Up From Facebook

My brother Tom posted that Fauci should resign. At first, my reaction was that Fauci probably sees himself as a bulwark against further Trump mischief, but now I agree with Tom. Fauci's most responsible path is to resign as a vote of no confidence in the Trump administration's goal of putting stock market optics ahead of public health. "The New York Times reported Thursday that Fauci has “told associates that the White House had instructed him not to say anything else without clearance.” This after President Donald Trump and Fauci gave differing messages on the virus — Trump said nobody knew whether the situation might get better or worse, while Fauci described COVID-19 as “a serious virus.”" https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/white-house-reportedly-shutting-down-media-appearances-disease-expert-dr-fauci?fbclid=IwAR3JwMFtBcuocMIj9Rm5JYEhlauHhJlVzH_DbvULj9-VmnrnyvdaSYE9H9U

In an election year, the economy is justly a focus for attention and discussion. Especially at the presidential election level, where the office has relatively little to do with the economy, but everyone credits or blames the president for the economy. So when a writer for the WaPo purports to explain middle class anxiety, it gets our attention. But the egregious and avoidable reverse engineering of statistics to make your point serves nobody. Matt Yglesias does the honors: https://www.vox.com/2020/2/25/21151335/oren-cass-cost-of-thriving

" As you can see, white cops are always more likely to use force than black cops. But here’s what’s even more interesting: as the black percentage of a neighborhood goes up, white officers increase their use of force far more than black officers. The blacker the neighborhood, the bigger the difference in use of force. T he difference is even more dramatic when it comes to guns. In white and mixed-race neighborhoods, white and black cops use their guns at about equal rates. But as neighborhoods become blacker, the use of guns by white officers skyrockets while the use of guns by black officers increases only slightly." Shame https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/02/do-white-cops-treat-black-suspects-worse-than-white-suspects/

Inspired by a deep thread discussion with a FB friend, I thought I'd call this to your attention. The "broken windows" and "stop and frisk" policing in NYC have been credited with reducing crime in NYC, even though crime was dropping during the same period across the US. Another hypothesis was that Roe v Wade caused the abortion of a generation of would-be criminals. Apart from the dubious logic, it doesn't explain how a similar decline in crime occurred in Europe, which wasn 't affected by RvW.  A better hypothesis is that leaded gas was phased out about 20 years before the decline. Lead is a known neurotoxin. Neonates exposed to high levels have reduced intellectual capacity and blunted judgement. As lead disappeared from the air, a generation of kids were born and raised that were spared brain poisoning and grew up with more self-control. Since similar bans occurred throughout the world, it explains the declines in crime about 20 years later, when...

Viruses are basically selfish DNA. Like transposable elements, they use cellular machinery to perpetuate themselves. They cannot exist apart from cellular hosts. Indeed, this inconvenient fact posed a problem when viruses were first implicated in human disease, since they could not satisfy the part of Koch's postulates that required that the etiological agent be cultured in purified form. So I read with interest the new genomics of bacteriophages and the discovery that some have huge genomes that carry functions previously not found in these viruses. Do these finding "blur the boundaries of life?" Absolutely not. They merely expand the boundaries of parasitic DNA properties. The title of this iflscience post is just clickbait, peeps. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/hundreds-of-new-viruses-with-enormous-genomes-blur-the-boundaries-of-life/?fbclid=IwAR3wajKaWwmpCSIBqgm-UyJQtDqrcmjnmfoTeqNTwVhLYqDZ6wTh3qLG3mk

My undergraduate major was microbiology. I moved up the phylogenetic scale somewhat after that, but I've always retained an interest in viruses. They aren't really "alive," they're more like selfish DNA. But they certainly do more than their fair share of damage. So where did the latest Coronavirus epidemic come from? Bats, it seems. But there may have been an intermediary. Bottom line? Stay away from open air markets that sell live animals. " The current outbreak — which has grown to infect  45,000 people and kill 1,117  — is thought to have started in a food market in Wuhan, China. But uncertainties remain: Researchers are still not sure which animal started the outbreak. DNA evidence suggests it’s likely related to bats (which also were the origin of the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003). But there’s also new, unconfirmed evidence, that the  illegal pangolin trade  may be implicated." https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/2/12/21133560/coronavi...

