... nobody forgot that the work they were doing at Los Alamos was both vital to national defense, and highly dangerous due to the radioactive substances involved. Wilson recalled his own brush with death while assisting a physicist in the Critical Assemblies Group with another experiment to determine when criticality was reached as one stacked a series of enriched uranium hydride cubes. He was surprised, and a bit dismayed, to find that the group didn't rely on the usual elaborate safety devices commonly used at cyclotron facilities at the time. Instead, the physicist arrived with a simple set-up involving a wooden table, a single neutron counter to monitor criticality, and a whole bunch of cubes of enriched uranium hydride.
Wilson watched, rapt, as the physicist started stacking uranium cubes, and then noticed with alarm that the neutron counter wasn't, well, counting. Upon inspection, he discovered that the voltage supply was burnt out. When the counter was turned back on, it lit up immediately, to Wilson's horror. "A few more cubes and the stack would have exceeded criticality and could well have become lethal," he recalled. Furious, Wilson chewed out the physicist, his division leader, and even raged about it to Oppenheimer himself, but he had to leave for Trinity the very next day, so he let the incident drop. Had he stayed and pursued the matter, Wilson believed, "I might have saved the lives of two people. To this day, the incident is on my conscience."
Those two people were Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. and Louis Slotin, both of whom died of radiation sickness after accidents that occurred while conducting critical experiments with a plutonium core -- known as "tickling the dragon."
On May 21, 1946, with seven other colleagues watching, Slotin performed an experiment that involved the creation of one of the first steps of a fission reaction by placing two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around a plutonium core. The experiment used the same 6.2-kilogram (13.7 lb) plutonium core that had irradiated Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., later called the "Demon core" for its role in the two accidents. Slotin grasped the upper beryllium hemisphere with his left hand through a thumb hole at the top while he maintained the separation of the half-spheres using the blade of a screwdriver with his right hand, having removed the shims normally used. Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol.
At 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell, causing a "prompt critical" reaction and a burst of hard radiation. At the time, the scientists in the room observed the "blue glow" of air ionization and felt a "heat wave". In addition, Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand. Slotin instinctively jerked his left hand upward, lifting the upper beryllium hemisphere and dropping it to the floor, ending the reaction. However, he had already been exposed to a lethal dose (around 2100 rems, or 21 Sv) of neutron and gamma radiation. Slotin's radiation dose was about four times the lethal dose, equivalent to the amount that he would have been exposed to by being 1500 m (4800 ft) away from the detonation of an atomic bomb.
As soon as Slotin left the building, he vomited, a common reaction from exposure to extremely intense ionizing radiation. Slotin's colleagues rushed him to the hospital, but irreversible damage had already been done. His parents were informed of their son's inevitable death and a number of volunteers donated blood for transfusions, but the efforts proved futile. Louis Slotin died nine days later on May 30, in the presence of his parents. He was buried in Winnipeg on June 2, 1946.
At first, the incident was classified and not made known even within the laboratory; Robert Oppenheimer and other colleagues later reported severe emotional distress at having to carry on with normal work and social activities while they secretly knew that their colleague lay dying.
The core involved was subject to a number of experiments shortly after the end of the war and was used in the ABLE detonation, during the Crossroads series of nuclear weapon testing. Slotin's experiment was set to be the last conducted before the core's detonation and was intended to be the final demonstration of its ability to go critical.
The accident ended all hands-on critical assembly work at Los Alamos. Future criticality testing of fissile cores was done with special remotely controlled machines, such as the "Godiva" series, with the operator located a safe distance away in case of accidents.
One of the jobs I had was software safety for the detrous manipulator being built for the Space Station. It was hard to get the engineers to think hard about "what could go wrong". We are all optimists by nature. We love to extrapolate the upside. It is really hard, however, to think about failure modes, the "what if" when things go wrong. It helps if you've had previous experience to guide you. But the problem with new technology is that it is "new". We all love to see the wonderful new possibilities of the new, but few like to muck around with the grim downside. Worse, when people do consider what can go wrong, they tend to overshoot and come up with real gloom-and-doom scenarios (e.g. gray goo or the singularity) rather than the more mundane cascade of of unlikely faults that have hidden connections that lead you into a major disaster.
Most people are abysmally ignorant of the role of science and technology in today's world. They have wildly romantic images of "organic gardening" and "back to nature" view of life. They are terrified of pesticides and absolutely ignorant of the fact that your veggies are packed with lethal concoctions natural to the plant as its defense against insects and other animals tempted to nibble on it.
These people think they can give up on nuclear power because it is dangerous while not aware of the deaths from traditional energy sources. They don't understand the trade-offs that must be taken in all aspects of our life. Mostly these are the coddled children of middle and upper class families, young adults never responsible for feeding and clothing themselves. But they get sucked up in a "great cause" of anti-science.
