch has upheld environmental regulations in at least two instances. In 2015, as part of a three-judge panel, Gorsuch upheld Colorado’s renewable energy standard in a lawsuit filed by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. He argued that no in or out of state fossil fuel producers would be disproportionately disadvantaged or advantaged by the standard since “all fossil fuel producers in the area served by the grid will be hurt equally and all renewable energy producers in the area will be helped equally.” Gorsuch further argued that whether the mandate raised energy prices was unimportant since Colorado voters had approved the standards with ‘overwhelming support” and were “apparently happy to bear” potential increases in electricity prices.
** ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND EDITIONS MAY 10-11 ** A raw materials storage pond lies in front of the USMagnesium production facility Tuesday, April 22, 2003 in Tooele, Utah. Magnesium is brewed from mineral-rich water baked for years in solar ponds. The smelter on the remote Great Salt Lake western shore ranked No. 1 on a government list of industrial air polluters for five years, a branding its executives disputed but found hard to counter. They’re also fighting federal allegations of stealing minerals — skimming concentrated brines from public lands inundated by an overflowing Great Salt Lake. (AP Photo/Steve C. Wilson)In 2010, Gorsuch ruled against a U.S. District Judge that had exempted a Utah magnesium plant from hazardous waste disposal as outlined in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Gorsuch argued that since the EPA had never issued a definitive interpretation, the agency could reinterpret an ambiguous regulation without public notice and comment. In 2016, Gorsuch and another 10th Circuit Judge denied the Obama Administration’s request to fast-track a reconsideration of a fracking rule decision, but also denied an industry request to throw out the administration’s appeal all together.
Gorsush on Public Lands
In 2009, the state of Wyoming asked the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to essentially block a National Park Service proposal to limit the number of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park. A U.S. District Court judge had previously set the snowmobile cap at 720 per day, but the NPS wanted to decrease the number to 318. Gorsuch was skeptical that the 10th Circuit had authority to stop the agencies’ rule and ultimately ruled in favor of the Park Service. In 2011, Gorsuch ruled that the U.S. Forest Service was not violating the law by charging visitors to access Mount Evans, a popular hiking site in Denver, CO. However, Gorsuch did suggest that the “[fee] might well be susceptible to a winning challenge as applied to certain visitors, perhaps even the plaintiffs themselves.”
In a 2014 decision, Gorsuch ruled that Entek Energy could legally cross private land to make use of an oil and gas well nearby. The suit was initiated by the surface rights owner, Stull Ranches, which was concerned about the effect of the drilling operations on the grouse. Gorsuch suggested that he could “certainly understand [Stull Ranches] point of view” but suggested that its efforts “would be better directed to legislators than courts.”
Gorsush on Education
In 2013, Gorsuch ruled that a Colorado school district had to pay tuition for a special-needs student to attend a private, out-of-state school as directed by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA requires public schools to provide specialized education at the school or compensate parents for tuition at a school that can meet their child’s needs. Gorsuch stated, “The defendant school district failed to provide Elizabeth with a free and appropriate public education. Her private placement was essential to ensure she received a meaningful educational benefit, and her private placement was primarily oriented toward enabling her to obtain an education.” Prior to 2014, Gorsuch was on the Board of Directors at the Boulder Country Day School, a private Pre-K-8 school in Boulder, Colorado. Gorsuch was an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Law School as recently as 2014.
A half-dozen protestors holds signs outside Hobby Lobby in Duluth on Wednesday morning, July 2, 2014 to protest the company’s winning of its appeal to not comply with the Affordable Health Care’s contraception mandate. Bob King / rking@duluthnews.com
Gorsush on Reproductive Freedom, Religion, and Civil Rights
Gorsuch sided with Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor in their cases challenging the contraceptive mandate of the affordable care act. In his book about assisted suicide, Gorsuch wrote “In Roe, the Court explained that, had it found the fetus to be a ‘person’ for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment, it could not have created a right to abortion because no constitutional basis exists for preferring the mother’s liberty interests over the child’s life.” SCOTUS Blog noted that Gorsuch “would be a natural successor to Scalia in adopting a pro-religion conception of the Establishment Clause” of the US Constitution. Although Gorsuch has not decided cases directly related to LGBTQ issues, he specifically mentioned gay marriage in a National Review opinion piece about using courts to advance civil rights. Gorsuch wrote “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.”
Gorsuch on Criminal Law
Gorsuch is expected to follow Scalia’s interpretation of criminal laws to the advantage of criminal defendants, and in his handling of death penalty cases. SCOTUS Blog reported that a Gorsuch appointment would be “very unlikely to make the court any more solicitous of the claims of capital defendants.” Additionally, SCOTUS Blog observed that “Gorsuch, just like Scalia, is sometimes willing to read criminal laws more narrowly in a way that disfavors the prosecution – especially when the Second Amendment or another constitutional protection is involved.”
Why it could be worse
This is a two edged sword, and I don’t have much to offer you to make you feel better.
1) Gorsuch would replace a very conservative judge. So replacing a very conservative judge with a very conservative judge is not as bad as replacing a liberal judge with a very conservative judge.
2) Because of #1, Democrats will fight less hard to stop this appointment. What Democrats should do is to respond to what the the Republicans did last time there was a SCOTUS appointment. Don’t let this appointment go through. Let’s wait until we have a president and a strong Senate majority from the same party at the same time to appoint any more judges. Then, let’s hope that doesn’t become Trump and a huge Republican majority in the Senate!
I refer you back to the quote at the top of the post. That was August, 1967, when Kissinger said that. (Gorsuch was at Harvard Law much later, contemporary with me and Barack Obama. But I was across the street in the University Museums, not studying law!)
Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to look up what was going on that month, the month Kissinger said that, as well as the same month in the year of Gorsuch’s graduation from Harvard Law. Turns out to be pretty interesting. Here it is from Wikipedia:
1967
August 1 – Race riots in the United States spread to Washington, D.C.
August 9 – Vietnam War – Operation Cochise: United States Marines begin a new operation in the Que Son Valley.
August 21 – The People’s Republic of China announces that it has shot down United States planes violating its airspace.
August 23 – Jimi Hendrix’s debut album Are You Experienced is released in the United States.
August 25 – American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell is assassinated in Arlington, Virginia.
August 30 – Thurgood Marshall is confirmed as the first African American Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
1991 (selected)
August 6 – Tim Berners-Lee announces the World Wide Web project and software on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The first website, “info.cern.ch” is created.
August 7 – Shapour Bakhtiar, former prime minister of Iran, is assassinated.
August 8 – The Warsaw radio mast, the tallest construction ever built at the time, collapses.
August 13 – The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (or “Super Nintendo”) is released in the United States.
August 19+ – Dissolution of the Soviet Union:
August 25 – Serbian aggression (Yugoslav People’s Army and Chetniks) starts
August 25 – Student Linus Torvalds posts messages to Usenet newsgroup about the new operating system kernel he has been developing.
August 29 – Boris Yeltsin bans and dissolves the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
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, but at close to half the price.
