Description: Guest expert Sydnee McElroy MD of the “Sawbones” podcast explains the science of vaccines. Bill and Nate look at why government steps in where charity falls short. Persephone on the future of nursing in the United States, by looking at Europe.
– Sawbones: “Dr. Mesmer and the Power of Animal Magnetism”
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If, like me, you don’t support the “mainstream” groups involved in autism activism (some of them are incredibly problematic and damaging for reasons I’m sure I’ll discuss at another time), consider supporting alternative groups such as the Mocha Autism Network this month. They’re dedicated to presenting a different and more inclusive perspective. Below are some starter facts from their Facebook page:
#RoyalBlueForAutismAwareness
FIRST DAY FACTS:
- 1 in 68 children are currently diagnosed on the #autism spectrum.
- By gender, it is broken down as 1 in 42 boys, 1 in 189 girls.
- Black/Latino boys are diagnosed as late as 2.5 years later than White boys.
- Girls (all ethnicities) are diagnosed the latest.
- In California, only 10% of pediatricians are equipped to provide Autism assessments in Spanish.
Join us in April as we provide the resources and information you can share to educate our communities
Mocha Autism Network
Website: mochaautismnetwork.com
Facebook: facebook.com/BayAreaMochaAutismNetwork
Twitter: @MochaAutismNTWK
Instagram: @mochaautismntwk
Google Plus: +Mocha Autism Network
Paul M. Barrett last week in Bloomberg Businessweek discussed the state of the (once again) failed “gun debate” following Newtown. He zeroes in on what might be termed the ‘narrative gap’ in the country’s divided political communication over this issue, which has prevented gun control policy advocates from achieving much in recent years.
This particular line from Barrett jumped out at me, in light of the research presented in my own book on divided interpretations of rhetorical symbols surrounding the American Dream:
For better or worse, gun ownership has come to symbolize a range of deeply felt ideas about culture and government authority.
This is definitely going to become a recurring theme, I sense. It’s partly a communication issue and partly a sectionalism issue, in the vein of the country’s original cultural-historical sections identified by authors such as Colin Woodard in “A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America”. (Full disclosure: Though I own a copy of that book, I have not yet had a chance to read it. I have, however, read some of his interviews and extended essays drawn from the book, which I highly recommend.)
Essentially, some regions of the country don’t have much need for guns in a practical sense anymore — and historically never held the views about government that make some regions use guns as “emblems of liberty and traditional values,” as Barrett puts it.
To many people in the former places, which always tended to support strong central government, opposition to gun control — or more properly the concept of gun rights at all — is genuinely baffling because the two are basically viewed as unrelated.
To many people in the latter regions, which have always opposed or questioned strong central government (witness early nullification challenges in Kentucky, or South Carolina), support for gun control is genuinely viewed as tyrannical. Even if one doesn’t literally believe that gun owners would successfully repel a totalitarian government, many see gun control policies as a metaphor of other perceived overreaches. And the gun is a symbolic resistance against that.
So the real question is going to be how to bridge that chasm dating back centuries. A total failure to communicate means no policy change but increasing bitterness on all sides.
We’re going to have to figure out an alternative route that allows us to speak the same language on this issue rather than just staring blankly or angrily at each other. As Barrett says, it’s not going to work to just keep repeating facts and figures over and over while condemning the “liberty” arguments as paranoid and unrealistic. I’ll admit I’m guilty of that approach, but I can also see it’s not working.
Russian Federation troops may be massing on the border of the Russian-dominated Donetsk region of Ukraine, but snarky Ukrainian activists in the region’s capital city, with a mind toward history and an eye toward remaining free of Russia, have other ideas for their economically depressed region:
The industrial city of about 950,000 people on the Kalmius river was once known as Hughesovka or Yuzovka, after its Welsh founder John Hughes.
Hughes was an engineer, born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1814 or 1815. After building a successful shipbuilding and ironworks company in Britain, which was known primarily for developing armored plating for warships, he was invited 1868 by the imperial Russian government to buy a concession in eastern Ukraine to set up a metallurgy and rail-producing factory.
According to a 2010 BBC feature, “Hughes provided a hospital, schools, bath houses, tea rooms, a fire brigade and an Anglican church dedicated to the patron saints St George and St David.”
Satirizing the question posed in the very dubious recent referendum in Crimea, activists have pitched a self-determination referendum for the city of Donetsk, giving “voters” even more exciting options than merely joining Russia or remaining in Ukraine:
According to the Moscow Times, “more than 7,000 people had supported the proposal by Sunday, with an online poll showing about 61 percent of respondents favored accession to Britain, and another 16 percent favored ‘broad regional autonomy’ with English as an official language.”
More from that Moscow Times article:
The online appeal asked the people of Donetsk — “fellow Britons” — to seize the “decisive moment” and have their say on “where your children will live and what language they will speak.”
[…]
“For more than a century Russians have deceived us by saying that this is an indigenous Russian city, and Ukrainians — that it is Ukrainian,” the online appeal said.
The mock referendum’s slogan, according to a Google translation of a Russian-language site, is: “Glory to John Hughes and his town! God save the Queen!”
One of the banners circulating on social media promoting it looks like this:
Now might be a good time to make a bid for accession to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, due to the upcoming Scotland Independence Referendum, to be held this coming September.