One of the most laughable was the "frankenfood" movement based in Europe. These people are convinced that if you transfer genes from one species to another you are upsetting "God's plan" and have created a great sin. They see genetically modified food as both dangerous and sinful. But they are completely ignorant of science and the fact that all life is chock-a-block full of "foreign genes" transported by viruses. This has been happening for a couple of billion years. The genetically modified food is perfectly safe unless the experiment was to move toxin-generating coding into the new species. But no food researcher is interested in poisoning people. They are trying to create stronger, better crops, e.g. move vitamin A into rice crops to fight disease. From Wikipedia:
Approximately 250,000–500,000 children in developing countries become blind each year owing to vitamin A deficiency, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Asia and Africa.
Golden rice is a variety of Oryza sativa rice produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of pro-vitamin A in the edible parts of rice.
This is the horror of "frankenfood"? This is engineered food to save half a million children per year from blindness.
The madness of anti-science was seen in the Unabomber. He was judge, jury, and executioner for his perceived "wrongs" of scientific researchers. Nobody appointed him. He had to pass no tests or get a license to go on his murderous spree. Rather than work within the system and try to set up regulations for ensuring safe research, he went on a killing spree. This is the "saviour" of mankind. Just as Osama Bin Laden was the "saviour" of a purist Islam. Self-appointed fanatics gone murderous and feeling saintly about their vicious trade.
A package bomb that injured two professors at a university here this month is the latest in a string of attacks by a new terror group inspired by the Unabomber. Its violent actions have put campuses across Mexico on alert and caused nanotechnology researchers worldwide to take precautions with their mail.
Nanotechnology was singled out as a target for the attacks in manifestos posted on the Web by the group behind the bombs, which calls itself "Individualities Tending Toward Savagery." It has been linked to attacks in France, Spain, and Chile, and to a bomb sent earlier this year to a scientist at another Mexican university who specializes in nanotech. An analyst who helped identify the Unabomber—who turned out to be a former professor—says the posts show signs of someone well-educated who could be affiliated with a college.
The online rants credit the Unabomber as an inspiration. ...
...
In the group's online post (written in Spanish) claiming credit for the latest bombing, the terrorists complained about the growing number of nanotechnology experts in Mexico, which it estimated at 650. "The ever more rapid acceleration of this technology will lead to the creation of nanocyborgs that can self-replicate automatically without the help of a human," it said.
...
Many people in the region are skeptical of science, he adds. "In our country, and in the whole Latin American region, we put more faith in the supernatural than in reason. This poses fatal consequences, making people view researchers in science and technology with suspicion and hate, as inhuman individuals, who work against society and as the exploiters and destroyers of natural resources."
These anti-science fanatics can't be bothered with facts. No researcher that I know of is trying to develop this kind of dystopian technology. Everybody I know is working to make a better world, like the first fellow who rubbed two sticks together to create fire. Sure, I'll bet there were those sitting around the resulting campfire speculating that some mad caveman would use this "new technology" to set afire all the forests of the world and destroy earth. Maybe they even plotted to kill the fire-starter and ensure the knowledge was lost because they saw it as a clear danger to the lovely lifestyle of sitting in the dark and cold eating raw meat and uncooked veggies.
People need to realize that science is what gives us the comfortable life we have. Those who are anti-science should put their energies into going "back to the land" and living with a "technology-free" lifestyle and quit trying to use murderous plottings to kill of the rest of us that are quite happy to benefit from fire, metal working, the wheel, the agricultural revolution, modern medicine, etc.
Two things astound me about these fanatics:
Their temerity to act on own behalf to bring their twisted vision of the future to reality. Who appointed them? What right have they?
The abysmal ignorance of these fanatics of the role of science in technology in modern life. Their blind ideology puts ignorance on a pedestal and they worship it. They use religion or just crass stupidity as justification for their evil actions without understanding what they claim to oppose or what the consequences of their actions truly are.
In my youth I was naive and thought the aberration of the Nazis with their ignorant anti-science views (the condemnation of "Jewish science" and their idiotic race theories) was a one-time thing. But as I get older I see more and more outbreaks of this kind of insanity. What truly astounds me is that these deluded people convince themselves they are the "benefactors" of humanity by going on a killing spree (just as Osama Bin Laden saw himself as the saviour of Islam by going on a jihad against the West). Insane!
I don't have the longer video clip that shows a driver ignore a police barricade and ended up stopped by the police who then surround the car and unleash a barrage of gunfire that killed the poor innocent driver.
But this video is of a witness to the police killing. And if you watch the whole video, you can see this couple nearly get shot as well when the police notice they have a camera phone and demand that they give the police the phone (presumably to suppress evidence of the killing):
A West Palm Beach couple who filmed Monday morning’s deadly officer-involved shooting on South Beach has accused officers of intimidation, destroying evidence and twisting the facts in the chaos surrounding the Memorial Day shootings – a charge that police officials say they know nothing about.
...