Medicare for All makes for a great campaign slogan, but the reality is that it will be a long slog to implement. The chief barrier to its implementation is the stranded asset problem; there is an immense amount of wealth tied up in the insurance industry. The people who stand to lose financially will oppose this and will demonize the supporters. "Some form of single-payer health insurance makes sense for the United States. It’s fine for Democrats to say this. But they need  to acknowledge that putting such a plan in place will take time and needs to be done carefully to build voter support, overcome resistance by vested interests, limit job losses, and avoid major implementation disasters. If we play our cards right, we can build on the Affordable Care Act and position ourselves to have some kind of single payer system in place in 20 years. If we overplay our hand, we may end up with four more years of Trump. My guess is that most of the candidates for the Democratic nominat...

Why do so many virus epidemics seem to be coming from China? Well, viruses thrive where the population density is high, and Wuhan is larger than any American city. But there are also the unregulated fresh air markets: " Dozens of species that rarely, if ever, come in contact with one another in the wild ― fish, turtles, snakes, bamboo rats, bats, even foxes and wolf cubs ― are confined in close quarters, waiting to be butchered and sold. The animals are often stressed, dehydrated and shedding live viruses; the floors, stalls and tables are covered in blood, feces and other bodily fluids." Viruses don't observe international boundaries. This is a threat to humanity. Also too: " The human health threat isn’t so much subsistence hunting of wild animal meat or the presence of any single exotic species at markets, but rather commercialization of the wildlife trade, Knights said. Each new species brought into a crowded market represents another set of pathogens and vi...

I first started following Matt Yglesias when he blogged as a Harvard undergraduate philosophy major. He's smart, for sure. His judgement is a bit uneven, but his writing is provocative and well worth reading. Here's his take on the Trump impeachment. If you want to be smart, read it. https://www.vox.com/2019/11/5/20914280/impeachment-trump-explained

As a scientist, I'm unafraid of the new and novel. Nature favors not the strongest or the swiftest, but the one that best adapts to change. But not all change is good, and when there's a bunch of money pushing the change, it's time to grab your wallet and start asking questions. " But the spectacle has highlighted a much more consequential problem in America, something I have coined the bullshit economy. We’ve seen elements of it all over the place. When MoviePass offered unlimited screenings for ten bucks a month, when Uber gets an $82 billion valuation for a low-margin taxi business it has never made a dime on, when WeWork implodes after the slightest scrutiny into its numbers, that’s the bullshit economy at work. We have seen the farcical bullshit of Juicero and the consequential bullshit of Theranos. Even at the highest levels, bullshit pervades, in fraudulent advertising metrics and fake numbers peddled to convince the world to siphon cash through Facebook and G...

Short answer: no. You may have read some scary stuff about the latest coronavirus coming out of Wuhan China, and the HIV virus. I'm not gonna repeat the scare-mongering rumors here. I'll just post this link, which explains things pretty well: "So the facts are that Wuhan coronavirus may have some new additions to it, but they’re common bits and pieces found in tons of viruses — not just HIV — and there’s no proof that they even have anything to do with how the Wuhan coronavirus behaves.  And there’s definitely no proof that they were put there on purpose." Especially if you work for the New York Times MASSIVESCI.COM Don't believe the conspiracy theories you hear about coronavirus and HIV Especially if you work for the New York Times

The link is very long, but if you plan to live in the United States for the next 20 years, you need to read it. Here's a teaser: " My past experience obliges me to give warnings, not predictions. As when I marched against Putin in 2005, raising the alarm about his turn toward despotism, I want to be proven wrong. I would like nothing better than to be called hysterical, a crank, a chessplayer who couldn’t see five moves ahead—if it meant that the American people had heeded the warning signs and acted in time to avoid a repeat of the painful recent history I witnessed. Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate will send a message to the country and the world; the only question is what that message will be. No matter what Trump does, his GOP defenders will never abandon him if he looks politically invincible, and he will spawn more imitators, both at home and abroad. Back in 1974, Richard Nixon’s resignation in the face of impeachment proceedings so stunned Leonid Brezhnev and t...