WhirledView

A Normal So-so Christmas Coming Up

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

There’d been highly hyped hopes for a couple of really cool gifts for Christmas this year, and I don’t include the snowstorm that roared up the East coast a couple of days ago. 

The global warming conclave in Copenhagen was supposed to feature a chorus of angels promising salvation for everyone, salvation in the form of strict agreed-upon goals—goals that would be enforceable.  Well, at the very least the goals would be measurable, so that failures to deliver on schedule would be as obvious as an airport ETA sign announcing “on time,” “delayed” or canceled.   I couldn’t buy either expectation.  So far as that unrealistic transparency goal was concerned, who’d be able to ferret out the inevitable fudging?  Worse, how would the international community manage to punish China or the US or any other country for not performing as promised? All in all, the belief that the species would be inspired to act harmoniously and altruistically seemed pretty unrealistic from the get go.

The other great gift for Americans was to be bipartisan health care reform, meaning broadly-backed coverage for every American at a cost the country can bear.  Well, it looks as if the Senate Democrats will actually pass a bill on Christmas eve (talk about Christmas presents!), but can you say sausage factory?  Who knows what’s in the package—and as for the process, it’s hardly what we want to promote as democracy abroad. 

Waiting for a Savior

In both cases, there was always the rather pathetic hope for a messiah, a mahdi, a deus ex machina, a superman, whose charisma or moral force or sheer power would deliver the goods–unanimity on the route to salvation, transparency, enforceability.  Barack Obama, it was hoped, would amply fill that role in Copenhagen as in Washington.  But alas!  Obama hasn’t transformed American politics, and no one human being could have created the extraordinary unity that the prospect of retarding global warming seems to require.  Never in the evolution of the murderous human species has there been the sweetly cooperative “we” that’s needed now. 

Nor has commonality been the theme du jour over these past decades.  It’s been multi-culturalism.  We must respect and preserve, unaltered, all human cultures in all aspects of their contrary contradictory glory.  Yet now, suddenly, we’re expected to shed our sacrosanct cultural ego complexes in this great global push for the common good.  We’re not so distinct, it seems.  We’re all the same.  Well, we all breathe oxygen and exhale CO2; we can’t drink salt water; we need food and a certain temperature range.  So we've gotta save the planet—meaning, of course, those planetary conditions that support human life.

Buddha and Gaia say, “Buy! Buy! Buy!”

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Copenhagen this month has been the scene of an all too familiar drama, a clash between elites in the meeting hall and activists in the street.  Often the substance of such dramas has to do with international trade.  In this case, it’s global warming—how to slow it down and put off the awful day when the rivers run dry and the oceans take over. Even if meaningful measures can be agreed on in Copenhagen, the likelihood that enough people will be willing to  make the costly changes in lifestyle that might actually decelerate the global warming trend is fairly slim.  The preferred course of action is already evident.  Find any and every excuse to shove the sacrifice onto designated culprits.

Over the years, in fact, even in America, there have been many efforts to jump start a lifestyle with a lighter footprint on the planet. Often they combine ecological science with plain old nature loving and/or various sorts of philosophy/religion/spiritualism.  They gain some ardent devotees, but they generally get diluted or subverted by the dominant culture, which is aggressively materialistic.  Gaia is one such route.  Buddhism is another.

I can’t say I’ve read the short, medium long and miscellaneous sutras from beginning to end, but it’s pretty clear that the absolutely most basic Buddhist idea is to make yourself less miserable by hanging on to less—and by getting a good grip on why you cling to anything or anyone at all, especially since nothing will last.  Nothing.  Well, maybe diamonds really are forever.  But that’ll be pretty cold comfort when global warming’s done its damage.  Meanwhile, nothing that matters—like life, like love—comes with a money back guarantee either.

A related philosophy has to do with taking care of the terrestrial organism by emphasizing sustainability: use less, don’t pollute, recycle what you must use.  It’s based on James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis which posits a homeostatic biosphere, but Gaia is more popular as an earth goddess who will take care of us if we take care of her.