Although all three major British political parties (Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal Democrats) have already banded together (with additional help from the European Union) to make it extremely unpalatable and economically suicidal for Scotland to vote for independence, I think Britain could also offer a spot to the city of Donetsk to further demonstrate to Scotland that it is eminently replaceable with another industrial area — and one that probably has a lower prevailing wage, which would help UK companies’ bottom lines.
Here’s to Hughesovka: the cheaper Eastern European replacement for Scotland.
Plus: If the Russian Empire is making a comeback on the Black Sea, it’s only right and sensible that the British Empire return to the region to counter growing Russian power.
Big props to the Casper Star-Tribune for their excellent reporting on a poorly-conceived Wyoming energy project that has been enthusiastically backed by Republicans who claim to oppose government “interventions” in private energy sector innovation.
Even after loudly blasting the Obama Administration’s Dept. of Energy for giving money to the ill-fated Solyndra solar company, Wyoming Republicans (including both Senators and the state’s Congresswoman) have been lobbying for $1.75 billion Federal loan guarantees for a proposed coal liquefaction plant by DKRW Advanced Fuels in Wyoming.
In comparison, Solyndra — which collapsed when silicon prices fell rapidly and made their non-silicon solar panels uncompetitive against regular, silicon-based panels — defaulted on a Federal loan of only $535 million, a substantially smaller amount than DKRW wants.
As the Star-Tribune notes:
Wyoming’s congressional representatives were enthusiastic backers of the project, writing letters on the project’s behalf to the Energy Department, sending representatives from their offices to speak in favor of it at public meetings and touting its progress in news releases.
“It uses Wyoming coal, Wyoming workers. It helps our economy in terms of around the state,” [U.S. Sen. John] Barrasso said in a recent interview. “If you’re using Wyoming coal, that’s going to be tax revenue from the state.”
The technology, which turns coal into liquid for use like other fossil fuels based on petroleum, is borderline non-feasible and the project in question has never found any private financing after a decade of delays. Congresswoman Lummis seemed to blame this on red tape “holding our nation back.” There is, of course, a much more likely explanation:
Michael E. Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, said coal-to-liquids’ history offers a clue about its economic feasibility.
The Nazis employed the technology during World War II, as did South Africa’s apartheid government. Both had limited access to oil supplies. The lesson: Coal-to-liquids is possible but usually makes sense only as a necessity.
He said DKRW’s proposal and Solyndra’s are “basically identical.”
H/T @RL_Miller on Twitter for flagging the Star-Tribune article.
New York Times: “Kremlin Finds a Defender in Congress”
Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, is speaking up for Moscow with pride.
Wow, there is so much to unpack in that article.
Now, for a start, Rep. Rohrabacher has always been a bit “unique” in his views and behavior — and the article spends some time on that. But he’s particularly delusional about the freedoms of the current, post-Communist version of the Russian Federation, as well as newly Russian-occupied Crimea:
“There have been dramatic reforms in Russia that are not being recognized by my colleagues,” he said. “The churches are full. There are opposition papers being distributed on every newsstand in Russia. You’ve got people demonstrating in the parks. You’ve got a much different Russia than it was under Communism, but you’ve got a lot of people who still can’t get over that Communism has fallen.”
What about Pussy Riot, the Russian protest group? Its members were jailed for criticizing Mr. Putin, released, then publicly flogged when they showed up at the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
“Well, I don’t think that happens often,” Mr. Rohrabacher said with a shrug. “There are lots of people demonstrating in the streets of Russia who are perfectly free to do so.”
Yet, this isn’t limited to one foolish Republican: as the article notes, progressive Florida Democrat Alan Grayson is similarly eager to endorse the Crimea referendum as “a virtually bloodless transfer of power establishes self-determination for two million people…”
Which is such a laughable fiction that it makes me question everything I know about Rep. Grayson. (Is he just trying to be contrarian for the sake of it at this point?)
But I also strongly suspect Rohrabacher’s love of Putin’s Russia and support for the Crimea annexation is partially grounded in Vladimir Putin’s violent and militarized opposition to “Islamic terrorism” (in the form of Chechen persecution and other state terror campaigns in the predominantly Muslim northern Caucuses):
By last year, Mr. Rohrabacher was accompanying the action star Steven Seagal to Russia in search of a broader Islamist plot behind the Boston Marathon bombing. The actor and the congressman had often discussed “thwarting radical Islamic terrorism,” he explained.
You may have heard of the “McConnelling” meme circulating based off the inexplicable decision of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s campaign staff to release video that is purely composed of silent clips of the uncharismatic and deeply unpopular conservative Senator giving borderline B-roll reaction shots, for use in DIY pro-McConnell ads.
Of course, no one was really interested in that idea, so they just did DIY nonsense with it (especially after The Daily Show got in on the act, encouraging people to make mashups of the video with unexpected content). Which is good too.
One of the better ones I have seen is this RoboCop (1987) mashup with the McConnell footage, created by Nerdy Little Secret’s Martin, the man behind the brilliant new “Cyvlorg” video series on cyborgs in pop culture.
You couldn’t really put a McConnell/RoboCop mashup in better hands than Martin’s:
Really does raise the question as to which one is the robot: the distinctly non-human Mitch McConnell or ED209?
As you may or may not have worked out, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, is up for re-election this year.