On Thursday, The Miami Herald spoke to the couple that saw the end of the 4 a.m. police chase on Collins Avenue, then watched and filmed from just a few feet away as a dozen officers fired their guns repeatedly into Raymond Herisse’s blue Hyundai. They say the only reason they were able to show the video to a reporter is because they hid a memory card after police allegedly pointed guns at their heads, threw them to the ground and smashed the cell phone that took the video.
The three-minute video captured on Narces Benoit’s HTC EVO phone begins as officers crowd around the east side of Herisse’s car with guns drawn. Roughly 15 seconds into the video, officers open fire. Benoit filmed the incident from the sidewalk on the northeast corner of 13th Street and Collins Avenue, close enough to see some officers’ faces and individual muzzle flashes.
Shortly after the gunfire ends, an officer points at Benoit and police can be heard yelling for him to turn off the camera. The voices are muffled at times. The 35-year-old car stereo technician drops his hand with the camera and hurries back to his Ford Expedition parked further east on 13th Street.
The video shows Benoit get into the car, where his girlfriend, Ericka Davis, sat in the driver’s seat. He raises his camera and an officer is seen appearing on the driver’s side with his gun drawn, pointed at them.
The video ends as more officers are heard yelling expletives, telling the couple to turn the video off and get out of the car. “They put guns to our heads and threw us on the ground,” Davis said.
Benoit said a Miami Beach officer grabbed his cell phone, said “You want to be [expletive] Paparazzi?” and stomped on his phone before placing him in handcuffs and shoving the crunched phone in Benoit’s back pocket. He said the couple joined other witnesses already in cuffs and being watched by officers, who were on the lookout for two passengers who, police believe at the time, had bailed out of Herisse’s car. It is still not known whether any passengers were in the car.
Four bystanders were shot in the gunfire and three officers suffered minor injuries.
Benoit and Davis said officers smashed several other cell phones in the ensuing chaos.
There are just too many instances where the police threaten, beat up, and confiscate evidence of police crimes. These cops need to be arrested, prosecuted, and thrown off the police force. The above article does not make it clear, but Raymond Herisse was innocent of anything except failing to heed a police blockade. For this he was killed. Worse... four bystanders and three police were injured by the insane fusillade that killed Raymond Herisse who had stopped and was apparently trying to obey police orders when the cops went amok and killed him point blank in a fusillade of bullets.
This reminds me of the most infamous recent case in this area, the killing of an immigrant, Robert Dziekański, at the Vancouver airport. The poor guy couldn't speak English. The mother was waiting outside the "secure" area and talked to officials telling them her son was supposed to have arrived but hadn't shown. The officials did nothing to connect the two, so after nine and a half hours he become unruly from frustration, and of course the police kill him. Now, over two years later the police finally issue an "apology" after fighting in court claiming "justified homicide" until their stories fell apart (because there is a video taken by a third party that makes it utterly clear that this was an unnecessary killing).
Europe is currently in the grip of a deadly outbreak of Escherichia coli O104:H4—a rare strain of a common bacterium. Prior to last month, E. coli O104:H4 had only been identified as a cause of illness in one, single person. As of yesterday, the bacteria had sickened thousands and killed 27.
...
Over the weekend, authorities thought they'd pinpointed the outbreak to a bad batch of organic salad sprouts. But, when preliminary tests of the sprouts turned up no evidence of contamination, they backed off and started pointing the finger at imported cucumbers and tomatoes from Spain. Today, the official opinion flip-flopped again. Direct tests of the sprouts are still turning up negative. But epidemiological studies show that people who ate the sprouts were 9 times more likely to become infected than those who had not.
She explains how hard it is to pinpoint the source of the outbreak. It's a nice education into this fight against food-borne illness.
From a summary of data by Anthony Watts on his blog Watts Up With That?. These numbers help show that these are not "off the chart" events. They are part of a long history of devastating storms:
Deadliest Tornado Years in US History
(Official NOAA-NWS Record: 1950 – present; Research by Grazulis: 1875-1949)
Year Fatalities 1925 794 1936 552 1917 551 1927 540 1896 537 1953 519 1920 499 1908 477 2011 481 (365 + 116 estimated Joplin fatalities as of May 23) 1909 404 1932 394 1942 384 1924 376 1974 366
Deadliest Single Tornadoes in NOAA-NWS Official Record
(1950 – present)
Tornado
Fatalities
Date
Flint, Michigan
116
June 8, 1953
Joplin, Missouri
116 (est.)
May 22, 2011
Waco, Texas
114
May 11, 1953
Worcester, Massachusetts
90
June 9, 1953
Udall, Kansas
80
May 25, 1955
Hackleburg, Alabama
78
April 27, 2011
Tuscaloosa-Birmingham, Alabama
61
April 27, 2011
“Candlestick Park,” Mississippi & Alabama
58
March 3, 1966
Cary, Mississippi
58
February 21, 1971
Judsonia, Arkansas
50
February 21, 1952
The main reason why storms have bigger tolls today than 100 years ago is that the population in the US is 3 times that of 100 years ago. It isn't "global warming". It is more people in the path of a storm.