What We Really Have to Fear about Health Care

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

We’ve been ruthlessly conditioned  to be afraid—to be absolutely terrified—of medical decision-making by government bureaucrats.  But we’ve got much worse instead:  employees rigorously trained by insurance companies to deny as many requests for care as they can get away with.  The less care you and I get for our  premium money, the happier (which is to say, the more profitable)  the private insurance companies are.

The Balance Sheet

SO:  You thought you would die but you didn’t.  Much as your insurance company tried to deny you access to testing, surgery and recuperative services, to say nothing of the precise drugs your doctor wanted you to have, you won the battle.  You got the care you needed and you are on your feet again.  You rejoice!  Your family rejoices.  Your friends rejoice.  Your employer rejoices.  Your doctor is happy.  Even a few drug companies are happy; you will be taking their products for x amount of time.  And, of course, your dog wags its tail, madly.

Meanwhile, your insurance company makes an entry in red, in the loss column. This year you are  a red blot on the balance sheet.  Next year there will be more red.  Ditto from now on, perhaps. You have been a mere profit or loss center for the company all along.  Now you are an out and out liability.  No matter how long you have been paying premiums to your insurance company, you would be better off dead, from its point of view, and it will drop you as soon as possible—or raise your rates until you are forced to drop out.

In short, those scarey death panels exist.  They obey your private health insurance company.  And people die every day because care has been denied.  Not just granny, folks.  People in every age bracket.

Thank you Cheryl

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

Last week, Pew reported the results of recent surveys of American scientists and the American public on the status and perceptions of science and scientists in this country. Among the findings was the existence of a gaping hole in understanding between the general population and this country’s scientists─ despite the fact that the scientific profession is still held in high regard here.

Yet only three percent of the over 2000 American scientists polled said they often spent time talking to reporters, only 18 percent said they wrote for blogs, while 85 percent said that public ignorance of science was a significant problem and the media’s coverage of science was dismal. Cheryl is one of those 18 percent who does write about science in layman’s terms and over the past five years she has done yeoman’s service on WhirledView in the pursuit of this crucial educational endeavor.

She also did yeoman’s service in keeping this blog functioning through thick and thin.

But it’s been several years since the three of us founded WhirledView and sometimes it’s time for change. So please do visit her at Phronesisaical, on Facebook and Twitter. We will miss her, but we will do our best to continue to make WhirledView a class act.

Be assured that WhirledView will continue to look at our world critically─and with affection. We will continue to write on international politics, US foreign policy, public diplomacy, but as ever we will stray into the arts, the law, domestic politics and other aspects of our always fascinating, but often frustrating era. Even science, especially the political impact of scientific matters.

Evolution Everywhere!

by Cheryl Rofer

I don’t know if it was something in the way I was thinking a while back, maybe it was Darwin’s birthday and then my nephew’s campaign to have the family’s mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA typed by the National Geographic’s Genographic Project, or if it was just that evolution is indeed the unifying idea of biology. But when I read this in the 24 April Science,

In humans, a deficiency of the mitochondrial protein frataxin lads to Friedreich’s ataxia, a progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disease. Frataxin has been implicated in heme metabolism and in the assembly of Fe-S clusters.

I had to pause and appreciate the complexity that evolution has worked into our bodies. Then I went on to read a book review about slime molds, which sometimes live as individual amoeba-like cells and sometimes group together into a larger organism, which must have been a step (or something like it) in the development of multi-celled organisms from single cells.

Let me try to unpack all that evolution.

Mitochondria, now part of most organisms’ cells, were once free-living organisms themselves. They became subordinate members of other cells some long time ago. They produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an essential source of energy for cell processes. At some point, an organism without mitochondria tried to eat, or otherwise engulfed the free-living proto-mitochondrion. Or perhaps the proto-mitochondrion was a parasite that bored its way into another cell. It turned out to be a happy association. We don’t see free-living mitochondria today, so presumably this has been a favorable outcome for the ones who decided their future was inside other cells as well as their new owners.

