Tag Archives: world

Late Night Miscellany—Powered by Dexamethasone!

by IrwinKDIDa Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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I am currently taking a drug that appears to be supercharging my brain. I even almost got into a Twitter argument today, which is surely the biggest waste of gray matter known to man. But I was full of energy, so off I went. I was also full of energy all last night, and I have to say you guys are all a bunch of slackers. At 3 am there were no new blog posts, no one making clever remarks on Twitter, no new email, no nothing. I was reduced to reading a book. If this keeps up, I’m going to have to make more friends in Australia and Europe to pick up the slack.

So anyway, let’s see what’s going on right now. First off, here is Donald Trump explaining how politics works:

At a meeting with The Times’s editorial writers, Mr. Trump talked about the art of applause lines. “You know,” he said of his events, “if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.”

The charming thing is that he’s willing to admit this on the record to a bunch of reporters. He just doesn’t care, and he knows his supporters don’t care either. Basically, they’re all in on the con and enjoying themselves, so a little peek behind the scenes—”The Making of the Trump Campaign”—just piques their interest rather than disillusioning them. Not that they read the Times in the first place, so it probably doesn’t matter much what he says to their editorial board anyway.

And speaking of Trump, here is Thoreau explaining that he loves the guy because he’s smashing the Republican Party for us:

Some of you might doubt that Trump is deliberately doing good, and you’re probably right. But, hell, when the Hulk is smashing bad guys, do we really know for sure that he’s acting on his good side rather than just smashing for fun? Still, he’s smashing what we need him to smash. Well, same for Trump. I mean, FFS, he already dashed Scott Walker’s hopes of ever having a political career in Washington. That alone should make him the greatest liberal hero of the 21st century thus far.

What else? Gallup is always good for a laugh. They report this weekend that 50 percent of Americans think they’re better off economically today than they were eight years ago. But wait. Here’s how it breaks down by party affiliation:

In other words, this poll result is completely meaningless. I think it’s safe to say that both Democrats and Republicans have done about equally well over the past eight years, and Gallup even presents some more detailed polling results that pretty much prove this. But when you ask a very general question, even if it’s on a specific topic, what people hear is “Do you like President Obama?” And that’s the question they’re answering. It’s all pure affinity mongering, and I’m sure the results would have been the mirror opposite if the question were asked in 2008 instead of 2016.

And as long as we’re at the Gallup site, here are the top ten results for economic confidence by state in 2015. I’m showing them to you for two reasons. First, California handily beat Texas. Hah! Second, Washington DC is simply on another planet—with Beltway neighbors Virginia and Maryland also doing pretty well, though in a more earthbound way. Conservatives are always griping about the way that folks who feed at the federal trough always manage to do great no matter how poorly the rest of the country is doing, and it seems like they might have a point.

And now I’m off to bed. Whether I’m also off to sleep remains an open question. I’ll let you know Monday morning.

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Late Night Miscellany—Powered by Dexamethasone!

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As W.H.O. Declares Zika a Global Health Emergency, a Look at the World’s Failed Mosquito Policies

by Myrna Posted on February 1, 2016

Areas stricken in Zika virus outbreak were once free of the mosquito that carries this and other dangerous diseases. Continue reading:   As W.H.O. Declares Zika a Global Health Emergency, a Look at the World’s Failed Mosquito Policies ; ; ;

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As W.H.O. Declares Zika a Global Health Emergency, a Look at the World’s Failed Mosquito Policies

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As W.H.O. Weighs Zika as Global Emergency, a Look at the World’s Failed Mosquito Policies

by Myrna Posted on February 1, 2016

Areas stricken in Zika virus outbreak were once free of the mosquito that carries this and other dangerous diseases. Excerpt from:  As W.H.O. Weighs Zika as Global Emergency, a Look at the World’s Failed Mosquito Policies ; ; ;

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As W.H.O. Weighs Zika as Global Emergency, a Look at the World’s Failed Mosquito Policies

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Bracing for Defeat, Santorum Uses the Waning Spotight to Reminisce

by Hans38883997 Posted on January 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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On the edge of Sioux City, Iowa, in the muddy fields off Highway 20, a dirt road leads to large yellow mega-church atop a modest hill. It was there, at the conservative Cornerstone World Outreach, that Rick Santorum finally got his standing ovation.