The bottom panel of following graphic shows what most meteorologists already know: there has been a downward trend in strong (F3) to violent (F5) tornadoes in the U.S. since statistics began in the 1950s. As seen in the top panel, this has also been a period of general warming. For those statistics buffs, the correlation coefficient is -0.31. Obviously, the conclusion should be that warming causes fewer strong tornadoes, not more. (Or, maybe a lack of tornadoes causes global warming!)
Go read the post to see the data graphed that shows this trend.
Amidst all the ranting about how food additives, especially food colourings, "poison" the food supply, I found this bit from Derek Lowe's blog In the Pipeline interesting:
... treating nematodes (roundworms, C. elegans) with the dye Thioflavin T (also known as ThT or Basic Yellow 1) extends their lives quite significantly - up around a 60% increase in both median and maximal lifespan. Several other related benzazole compounds were also tried, which produced lifespan extension of up to 40%, and at much lower concentrations.
Wouldn't it be hysterically funny given all the hue-and-cry about food dyes being carcinogenic, it ends up that the surprising extension to lives achieved in the 20th century comes down to putting food colouring into the food supply? Or as Lowe puts it:
... as my wife pointed out to me when I told her about this paper, the FDA was just making headlines the other day by recommending that more study be given to any possible links between food dyes and hyperactivity (though stopping short of recommending any warning at this time, due to lack of convincing evidence). On the basis of this latest work, though, I'm starting to wonder if we're not putting enough dyes in our food...
Lowe cites a paper published in the prestigious Nature journal that looks at dyes and their ability to attack and destroy amyloid plaques (the stuff that is believed to cause dementia). This might be a real advance in treating Alzheimer's.
I can't wait for food dyes to become all the rage among health nuts. That will mean we will see people with skin colours of blues, and greens, and yellows, and reds, and oranges, and pinks, etc.
Five are believed to have already died and 15 are injured while others have said they know the radiation will kill them.
The original 50 brave souls were later joined by 150 colleagues and rotated in teams to limit their exposure to the radiation spewing from over-heating spent fuel rods after a series of explosions at the site. They were today joined by scores more workers.
Japan has rallied behind the workers with relatives telling of heart-breaking messages sent at the height of the crisis.
...
But it is becoming even more pressing that the Fukushima succeed after it was revealed today that Tokyo's tap water has been contaminated by unusual levels of radiation.
The government have issued a warning to all mothers urging them not to let babies drink the tap water.
...
Nearly two weeks after the twin March 11 disasters, nuclear officials were still struggling to stabilise the damaged and overheated Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, which has been leaking radiation since the disasters knocked out the plant's cooling systems.
Radiation has seeped into vegetables, raw milk, the water supply and even seawater in the areas surrounding the plant.
All energy sources carry a risk. Nuclear is no different except that it is a newer technology and consequently it scares a lot of people who fear anything new. The lessons to be learned from this crisis is good and bad. The reactor was hit by an incredible disaster but didn't completely fail and the radiation is still limited compared to the worst case possible. This means that some will die, but not the large numbers in a Chernobyl-size disaster. But the death toll is still small compared to mine disasters. The good news is that more safety can be engineered into these nuclear plants.
This report from BBC gives you an idea of the kind of "justice" and "government" that Gaddafi provides in Libya. This is the future that the rest of the world is condemning the Libyans to live in because the world would rather twiddle its thumbs that "risk" getting involved. From a BBC report:
Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi's security forces detained and beat up a BBC news team who were trying to reach the strife-torn western city of Zawiya.
Members of the three-man team were beaten with fists, knees and rifles, hooded and subjected to mock executions by Libyan troops and secret police.
The three were detained on Monday and held for 21 hours, but have now flown out of Libya
...
One of the three, Chris Cobb-Smith, said: "We were lined up against the wall. I was the last in line - facing the wall.
"I looked and I saw a plainclothes guy with a small sub-machine gun. He put it to everyone's neck. I saw him and he screamed at me.
"Then he walked up to me, put the gun to my neck and pulled the trigger twice. The bullets whisked past my ear. The soldiers just laughed."
A second member of the team - Feras Killani, a correspondent of Palestinian descent - appears to have been singled out for repeated beatings.
Their captors told him they did not like his reporting of the Libyan popular uprising and accused him of being a spy.
The third member of the team, cameraman Goktay Koraltan, said they were all convinced they were going to die.
I can understand US reluctance to go storming into Libya. There is a lot of mistrust of the US and its policy. What I don't understand is why the Arab League, the African Union, and the European Union don't take a principled stand and call for joint action by the world to rid Libya of the crazed madman Gaddafi. Thousands have already died and now that it appears that Gaddafi has gotten control of his troops and is advancing on rebel held territories, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, will die because the rest of the world would rather dither than act. Tragic.
The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has died. Here is the NY Times obituary.
