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By now, the evidence for evolution (the idea that all life on earth is related by descent) is as extensive and robust as the evidence that sun is at the center of the solar system. Darwin's genius was to summon this evidence into a coherent thesis in the middle of the 19th century, long before plate tectonics and genome sequencing. Most attacks on evolution come from religious extremists. But Fox News presenter Lara Logan has fabricated her attack with an appeal to anti-semitism. She suggested that Charles Darwin was paid by the Jewish Rothschild family to invent the theory of evolution. ""Does anyone know who employed Darwin? Where does Darwinism come from?" Logan asked. "Look it up. The Rothschilds." "I'm just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory based on evidence," she added before saying that evolution is a chicken or egg debate and cannot be answered scientifically. "The Rothschilds were a prominent wealthy Jew...

The latest insurrection scandal is the 457 minute gap in the WH phone log. We already know who some of the people were who Trump talked to during that gap. Even if Trump was using a burner phone, the caller on the other end has a telecom phone record that could be subpoenaed. This has been known for months. It's hard to escape the impression that the Jan 6 committee and Merrick Garland are slow-walking any indictable evidence that implicates Trump directly.

In response to my post on a comment thread over at jabberwocking.com about the fact that Stalin, the longest ruler of the USSR, died of a stroke at the age of 74: "That’s the point. Alive, he held everything together through fear (in no small part fear of Beria, whom everyone, including Stalin, feared). But it was a combination of their powers that was important. "Stalin’s death created openings and a structure for power, which Beria lost. But apart from the pent up resentment and hatred of Beria, two things were clear to the Russian elites who’d served Stalin: Beria couldn’t simply be allowed to walk away. There was a moment of weakness and a power vacuum which created a very small window of opportunity to kill him before he could regain his footing and reassert his power. Beria alive and taking revenge was unthinkable so everyone who mattered set aside their differences and claims to power to kill him. "The second thing everyone one understood was that once the deed w...

Even "mild" Covid is something you don't want to catch. About 20-25% of covid deaths are of fully vaccinated people. "At six months after infection, after taking their risk factors into account, people with breakthrough infections had lower rates of death and long-term lingering health problems than COVID-19 patients who had not been vaccinated. But compared to people who never had COVID-19, those who had breakthrough infections had a 53% higher risk of death and a 59% higher risk of having at least one new medical condition, particularly problems affecting the lungs and other organs. Even when breakthrough infections did not require hospitalization, the increased risks of death and lasting effects were "not trivial," the research team reported on Monday on Research Square ahead of peer review. "The overall burden of death and disease following breakthrough COVID-19 will likely be substantial," the researchers conclude." https://www.reuters.c...

Here's a clip from a paywalled post at TPM writing about a paywalled post in Le Parisien. "The rule of these is that Macron has to sit and listen to the extemporaneous lectures, it’s highly sensitive diplomatic exchanges after all. It’s an interesting if uh not totally great data point as to Putin’s mindset and muddled motivations. It gives off the eerie vibe of someone lost in his hall of mirrors, with grandiose historical ideas and paranoia about respect and such. In essence, the article depicts Putin as a weirdo comments section guy — I’m sure you are familiar with the type — rather than some canny geopolitical poker player. He comes across as unmoored. As I said, it’s not reassuring at all."

The latest brouhaha surrounding Ginni Thomas should come as no surprise. She's been a right-wing extremist, just like her husband Clarence Thomas, just more shameless and loquacious. The January 6 committee is considering a subpoena, but Liz Cheney may obstruct that. We'll see, but all they have to do is slow-walk it, since the committee disappears when the GOP takes over the house after the midterms. This should make all American patriots very angry. Although the politicization of the SCOTUS has been obvious at least since Antonin Scalia was appointed, it has reached a new apotheosis with the Trump appointees. Anchoring this is Clarence Thomas, whose shameless partisanship will be exercised on matters that concern his wife's actions. Here's the nut graf from a paywalled piece over at TPM: "The Thomases have for decades been indifferent to the need for Justices and their spouses to maintain at least some remove from active partisan politics. But attempts to overth...

I've never suffered from clinical depression, but I've known several people with clinical depression. Not the blues, but actual disabling can't-get-out-of-bed-for-days depression. There are drugs, but the people who use them will tell you that they have unpleasant side-effects. I hope this therapy holds up. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/new-treatment-for-depression-causes-remission-in-almost-80-percent-of-patients/?fbclid=IwAR0a27vxkGEAwKQY8Bs3O11Lo1-6ugoa-5fTtqxaYGuDFsSLBSMqW6mLF3Y

I want to believe that Russia is signaling a retreat from the goal of toppling the Ukraine government, but the cynical me says this is just propaganda. "Not long after Mr. Biden arrived in Poland, the Russian military signaled that it might be reducing its war aims. After a month of a grinding war in which Russian forces have been met by unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance and have failed to capture major cities across the country, Maj. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi said Russia would now be focused on defeating Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting a war since 2014." https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/25/world/ukraine-russia-war