Four years ago, the former senator from Pennsylvania was poised for a surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses. He topped Mitt Romney with the support of evangelical voters, among them the controversial pastor of Cornerstone, Rev. Cary Gordon, whose influence among evangelicals in the state draws presidential contenders to seek his endorsement.

Gordon endorsed Santorum four years ago. The two have traveled to Israel together, and Santorum’s campaign they are good friends. But in 2016, the pastor has chosen not to back a candidate. In a long and winding article published on TheIowaRepublican blog this week, Gordon, an immigration hard-liner, blasted Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump as all being too weak on the issue. (Cruz, who is working hard to woo the types of evangelicals who are influenced by Gordon, might have the most to lose from his decision to stay out of the race.) Although Gordon did not endorse Santorum this time, he did welcome him on Sunday, and allowed Santorum to preach to several hundred listeners in his pews.

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Bracing for Defeat, Santorum Uses the Waning Spotight to Reminisce

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Lead and Race In Flint—And Everywhere Else

by ElbaKuester Posted on January 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Marcy Wheeler comments today on the lead disaster in Flint: “Think about how effects of lead poisoning feeds the stereotypes about race and class used to disdain the poor.”

Yep. Lead poisoning is equally bad for everyone, but certain groups were far more exposed to lead poisoning than others. Here’s a chart showing the percentage of children who displayed elevated blood lead levels over the past four decades. The data is taken from various studies over the years that have reported data from the CDC’s long-running NHANES program:

All the rest of the data on lead poisoning is exactly what you’d expect. Not only is it higher among blacks than whites, but it’s higher in inner cities and it’s higher among low-income families. And of course, this is on top of all the social problems these kids already have from being black, poor, and living in rundown neighborhoods.

Needless to say, lead didn’t cause institutional racism. But lead sure made it worse. White children were severely affected by the postwar lead epidemic, but it produced nothing less than carnage among black kids. Before we finally got it under control in the late 80s, lead poisoning had created nearly an entire generation of black teenagers with lower IQs, more behavioral problems in school, and higher rates of violent behavior—which, as Wheeler says, feeds into already vicious stereotypes of African-Americans and the poor. The only good news is that as lead poisoning has declined, it’s declined in blacks more than among whites. The difference today between black and white kids is fairly modest.

But what about Flint? The big problem with lead is that it does its damage in children, and once the damage is done the brain never recovers. We’re seeing lower levels of violent crime today because most crime is committed between the ages of 17-25—and that age cohort was all born after 1990, when atmospheric lead had dropped close to zero. But the effects of lead continue to dog people in their 40s and 50s. Once it’s there, it’s there.

This is what makes Flint so scary: if elevated lead levels damage young children, they’ll be damaged forever. So how much damage was actually done? And how much damage is still being done?

Those are hard questions to answer for two reasons. First, we don’t have as much hard data as we’d like. Second, lead is a horror show. Nobody wants to say anything that quantifies the damage and runs the risk of minimizing it. Public health experts are dead serious when they say the only safe level of lead is zero. Because of this, they simply don’t want to publicly declare that any specific rise in elevated blood lead levels is…is…anything. I don’t want to say it either. It’s just bad, full stop, and it needs to be fixed.

That means I was surprised to see this in the New York Times today:

“Our kids are already rattled by every kind of toxic stress you can think of,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha said….She emphasized, however, that not every child exposed to lead would suffer ill effects. Kim Dietrich, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, said that based partly on the blood lead levels of children in Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s study, he did not think serious long-term health problems would be widespread.

I’ve spoken with Dietrich, and he’s not a guy who takes the effects of lead lightly. If he says the long-term effects in Flint are likely to be modest, I’d pay attention to him.

But why would the effects be modest? Three reasons. First, lead levels in Flint were elevated for about 18 months. That’s a long time, but it’s a lot less than having elevated levels for your entire childhood up to age five. Second, the use of filters and bottled water helped reduce the lead levels in the drinking water. And that in turn means that, third, the rise in kids with blood lead levels above 10 m/d was less than one percentage point—and the rise was less than three percentage points even if you use the more conservative level of 5 m/d. As recently as 2008, the levels seen during the Flint water crisis would have been cause for celebration.