Here's a lecture he gave at a TED conference in Feb 2010:
I remember attending a lecture of his at the University of British Columbia in the 1980s. What I remember most was his enthusiasm and his curious and interesting examples from his mathematics.
Update 2010oct17: Here is an article Remembering Benoit Mandelbrot by the mathematician Rudy Rucker. It is a reminiscence of going to Mandelbrot's house in 2001 to talk about helping put together an IMAX film on fractals. It has some nice graphics and a video clip touring a quintic Mandelbrot set.
This is the second book I've read by this pair. They are fun. As philosophy students who didn't "go pro" and retained an interest but also a sense of humour about the profession, they are fun to read.
In this book they mention an unusual cast of philosophical characters (Kirkegaard, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and William James) and their "bon mots" on death. This is nicely interlaced with jokes and comic quotes from an "expert" such as Woody Allen. So the book is funny, but it is also serious. It is a walk through Western culture's views on death. It raises all the important questions and kicks around all the proposed answers. Read it if you have a half day and want to be entertained and enlightened.
Sadly, Christopher Hitchen is dying of cancer. The title may seem flip and immoderate, but it is meant as praise. I'm glad to see him going down gallantly, flying the flags high, and hanging on to his credo.
The following is a video clip of an interview done by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine:
The above interview is interesting but unsatisfying. It is too focused on death and religion. Here's a much more sympathetic treatment of Hitchens by himself in an article for Vanity Fair where he talks about his condition.
In the United States, the death penalty is a sensitive political issue. Many of the hotly contested issues are moral and philosophical in nature, so they are outside the purview of science. At least one issue, however, is purely scientific, the question of whether the death penalty has the intended deterrent effect. Does the knowledge and prospect of execution deter potential future murderers from committing the crime?
While the political and public debate continues, the preponderance of scientific evidence, both from cross-sectional (comparing states with and without the death penalty) and longitudinal (examining the same states before and after the introduction of death penalty) studies seem to indicate that the death penalty does not have the intended deterrence effect. It does not appear that there are fewer murders, at different places and times, as a result of the availability of the death penalty as a possible punishment for convicted murderers.
Why is this? There is no greater criminal punishment than the death penalty. Why does it not deter murder?
The fact that the death penalty does not deter murder is a puzzle for the social scientists, especially rational-choice microeconomists. From a microeconomic perspective, each actor makes a deliberate and careful cost-benefit analysis before making any decision. The lack of deterrence effect of the death penalty is therefore puzzling from this perspective, unless the probability of detection, arrest, prosecution, and conviction is infinitesimal. No matter what the actors want, they cannot pursue and consume it if they are dead. So, from the microeconomic perspective, there should be very few occasions where it makes sense for rational actors to decide to commit murder at a realistic risk of execution. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, however, the lack of deterrence effect of the death penalty is not a puzzle at all. First, contrary to microeconomics, murder in most cases is not a deliberately planned action. It usually begins with “trivial altercations,” where one man insults another by questioning his honor, status, and reputation. They begin a fight, which escalates to the point where one man ends up dead. The death penalty does not deter murder because there is very little forethought and cost-benefit analysis involved in it. Men usually do not consciously decide to commit murder. The death penalty may deter other types of criminals, who make a deliberate decision to commit a crime, or fictional murderers on Columbo, but not most real-life murderers. Most real-life murderers are not like those we see on Columbo and other whodunit shows. For one thing, they are very seldom highly intelligent and successful men and women.
Second, and more importantly, once again contrary to microeconomics, there is something worse than death. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, life – and everything in it – is a means to the ultimate end of reproductive success. So death is not the worst thing; complete reproductive failure is. If some men face a very dim reproductive prospect and a distinct possibility of ending their lives as total reproductive losers, it makes perfect evolutionary sense for them to be violent toward other men, in an attempt to eliminate them as intrasexual rivals for mates by killing or maiming them. It also makes perfect evolutionary sense for men who cannot gain legitimate reproductive access to women to attempt to do so illegitimately through forcible rape. This is why most criminals – especially murderers and rapists – are poor, uneducated men of few means and low social status who face very grim reproductive prospects.
I generally find Kanazawa a little to simplistic and "fundamentalist" for my taste, but he does a good job of popularizing ideas from the field of evolutionary psychology.
Yiyun Li's book is a bit hard to take. It is a grim portrait of the paranoid times under Communist China in the late 1970s when the Democracy Wall movement sprang up and was crushed. This novel is set in a provincial backwater and revolves around a dozen characters whose lives intersect in multiple ways with with the overpowering background event of a rebellion against the harsh Communist rule. Of course they get crushed.
Here is a snippet to show you the realism it provides into the behaviour of an ideological state:
A few teachers stood up and signaled to the auditorium, and more voices joined the chorus. It took several rounds for the principal to be satisfied with the roaring answer. "Long live the greatest, the most glorious, and the ever-correct Chinese Communist Pary," he said again with a thump-thump of his fist. "Do you all understand these words? What does this mean? It means our party has never been wrong and will never be wrong; it means that anything we do will not escape the scrutiny of the party. I know you've all been taught to respect your parents, but what are they compared to the party, our foremost parents? Everybody is equally loved by the party, but when someone makes a mistake, just as when a child makes a mistake, the party will not let a single wrongdoer slip by. No one will be spared; no crime will be tolerated."