Genetic testing and embryo selection in the process of in vitro fertilization is increasingly common. In my recent review of CRISPR gene editing in BioMolecular Concepts, I endorse the argument that reproductive CRISPR editing isn’t therapeutic because it doesn’t prevent genetic disease, and that embryo selection is an option for nearly all couples who want to conceive their own children. Of course, there’s money to be made with genetic testing and embryo selection. In addition to single-gene traits, some companies are offering testing for multifactorial traits, where the risk/benefit analysis hasn’t been rigorously done. This is a problem, but I’m sure that anyone who has the money can find a country where they can get this service already. “These tests demand a broader societal discussion. By nature of their complexity, polygenic risk scores also open the door to evaluating not only disease risk, but traits such as height or intelligence. At present, not enough is known about the gen...

The current war visited on Ukraine by Russia is objectively appalling and deserves our condemnation. It is not excused by the fact that the US military did the same thing in Iraq, also with no justification. "The scenes of the horrible destruction that Russia is inflicting on Ukraine’s civilian cities, from Kharkiv to Mariupol, and the killing of nearly 1,000 civilians, including nearly 100 children, have tugged at the world’s heart strings — and rightly so. Nineteen years ago, when the George W. Bush regime unleashed its “Shock and Awe” campaign on Iraqi cities, there was more celebration in the US press than condemnation. John T. Correll at Air Force Magazine wrote in 2003, , “The spectacular bombardment the world watched on television the first night was part of a broader attack that sent 1,000 strike sorties against military targets in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, and elsewhere.” https://www.juancole.com/2022/03/deplores-russias-spectacular.html

  No nation has friends, only interests. ~Charles de Gaulle There have been a lot of chatter about where China stands on the Russia-Ukraine war and the Russian sanctions. Pace Willard "Mitt" Romney, China is a bigger threat to the US than Russia; the last thing we want to do is push Russia and China closer together. Here's a think piece about the current state of play. The nut graf: "While China’s economy is far more robust than Russia’s, the Xi government is still not able to risk the same global ostracism as Moscow. China’s ambitious economic expansion plans are based on a globalised economy. It is in Chinese interests now to protect that economy from a volatile period exacerbated by the pandemic, supply chain questions and a conflict which is already rattling numerous markets around the world." https://www.juancole.com/2022/03/ukraine-bailing-russia.html

Airline pilots are suing the CDC over masking requirements. Here are some of their words: "Wearing a mask before and during flight causes us numerous medical deficiencies," the suit claimed. "Extended wearing of a mask, which has become a part of routine life, has led to the emergence of 'mask fatigue.' Mask fatigue is defined as the lack of energy that accompanies, and/or follows prolonged wearing of a mask." Tell that to the surgeons and support staff who wear masks continuously in operating rooms throughout the world. The Whipple Procedure, the surgical removal of a cancerous pancreas, can easily take 6 hours, all under continuous making conditions. These pilots are snowflakes. https://www.businessinsider.com/jetblue-american-airlines-southwest-pilots-sue-cdc-federal-mask-mandate-2022-3

While Republicans in the South seem bent on seeing their constituents die of COVID, it's easy to be deceived into thinking this is just a geographical problem. It's not. Anywhere the GOP is in control, science is abandoned and replaced with politics. I'm adding New Hampshire to my list of states to avoid. "The final approval of the bill would also mean that some COVID patients would no longer have to rely on the process of purchasing human-grade Ivermectin from foreign countries in order to treat their symptoms. "There is also a provision in the bill that protects doctors from any potential discipline for prescribing the drug. "The bill now goes to the state Senate, which is also controlled by Republicans. "New Hampshire's state legislature is working on a number of other COVID-related bills as well, including one that would ban the enforcement of any federal vaccine mandate. Members of the assembly also recently rejected a bill that would have added...

Putin is now only second to Stalin as the longest ruler of Russia. Putin is on record as lamenting the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a historical mistake, and his actions in the past 20 years have been interpreted as an effort to reassemble the broken Humpty-Dumpty of the USSR. There are several problems with this. Stalin was in his 40s when he succeeded Lenin, while Putin is nearly 70. After 20 years, Putin's leadership vision has become ossified, which is what brought down the Soviet Union. In addition, the media of Stalin were print, radio and television, while the media of Putin is the internet, which is much faster and impossible to block. And Stalin held regular ruthless purges; Putin has certainly assassinated opponents, but he has so far only arrested those he deems responsible for the failing Ukraine invasion. Why is Putin not resorting to Stalinesque purges and brutality? Could it be because he realizes that his biggest threat is internal, and there are lines that St...