Then those single-celled supercharged mitochondria-carriers got together into organisms, maybe the way slime molds do. Slime molds are fascinating. They live as single amoeba-like cells until, for some reason, they find it necessary to make spores. Then they get together and form a fruiting body. Here's a time-lapse video of them doing it. (I'm not seeing the video just now, although it was there when I first posted, so here's the link to YouTube.)

Bits and Pieces

by Cheryl Rofer

Volcanic Eruption from Space
Gorgeous photos, with a good explanation, here of a volcanic eruption on Matua Island, which is part of the Kurile chain between Russia and Japan.

Kyrgyzstan is On Again
Kyrgyzstan is now saying that the United States will be allowed to stay at the Manas Airbase. The US will be paying higher rent. It's easy to conclude that it's all about the money, but I continue to believe that complex politics between Russia and Kyrgyzstan, combined with Russia's desire to have more to say about NATO's actions in Afghanistan, are part of the mix. Supplying troops in Afghanistan is really difficult. Ask Alexander the Great. Ask the Brits. Ask the Russians. It might be one of the factors that should be weighted more heavily in considering whether the US should be in Afghanistan.

Nixon and Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program
This New York Times article almost incidentally contains a link to a recently declassified document on how Richard Nixon was dealing with Israel's nuclear weapons program. There's other interesting stuff in the article, too, and nothing particularly surprising in the document. But always interesting to see something of how things were actually playing out.

Watch out for those Drug Resistant Bugs: A Very Expensive Medical Horror Story

Patricia Lee Sharpe

My cell phone just died in my clothes washer.  That’s part of this story, which began on a playground at recess.  It's the sort of story we should keep in mind as efforts are underway to reform the U.S. medical care system, even as holier-than-thou members of the medical establishment attempt, once again, to block significant change. 

A Broken Leg

A friend of mine, a substitute teacher, was supervising kids, so they wouldn’t do something stupid on the playground equipment.  As one might expect, no kids got hurt.  She did—lets call her Jeanette.  She fell and broke her leg.  Very badly, it turned out.  It took general anesthesia and an enormous hook-like incision to get the pieces aligned.  Because Jeanette lives alone, the doctors decided she’d have to stay in the hospital until some equipment had been rented, her apartment had been readied for someone unable to stand on her leg for three long months and a visiting nurse and a home health aide had been lined up.

The good news for Jeanette, who had no medical insurance—not out of ignorance or negligence or odds-playing, but because she had no employer to put her on the company plan—is that Workmen’s Compensation pays for her medical care, a tiny monthly stipend and the necessary home help.

A Drug-Resistant Bug

The bad news is that Jeanette ended up spending more than a week in the hospital.  She was attacked by one of those drug-resistant bugs that haunts American hospitals.  This one attacked her digestive system and put her in the intensive care unit.  Very expensive.  Her visitors had to wear sterile gowns and latex gloves and scrub, scrub, scub their hands when they left—which, evidently, some doctor or other hospital employee hadn’t done when she’d been admitted for a mere broken leg.  

The Eensy Beensy Spiders

by Cheryl Rofer

When I went out the other day, this caught my eye. At first, I thought, well, that's how much I haven't been gardening, the spiders are building webs, I'll sweep it away. And then I saw motion. The little gold specks you see against the wall were in a globular arrangement, and some were dropping down, more as I came near. Every little gold speck, each maybe a half-millimeter in size, is a tiny spider. They must have hatched the night before.

As I went away, they rappelled back up into the cluster, down as I approached, but not outside the web.

Do lizards eat baby spiders? I wondered. Probably would be hard or messy for them to get through the web. There have been plenty of lizards around lately, a couple with truncated tails, and two that emerged from the same hole in the rocks. They're usually solitary, so we can guess what they were up to!

The next morning, the web was ruined, and there were only three or four of the little spiders left. I suspect it was a raccoon.