The story is dreary in its careful depiction of the sordid details of how human souls get perverted and crushed by a heartless regime. This book reads like fiction, and is, but it is real enough. This is the sad truth of Communist China, a regime that still endures.
The regime has learned to back off people's private lives, but this regime is still absolutely ruthless in crushing anything that remotely appears to contend with it for the people's hearts and minds. Think Falun Gong and how that was cruelly crushed. This story has hints of Falun Gong in that it has a subplot of a "counter-revolutionary" whose kidney's are "harvested" while she is still alive because the high Party cadre didn't like the idea of getting kidneys from a dead person.
It takes a strong stomach to work through this book. The brutality reminds me of Marina Nemat's novel Prisoner of Tehran.
This novel is a graphic portrayal of reality despite being a work of fiction. It reminds me of the graphic details of the autobiographies of Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai and Jung Chang's Wild Swans.
If you want to understand the incredible cruelty and butchery of Communist China, you need to read Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story
THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy.
"They can now have some involvement in their destiny," says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, who led the team doing the work.
...
One of the most difficult questions you might want to ask someone is whether they want to carry on living. But as Owen and Laureys point out, the scientific, legal and ethical challenges for doctors asking such questions are formidable. "In purely practical terms, yes, it is possible," says Owen. "But it is a bigger step than one might immediately think."
One problem is that while the brain scans do seem to establish consciousness, there is a lot they don't tell us. "Just because they can answer a yes/no question does not mean they have the capacity to make complex decisions," Owen says.
Even assuming there is a subset of people who cannot move but have enough cognition to answer tough questions, you would still have to convince a court that this is so. "There are many ethical and legal frameworks that would need to be revised before fMRI could be used in this context," says Owen.
Life and death are difficult topics. I know my own Mother had to give the coded message of "no heroic measures" to get the doctors to back off and let my Grandfather die. He was in and out of a series of pneumonia. A disease known as "an old person's friend" because in the good old days it would kill you if you were bed ridden and get you past your suffering. But today, technology can keep you alive so they can torture you will lots of "intervention" to keep you alive.
With my own Mother, left paralyzed on on one side with left neglect syndrome and cognitive "deficiencies" after a botched operation to remove cancer from her right parietal and occipital area of the brain, she asked the family to "get her out" of the hospital so we moved her to a hospice to let her die in relative peace.
I am really bothered by people who want to enforce their ethics on you which places "life" above everything. This is insane. A person has a right to dignity and enjoyment and control over their own affairs. It would be great if a person in a vegetative state was allowed to make a yes/no decision about their care. Who wants to be the prisoner of a beserk medical system intent on keeping you alive despite your medical condition? I get the heebie-jeebies every time I think of the film Johnny Got His Gun and the poor guy trapped in a torn up stump of a body.
I have no interest in hustling anybody else off life's stage if they want to cling to life. But I do get bothered when people -- and the state as an instrument of a fanatical few -- dictates control over my medical care. People need the right to refuse treatment, to say "enough", and have their wishes respected. And for those incapacitated, the family must retain the right to speak on behalf of the person. My experience of medical staff and hospitals during the few short weeks that my parents spent in the hands of "modern medicine" before their died puts real fear in me. Prior generations of my family died at home with family close by. They weren't subjected to the tortures of modern medicine.
Here is an interesting blog posting on rabies. The words "death panel" jogged me. The writer was making fun of Sarah Palin and the goofy Republican "talking points" machine that worked so hard to defeat health care reform in the US. But the comment on "death panel" points out that we make cost/benefit decisions on life and death every day.
Meanwhile, here's an interesting post on rabies in which I've highlighted the "death panel" comment:
One day, towards the end of summer, I walked into my living room and found my cats playing "Secret CIA Prison" with a bat. He was alive, but just barely. He lay on my floor twitching, his wings torn to Swiss cheese. The cats looked up at me as if to say, "We do good work, yes?" I locked them in the bedroom and called the vet. Fortunately, the cats were all up on their shots. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell the vet how the bat had gotten into the house, nor how long he'd been there.
"You should maybe call your doctor," she said.
On average, 55,000 people worldwide die from rabies every year, but only two or three of those cases happen in the United States, thanks to widespread vaccination of domestic animals and availability of post-bite treatment for humans. Today, when Americans die of rabies, it's usually because they didn't realize they'd been bitten until it was too late—which is to say, when they first noticed symptoms.
See, we know how to prevent rabies, but we have absolutely no idea how to cure it. In fact, we don't even really know how it kills people. Despite (and, perhaps, because of) its status as one of the first viruses to be tamed by a vaccine, rabies remains a little-understood disease.