"A handful of studies have noted how humans tend to be less open to experience as they age. One such study found that openness to experience tends to ramp up during our teenage years and then eventually decrease after our early twenties. "Open to experience" is one of the Big Five Personality Traits. It denotes our sense of curiosity, our preference for variety, our appreciation of aesthetics, and our desire to experience unknown things." I've always embraced novelty. Not for its own sake--not obviously bad novelty--but having my values, ideas and tastes challenged by novelty has always held an allure. There are very few songs, especially the ones popular in my teens and 20's, that I care to hear again. I've rarely read a book twice. I seldom watch a film again, no matter how much I liked it. I love reading about new discoveries and assumptions that have been overturned by new discovery. I'm an avid listener to KDHX, where as one DJ puts it, they pla...

“In 1984, Tracey Meares had the highest grade-point average in her class and was prepared to be her class' valedictorian. It was of particular significance to her because she would be the first Black person to claim the title in Springfield High School's history. But the title was denied to Meares, leaving a Springfield documentary filmmaker decades later to piece together a story of systemic racism. The film, No Title for Tracey, premiers April 16 at the Hoogland Center for the Arts. Today, Meares is a professor at Yale Law School. She is the first Black woman to hold a tenured professorship there.” President Biden has nominated a Black woman to the SCOTUS. The Senate GOP is already ginning up a phony attack on her as sympathetic to child pornographers. It doesn’t have to be true or even make sense. But in America, if you are a Black person of achievement—and especially a female Black person of achievement—you must be blocked at all costs. Same as it ever was. Feh https://www....

It would be a good idea for everyone to drive less, walk or use public transportation more, carpool more and own cars that get better gas mileage. This has been true for decades and remains true today. Gas prices have spiked a bit recently, although in real dollars, only to about twice what they were in 1950. And cars get much better mileage today, so the net effect on the median pocketbook is about the same as in 1950. That said, it would be better for the environment if everyone drove less and bought locally produced food that would reduce trucking fuel use. While the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine makes moral people want to do something on behalf of Ukrainians, the idea that cutting back on gasoline use in the US will have any benefit for Ukraine is specious. Duncan Black is typically blunt and caustic about this, but he's not wrong: ". . . the trend of celebrities and others posting things like, "I WOULD GLADLY PAY HIGHER GAS PRICES FOR THE PEOPLE OF UKRAINE" is po...

I just finished Robert Service’s biography of Lenin. The “Marxism” of Lenin was not Marxist at all. Classical Marxism holds that capitalism must achieve a high level of industrialization before the workers can overturn the landlords and factory owners and collectivize the fruits of labor for the benefit of workers. Like Mao, Lenin retrofitted socialist revolution to the circumstances. Since Russia at the end of the Romanov dynasty was still a semi-feudal rural society, Lenin decided to dispense with Marx’s preconditions and asserted that Russia was ripe for socialist revolution. While he was certainly right that the people were ready to overthrow the Czar, Lenin had to destroy any attempts at a democratic successor government to ruthlessly impose single-party Bolshevism with himself and his cronies Trotsky and Stalin at the top. This meant that the masses had to be firmly and correctly guided by their Bolshevik overlords—guidance in this case implemented by summary execution of anyone ...

  Here's an optimistic take on events in Ukraine. I don't mean optimistic in the sense that things will be bloodless from now on, I mean that he argues cogently that Putin does not want to reconstitute the USSR, invade NATO countries and provoke thermonuclear war. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine?source=cm_paid_social_midfunnelcampaign_broad_single_control&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=cm_paid_social_tny_paid_content_midfunnel&utm_social-type=paid&utm_brand=thenewyorker&fbclid=IwAR3ZbLXRkLZWQm3m2jY0qbxzsYfKfrb1A-X93WSMn4FREJc6-YwI-bhvqfQ

It gives me no pleasure to call out the Republican Party as the party of anti-democracy, but that's what it has been ever since Reagan was elected. I was born in the Eisenhower administration, helmed by a Republican who was unambiguously antifa. I have never been a Republican or an admirer of a party that, in the words of William F. Buckely, Jr: " . . . stands athwart history, yelling Stop . . ." But I admit that in many ways, I'm deeply conservative. I won't go into why that's true, but circumstances have placed the US and the champions of Democracy (including me) in existential peril, and as a patriot, I call out the party that enabled it. The American GOP aided and abetted this: "It’s important to understand that the sociopathic Putin is the sole cause of so much present suffering in the world—and that the Republican Party has been his domestic adjuncts here in the United States—because understanding this helps explain why under no circumstances can Pu...

Francis Fukuyama predicted "the end of history" with the fall of the Soviet Union. I don't know that he ever retracted this, but his book sold well. Here are some of his latest prophecies: "I’ll stick my neck out and make several prognostications: • Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks. The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slo...