And what about now? Data here is frustratingly hard to get. Marc Edwards, the water-treatment expert who first blew the whistle on Flint’s water supply, says that (a) Flint’s pipes are probably back in satisfactory shape now that water has been coming from Detroit for the past three months and is being properly treated, (b) the water is “much, much better than it was last August,” and (c) there’s a 50-50 chance it could even pass a full-bore federal testing regime. Beyond that, preliminary state data suggests that blood lead levels in children are now down to about where they were before the water crisis. That’s good news, but it’s tentative.

More recently, the US Public Health Service announced that 26 out of 4,000 water samples in Flint had lead levels above 150 parts per billion. This is important because above that level it’s possible that filters won’t work effectively. But it doesn’t really tell us much about current lead levels in Flint’s water. We can say that 99.4 percent of homes have levels below 150 ppb and are probably safe if the water is filtered. But how many are below the EPA “action level” of 15 ppb? And what’s the “90th percentile” lead level, the standard way of measuring lead in tap water? We don’t know any of that, even though 4,000 samples is enough to give us a pretty good idea. Overall, Flint’s water is obviously much improved, but it’s hard to say precisely how good or bad it still is.

Put this all together and what do we get? Several educated guesses:

At a public services level, the Flint water crisis was an unbelievable fiasco.
The long-term damage to Flint’s kids is very real, but probably not catastrophic.
The water today appears to be safe in nearly all homes that use a filter.
However, there are also a small number of homes with astronomical lead levels in their water. It’s unclear why, but these homes need to be the target of immediate crash remediation.

If anything positive comes out of the Flint debacle, it will be a better understanding of the dangers of lead. Ironically, though, it’s not lead pipes that are really the biggest problem nationwide. Thousands of towns and cities have old lead pipes, and they generally don’t cause any problems except when some bonehead decides to stop treating the water properly and the scale inside the pipes corrodes away. Rather, the biggest problems now are lead paint and lead in soil. Everyone knows about lead paint, and abatement programs are widely available. But lead in soil, the product of decades of leaded gasoline settling to the ground, just sits around forever and gets kicked back into the air every summer when the soil dries up. It remains a serious problem, and not surprisingly, it’s most serious in heavily black, urban neighborhoods that had the highest levels of lead poisoning in the first place. You can read more about this in my piece about lead and crime (scroll to the bottom) or in this recent Vox piece by Matt Yglesias specifically about lead in soil.

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Lead and Race In Flint—And Everywhere Else

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Three Things I’m Still Waiting For

by CorazonUMS Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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  1. Donald Trump’s new corporate policy allowing unrestricted carry at his golf resorts.
  2. A look at the “very nice place” where Trump keeps all the Bibles that people send him.
  3. A list of the “25 different stories” documenting his pre-invasion opposition to the Iraq War.

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Three Things I’m Still Waiting For

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Pentagon Wants a Few More Troops to Fight ISIS

by Finley8505 Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Pentagon wants more troops for the fight against ISIS:

Pentagon officials have concluded that hundreds more trainers, advisers and commandos from the United States and its allies will need to be sent to Iraq and Syria in the coming months as the campaign to isolate the Islamic State intensifies.

….With the liberation of the Iraqi city of Ramadi last month, coupled with recent gains in northern Syria, senior military leaders say that the war effort can now focus on isolating — and then liberating — the Islamic State-held cities of Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria. “The reason we need new trainers or additional trainers is because that’s really the next step in generating the amount of combat power needed to liberate Mosul,” Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for the American military in Baghdad, said last week. “We know we will need more brigades to be trained, we’ll need more troops trained in more specialties.”

….The United States has had little success in persuading allies to provide more troops. But Mr. Carter and General Dunford do not want the United States to be the only source of more forces. With ISIS posing a threat to European countries, they are trying again.

I will note a couple of things. First, the Pentagon didn’t call for carpet bombing of ISIS strongholds. Perhaps they know something that Ted Cruz doesn’t? Second, the US has tried repeatedly to get more support from our allies, including those in the Middle East, and gotten nowhere. Some of them are willing to contribute a little bit of air power, but that’s it. None of them have any interest in providing troops. But perhaps Ted Cruz knows the magic words to change their minds.