It's a mystery that makes doctors understandably nervous. Just a week before I found my bat, some friends of mine in St. Paul had woken up to find a bat in their bedroom. Being asleep is one of those times when tiny bat teeth could bite you without you being aware of it. My friends had to get post-exposure prophylaxis, a treatment designed to neutralize any rabies virus in your system before it has a chance to reach your brain and develop into a full-blown infection.
"You think about flu, that's a very quick virus. You develop symptoms in a couple of days. In a week, it's passed. But rabies incubation is very long," said Zhen Fu, DVM Ph.D., professor of pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. "It may be weeks or even months before you develop an active infection. So we have enough time after a bite to immunize with normal vaccine and bring up the immune system."
That means five doses of vaccine, over the course of 28 days, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If there's also an obvious bite, doctors will clean the wound and apply rabies antibody serum to the site. The antibodies are basically the key part of a lock-and-key system that tells your immune system to destroy anything the key fits. The idea is that antibodies will help destroy most of the virus at the site of entry, while the vaccine will train your body to knock out any strays it finds elsewhere. The CDC also recommends a shot of antibodies, separate from the vaccine, even if there is no obvious bite.
This one-two punch is almost 100% effective, provided you get it in time. How fast is "in time"? Nobody really knows. The CDC says that, as long as a bite victim isn't yet symptomatic, they should get the prophylaxis. Dr. Fu said that the window of opportunity can vary in length, depending on how close the bite is to the person's central nervous system. Without post-exposure prophylaxis, rabies is fatal. By the time symptoms--fever, confusion, partial paralysis, difficulty swallowing--appear, it's too late. There's not much doctors can do after that, because they aren't even sure what the virus is doing to you.
"We don't know how rabies kills people. There are some unproven hypotheses, but that's it," Dr. Fu said. "One idea is that, once the infection reaches the neurons in the brain, it blocks the transmission of messages from the brain to the rest of the body. If that's the case, it could explain many of the phenomenon we see in humans and animals, such as end-stage paralysis. That could even be why humans die, because of paralysis of muscles in the heart and lungs."
Given the lack of information and the risk of death, it's not surprising that even a situation like mine, where a bite was extremely unlikely, ended with a referral to a nearby hospital for post-exposure prophylaxis. But, after several conversations between the emergency room doctor and the Minnesota state rabies hotline, I ended up not getting it. Turns out, sneak-attack bites don't really happen to wide-awake, sober, cognitively normal adults in the middle of the day. The chance that I or my husband were actually bitten by the bat before the cats set upon it was so small that, on the advice of medical professionals, we decided that it wasn't worth the pain, potential side-effects, or cost of treatment.
That's right. I am my own death panel.
But on the off-chance that I do come down with symptoms—there've been cases of rabies incubating for up to a year—is there really no hope? Well, sort of. Maybe. Ish. Researchers have been experimenting with a treatment that they think could save the lives of people with full-blown rabies. Called the Milwaukee Protocol, it involves putting the patient into a coma and also giving them antiviral medication. The idea is that the human immune system—with some help from antivirals—can fight off a rabies infection, while the coma limits damage to the brain that seems to be a common cause of rabies death. In 2004, a teenage girl who received this treatment became the first person—ever—to survive symptomatic rabies without having received the vaccine either before being bitten, or before symptoms appeared.
The problem: We still don't know whether the Milwaukee Protocol actually works. It's been tried—and failed—at least 13 times since 2004, according to a 2009 paper published in the journal Current Infectious Disease Reports. There are two reported successes, but in one of those the patient received the vaccine before her she became symptomatic. The other success is very recent and there aren't many details available yet.
So why did the first girl survive? Again, nobody knows. It's possible that either she had a particularly hardcore immune system, or the variant of the virus she contracted was particularly weak, or both. When she was diagnosed, she had rabies antibodies in her cerebral spinal fluid—something that would indicate the presence of rabies in her brain—but doctors weren't able to isolate any actual virus—suggesting that her body was already on its way to winning the fight before the Milwaukee Protocol was used.
Unfortunately, any effort to really conquer rabies may be hampered by the fact that the vaccine works so well, Dr. Fu said.
"Treatments haven't been successful because we don't know what it's doing in the brain," he said. "We need more research but, usually, once you have a good vaccine the funding for the research goes away."
But my problem is that promising people unlimited coverage -- everybody gets all the very latest, most expensive, unlimited health coverage -- is a lie. I'm all for universal health care, but it has to be reasonable. The cost must match benefits.
I remember being driven crazy in British Columbia back in the early 1970s when there was a family with a child with hydrocephaly, blindness, cerebral palsy, and mental retardation. He had undergone a number of brain operations. The prognosis was bleak, i.e. no improvement and just a long series of "more operations". So the parents said "enough, let him die". The child services of British Columbia stepped in and demanded that millions more be spent in operations on the kid. There was a big court case. I don't remember the outcome, but I was horrified. I kept thinking of how many kids could have thrived if they had gotten just a tiny bit of that money to solve a problem. But once it was given away, these other kids were being told "no". A health system that would go to court to force health care in a hopeless case when the money could be spent effectively elsewhere is completely irrational.