There are always more people awaiting organs than there are donors. Until the technologies for xenotransplantation and/or 3D printed organs are perfected, triage will be the rule. Good to see some policy changes have improved prospects for the most desperate. A few years ago, a gastroenterologist friend told me that alcoholic patients are often denied liver transplants. While I understand the reasoning, I'm glad I don't have to make decisions like that. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/97613?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2022-03-12&eun=g1700464d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Morning%20%202022-03-12&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition_Morning

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." ~Carl von Clausewitz When the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin forbade the evacuation of civilians from cities on the grounds that the Red Army would fight harder to defend their fellow citizens. It was an experiment without a control, but if you accept the logic, then Putin is making a mistake by preventing the evacuation of Ukrainian cities. I'm not sure that this link adds much in the way of insight or prophecy, but I'll post it anyway. Here's the ambivalent nut graf: "Ultimately, it appears that this war will not end quickly, as it will take a considerable amount of time for either side to make the other give up. Either the Russian military’s transition to indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets succeeds in eroding Ukrainian resistance, or battlefield casualties and domestic economic woes succeed in defeating Russia’s will to fight. Neither outcome is likely in the coming weeks and ...

"But the dissent authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, along with, to a lesser degree, a concurrence from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, offer a dark indication as to where the right wing of the bench would like to go. The dissenters say that North Carolina Republicans had the stronger argument and likely would have won on the merits to get the court’s map invalidated. “That some of the justices rejected outright state court interpretations of state statutes is, frankly, a power grab by the Supreme Court,” Carolyn Shapiro, law professor and founder of Chicago-Kent’s Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States, told TPM. “It’s an astonishing shift of authority over election law from state courts to federal courts, but primarily to the Supreme Court.” Kavanaugh writes that he wants to take up the case, or one like it, in the future, but that it’s currently too close to an election for the federal judiciary to intervene. Gorsuch, ...

"The authors examined self-reported data from both VAERS and v-safe on 298,792,852 individuals in the U.S. who received Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. Of the 340,522 reports to VAERS, 92% were non-serious, 6.6% were serious (non-death), and 1.3% were deaths. "However, Gee's group noted caveats to the deaths, namely that reporting on any deaths after vaccination was required since the products were under emergency use authorization, but no unusual patterns were detected in the cause of death reports. They added that 80% of deaths were among adults ages 60 and up. They also pointed out that a different surveillance system demonstrated no increased risk of non-COVID-19 mortality in vaccinated people." https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccine/97545?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2022-03-08&eun=g1700464d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Morning%20%202022-03-08&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition_Morning

Electric vehicles are a good trend insofar a the world transitions from carbon-based energy. But I had a FB exchange with an EV owner who was extolling the fact that he wasn't paying for petroleum-based fuel. I don't know where he lives, but here in Missouri, we still get ca. 70% of our electricity from coal. Coal is not only polluting as it burns, but coal mining is environmentally destructive and the coal ash residue is toxic and must be stored indefinitely. He suggested that we could fuel an EV using our solar panels. Well, we could, but then we'd have to use more coal-based electricity to fuel our house, so that doesn't fix anything. The economics of rooftop solar aren't yet realistic for most people. We got our 22 panels nine years ago, when Ameren paid half the cost and we could take a 30% tax rebate on the remainder. Even then, we won't get our investment back in nominal dollars for another 2-3 years, and that doesn't even take into account the fact t...

The time is running out for the House 6 January committee. When the GOP regains control after the November election, the committee will be disbanded. The only thing that will matter is what cases are taken on by the DOJ, which the GOP won't control, at least until after the 2024 election. From a comment over at jabberwocking.com: "There’s an immense amount of published material (including the Mueller report) implicating Trump in an immense amount of criminal activities, including his well documented role in the abortive January 6th coup. There’s absolutely no indication that the DOJ has the slightest interest in investigating any of this. . . In the long run, Merrick Garland is doing far more damage to the rule of law than Donald Trump."

Pet hamsters probably carried the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 into Hong Kong and sparked a human COVID-19 outbreak, according to a genomic analysis of viral samples from the rodents. The research confirms earlier fears that a pet shop was the source of the outbreak, which had, by early February, infected about 50 people and led to the culling of some 2,000 hamsters across the city. Hamsters are highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 and so are a popular model for studying the virus. But the Hong Kong study — posted online as a preprint and yet to be peer reviewed — is the first to show that hamsters can become infected outside the laboratory, and that they can pass the virus on, both to other hamsters and to humans (H.-L. Yen et al. Preprint at Social Science Research Network https://doi.org/hh9r ; 2022). Hamsters are only the second animal known to be able to infect people, after mink. In late 2020, small outbreaks of COVID-19 in people in Denmark and the Netherlands were linked to farmed m...