Last night Cruz said his enthusiasm for carpet bombing wasn’t just tough talk. “It is a different, fundamental military strategy than what we’ve seen from Barack Obama.” Uh huh. In reality, it’s as much a “strategy” as Donald Trump’s call to “bomb the shit out of them.” It’s nothing more than big talk with nothing behind it. The Pentagon has no interest in this because they know it would be useless. They have a hard time finding enough worthwhile targets as it is.

However, there’s something that hasn’t gotten enough attention in all this: Cruz and Trump really have tapped into Ronald Reagan’s military spirit, and I’m surprised the rest of the field hasn’t figured this out. Reagan basically talked tough and spent a lot of money, but shied away from foreign interventions. The invasion of Grenada and his support for the Contras were small things that never risked any US troops. He pulled out of Beirut when things got tough there, never committed any troops to Afghanistan, negotiated with the Iranians, and to the horror of neocons everywhere, nearly concluded an arms deal in with Gorbachev in Reykjavík that would have banned all ballistic missiles.

This is what Cruz and Trump are doing. They talk tough and promise to spend a lot of money, but both of them explicitly want to avoid much in the way of serious intervention overseas. And this is popular. It’s what a lot of conservatives want. If the rest of the world wants to go to hell, let them go to hell in their own way. Bill Kristol is appalled, I’m sure, but his brand of endless intervention has never really caught on—and after Iraq and Afghanistan it’s even less popular than ever. Cruz and Trump have figured this out.

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Pentagon Wants a Few More Troops to Fight ISIS

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There May Soon Be More Plastic in the Oceans Than Fish

by WiltonIacovelli Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Discarded plastic will outweigh fish in the world’s oceans by 2050, according to a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. That is, unless overfishing moves the date up sooner.

The study, a collaboration with the World Economic Forum, found that 32 percent of plastic packaging escapes waste collection systems, gets into waterways, and is eventually deposited in the oceans. That percentage is expected to increase in coming years, given that the fastest growth in plastic production is expected to occur in “high leakage” markets—developing countries where sanitation systems are often unreliable. The data used in the report comes from a review of more than 200 studies and interviews with 180 experts.

Since 1964, global plastic production has increased 20-fold—311 million tons were produced in 2014—and production is expected to triple again by 2050. A whopping 86 percent of plastic packaging is used just once, according to the report’s authors, representing $80 billion to $120 billion in lost value annually. That means not only more plastic waste, but more production-related oil consumption and carbon emissions if the industry doesn’t alter its ways.

The environmental impact of plastic waste is already staggering: For a paper published in October, scientists considered 186 seabird species and predicted that 90 percent of the birds—whose populations have declined by two-thirds since 1950—consume plastic. Plastic bags, which are surprisingly degradable in warmer ocean waters, release toxins that spread through the marine food chain—and perhaps all the way to our dinner tables.

Most of the ocean’s plastic, researchers say, takes the form of microplastics—trillions of beads, fibers, and fragments that average about 2 millimeters in diameter. They act as a kind of oceanic smog, clouding the waters and coating the sea floor, and look a lot like food to small marine organisms.

In December, President Barack Obama signed a law banning microbeads, tiny plastic exfoliaters found in toothpaste and skin products that get flushed into waterways. But the MacArthur report urges plastic producers to step up and address the problem by developing products that are reusable and easily recycled—and that are less toxic in nature—and working to make compostable plastics more affordable.

The 2050 prediction is based on the assumption that global fisheries will remain stable over the next three decades, but a report released last week suggests that may be wishful thinking. Revisiting fishery catch rates from the last 60 years, Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia found that the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization drastically underestimates the amount of fish we pluck from the seas. The United Nations relies on official government data, which often only captures the activities of larger fishing operations. When the British Columbia researchers accounted for smaller fisheries, subsistence harvesting, and discarded catches, they calculated catches 53 percent larger than previously thought.

There was a glimmer of hope in the findings, though: The researchers write that fishing rates, after peaking in 1996, declined faster than previously thought—particularly among large-scale industrial fisheries. Whether that trend will hold is another story.

