Up From Facebook

 It's well-known the Black Americans are hard to enroll in clinical studies. Now, the challenge is to get Black Americans vaccinated for COVID-19. No, it's not about the Tuskegee syphilis study. “It's ‘Oh, Tuskegee, Tuskegee, Tuskegee,’ and it's mentioned every single time,” says Karen Lincoln, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California. “We make these assumptions that it's Tuskegee. We don't ask people.” When she asks the Black seniors she works with in Los Angeles about the vaccine, Tuskegee rarely comes up. People in the community are more interested in talking about contemporary racism and barriers to health care, she says, while it seems to be mainly academics and officials who are preoccupied with the history of Tuskegee. “It's a scapegoat,” Lincoln says. “It’s an excuse. If you continue to use it as a way of explaining why many African Americans are hesitant, it almost absolves you of having to learn more, do more, involve oth...

 I created this blog because of the right-wing bias in Facebook's enforcement of their so-called community standards. Evidently, the right-wing bias continues. I posted this clip and link on my FB page. Wonder whether FB will block it (and me) "In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened. Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company's policies for "dangerous individuals and organizations," which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise...

  The blackouts in Texas had me wondering why, during increased demand, it was necessary to shut off functional power plants. Indeed, the claim was that if this wasn't done, the generators would be damaged. Turns out, my favorite blogger Kevin Drum wondered the same thing, but neither he nor I have the electrical engineering chops to suss it out. Fortunately, a reader posted an explanation on Kevin's blog: "The fundamental reason why grid operators have to resort to induced blackouts to protect their generation stations (and why it's sometimes done automatically) is that AC frequency management is everything in grid safety. Every generation hooked to the grid that uses physical motion (typically a turbine) has huge, expensive, precise turbines turning at some local multiple of 60Hz, and all of them are putting out AC whose waves are synchronized with one another. A small gas plant in El Paso phase peaks within a few milliseconds of when the steam turbines at the Comanc...

Just finished reading “India After Gandhi: The history of the world’s largest democracy” by Ramachandra Guha. It clocks in at 919 pages, although only 783 pages are text, the rest being the acknowledgements and endnotes. The book covers the period between 1938 and 2016. India was born in 1947. It’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, steered the new nation through the consolidation of what had been over 500 states and principalities, convincing their rulers to give up power to the center. In a new nation with over 20 different languages and six major religions, the magnitude of his accomplishments are hard to overstate. When I was growing up, Nehru was regarded with deep suspicion in the US because in the bi-polar world of the time, Nehru insisted on remaining non-aligned. Thus, the US became allied with the military dictatorship in Pakistan, pushing India towards alliance with the USSR. This is not to say that the history of India after Gandhi was untroubled—far from it. Violence,...

  Conspiracy theories and cults are nothing new in America. For those of us who are concerned about the latest conspiracy theory-driven cult, QAnon, it is useful to recall that the John Birch Society was founded on a conspiracy theory that the US government--up to and including then-president Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren--was infiltrated by international communism. Yes, that seems quaintly amusing and childishly outrageous now, but back then, America was in peak Cold War. People believed this sort of claptrap, the way people apparently believe that the Democratic Party sex traffics in children and engages in human sacrifice. What happened to the JBS? Importantly, William F. Buckley, Jr, editor of the National Review, finally recognized that the JBS posed an existential threat to conservatism, which he was trying to build as a political movement. Ultimately, Buckley publicly repudiated the JBS and rallied sufficient support among conservatives and grudging support among...

  I have this file on my laptop to which I add quotes from time to time. I've always loved Joni Mitchell's songs, both for the melodies and the lyrics. Behind those lyrics is a perceptive and searching intellect. This is one of her quotes I saved and just re-discovered: "Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line. But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was f...

  With the outcome not in doubt, the whole trial was theater. Trump, his GOP enablers and the Trumpenproletariat will consider the acquittal as vindication. Are they right? The first test will be the 2022 midterms. If the Trump apologists are turned out in large numbers, they will be proven wrong. In political terms, that's an eternity from now.

  The GOP is suddenly concerned about deficits and the national debt. What happened? The executive and legislative branches are now in Democratic Party hands. Ronald Reagan taught us that Republican deficits and debts don't matter. But apparently Democratic deficits and debts do. So should we be concerned about the effect of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill on the economy? Is hyperinflation just around the corner? Look, what matters isn’t the absolute size of the national debt, it’s the ratio of the debt to GDP. That ratio was higher in the US in the years following WWII and hyperinflation didn’t happen then. But there are other reasons not to hyperventilate about the current national debt. I’ll let Kevin Drum explain: “Japan has had massively higher debt than the US for the past two decades, and the price they've paid for this is . . . close to nothing. Japan, like the US, issues its own currency, which helps, and they have a culture of saving that supports their debt. The ...

  The advent of genome editing technology promises to transform human health, livestock and agriculture, and to eradicate pest species. This transformative power demands urgent scrutiny and resolution of the ethical conflicts attached to the creation and release of engineered genomes. Here, I discuss the ethics surrounding the transformative CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing technology in the contexts of human genome editing to eradicate genetic disease and of gene drive technology to eradicate animal vectors of human disease. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/bmc-2021-0001/html?fbclid=IwAR2OXjmI26e5znJAczaBTjjqVzfVkpCup7ybUBOZP7IzG_HQzT3Z6MdU-QM