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There May Soon Be More Plastic in the Oceans Than Fish

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Parenting Tip of the Day: Buy a Backward-Facing Stroller For Your Baby

by LelaClvfcl Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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I just got back from my morning walk, and as usual I saw a bunch of parents taking their babies out for a walk in their strollers. And that got me wondering: does this have any benefit for babies? What do they get out of a daily ride around the neighborhood?

When I got home I tried to find some research on this point, but I failed. I guess I don’t know where to look. But I did find some research suggesting that if you’re going to take your baby for a stroll, you should do it in a stroller where the baby faces you rather than the outside world. Why? One researcher suggested (without data, apparently) that babies just felt more comfortable when they could see mommy or daddy. But two researchers have actual data. Although they come up with raw numbers that are different enough to make you wonder just how accurate any of this is, both Suzanne Zeedyk and Ken Blaiklock performed observational research of parents pushing their kids around and found that parents talked to their babies a lot more when the babies faced them.

This makes perfect sense, of course, and both Zeedyk and Blaiklock recommend parent-facing strollers because it encourages more interaction, which is a good thing. This doesn’t answer the question of whether taking your baby for a stroll has any effect one way or the other, but at least it suggests the best kind of stroller to get. Consider this your parenting tip of the day.

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Parenting Tip of the Day: Buy a Backward-Facing Stroller For Your Baby

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Are There Toxic Chemicals Lurking in Your North Face Jacket?

by Grady6963359742 Posted on January 27, 2016

It may come as a surpriseor perhaps not surprising at allthat a variety of toxic chemicals have been used to makeoutdoor gear like jackets, shoes, tents, backpacks, and even sleeping bags.

A new report by Greenpeace Germany has documented that “hazardous and persistent chemicals, dangerous to human health and the environment, have been found in the products of leading outdoor brands.”

Greenpeace tested 40 products purchased in 19 different countries and regions. Among the companies whose products were found to be tainted are The North Face, Patagonia, Mammut, Columbia and Haglofs.

The chemicals found embedded in the fabrics of the products these companies make are calledpoly- and per-fluoronated compounds, or PFCs. PFCs are synthetic chemical compounds that do not exist in nature. They are used by the outdoor gear industry to make products waterproof and dirt-repellent.

As effective as they may be, PFCs have serious human health and environmental impacts. These compounds can cause harm to reproduction, promote the growth of tumors, and affect the hormone system. The National Institute for Environmental Health Science reports that in animal studies PFCs also “reduce immune function; cause adverse effects on multiple organs, including the liver and pancreas; and cause developmental problems in rodent offspring exposed in the womb.”

The Minnesota Department of Health notes that PFCs “are extremely resistant to breakdown in the environment,” so once they are released, they persist for a very long time. They can get into the food chain of animals far from their source. PFCs have been found in animals like dolphins, in polar bear livers, and in human blood. They have also shown up in drinking water and in fish near textile factories in China where much of the clothing and gear is produced.

The gear is not believed to threaten you if you wear it. However, because we all live on one planet, and because once the chemicals are released they circulate all over the world, you could be exposed to themwhether you’ve bought the gear or are basically an innocent bystander. Certainly polar bears never wear Polar-tec, yet the chemicals have shown up in their bodies.

What Can You Do?

1) Ask the manufacturer of your gear whether they use PFC compounds for water proofing and repelling dirt. There’s not really much you can do if you already own the gear, other than return the gear to the manufacturer when you’re finished with it, but that’s better than tossing it in the trash.

2) Buy used gear. Since a big source of PFC pollution comesduring manufacturing, you can reduce the amount of new products manufactured – and new chemicals emitted – by buying gently used equipment and clothing.

3) Likewise, sell your used gear on EBay or Craig’s List, donate it, or take it to a thrift shop rather than throwing it away. Extend its life as long as possible.

4) Buy gear from companies that have pledged zero discharge of hazardous chemicals into the environment. There aren’t many of them, but one to look at is Paramo, which has issued a “Detox Commitment” that hopefully will inspire its competitors.

RELATED

Big-Brand Clothing Found Laced with Toxic Chemicals
Why You Should Wash Your Clothes Before You Wear Them

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Are There Toxic Chemicals Lurking in Your North Face Jacket?

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