The amount of dollars in a system is limited. You have to be sensible. You can't gold plate everything. Ted Kennedy's speech implies gold plate, i.e. everybody gets the best possible health insurance!
That is a lie. That can't be afforded. Real health care systems with universal coverage make decisions about cost versus benefit (which is what the parents of that child did) and decide at some point "no more". It is better to spend the money to buy the best results. That can be dressed up as "death panels" but the reality is that homeless people quietly die in the streets of the US right now because they can't afford health care. Don't kid yourselves.
The most egregious case of people pretending to high moral judgements was the comparison between the Right to Life fanatics in the streets demanding that a brain dead woman in Florida, Terri Schiavo, be kept "alive" because "life is too precious". At the same time, a woman in Texas who was very much alive and conscious had run out of money and the hospital sued to "pull the plug" on her because she couldn't pay her bills. This is the case of Tirhas Habtegiris, an Eritrean immigrant with cancer and on life support. She wanted to live long enough to have her mother at her bedside. But the hospital sued and won to cut off the life support -- and let her strangle, fully conscious, strange to death -- because she couldn't pay. No "Right To Life" people were out in the streets of Texas protesting this. Nope.
Tirhas was dark skinned while Terri was white. I guess God loves the white skinned people more than the dark. At least that is the message I got from "Right To Life". And I also got the message -- loud and clear -- that the "Right To Life" people thought that having a brain dead person's life support being pulled was more "painful" than having a fully conscious person having the plug pulled and struggling for breath and dying fully aware that they were being "shut down" by a hospital that wanted payment. But I guess God also believes that if you can't afford your hospital fees, then it really isn't killing you to pull the plug and let you strangle while fully conscious.
God obviously believes -- and "Right To Life" certainly does -- that if you are white, middle class, and have insurance but are brain dead and don't know if you are plugged in or not, it would be cruel to unplug you even though you couldn't possibly notice because there is no you still alive in that brain dead body. Crazy!
What I find most obscene about the "health care debate" in the United States is the lying that both sides are doing. People need to know the truth. There are no "death panels" but there is no "unlimited health insurance". There is real costs in extending health care to everybody but there are real savings in removing a lot of the bureaucratic overhead of the insurance companies and the games they play to offload needy patients. There is need for an honest discussion. Groups that claim to "preciousness of life" need to be called out for their callous disregard for the poor dying daily in the US because they can't afford even simple, cost-effective health care. Those like Ted Kennedy who are selling gold plated dreams need to be called out because there will never be a system that gives everybody unlimited coverage.
Walter Cronkite has died. I remember his as the iconic evening news "anchor".
I didn't realize that he was for world government. So I was surprised to run across this in his Wikipedia page:
He was also a proponent of centralized world government, writing fund-raising letters for the World Federalist Association (now Citizens for Global Solutions). In accepting the 1999 Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at the ceremony at the United Nations, Cronkite said:
"It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order. But the American colonies did it once and brought forth one of the most nearly perfect unions the world has ever seen."
I admire that. This is a sign of his intellectual honesty. He didn't follow any "party line" and didn't cut his views to fit some fashion. He told people facts as he saw them. I'm especially proud of the fact that he came out against the Vietnam war on February 27, 1968:
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
I believe this helped Eugene McCarthy's campaign and surprise challenge in New Hampshire which forced Johnson to call off his campaign. Sadly Johnson wouldn't let the American people pick their own candidate. He foisted Hubert Humphrey, the grinning goon, on the American people and ensured Nixon's election. A tragedy. But Cronkite had his heart in the right place.
If Johnson had taken Cronkite's advice, some 30,000 US troops would have lived and not died, a couple hundred thousand US troops wouldn't have been wounded saving Nixon's face, and a million Vietnamese and half a million Cambodians would not have been killed so that no US president would have to say that he "lost" a war. Sad. Cronkite gave good advice, he told the news honestly. I don't believe those days will come back until there is fundamental change, not the "change we can believe" silliness that Obama is now selling, but real change that removes the dead hand of corporate power and sold-out politics from the levers of power in Washington.
Cronkite represents the "can do" attitude Americans had as they went into WWII and saved the world from fascism. He was the face of the country at the high tide of optimism. Sadly he presided over the slide into the abyss as the people's expectation of change were destroyed by Southern racism that blocked change at every turn, race riots broke out in cities under the heavy hand of racist cops, by the military-industrial complex that Eisenhauer warned of which got a choke hold on the Congress, by the internal fight over Vietnam that culminated in the State using militia to kill unarmed students demonstrating against the war in Kent State, by the cultural wars that let rabid right wing crazies take control in the wake of the idealistic Sixties and replace that with anti-abortion marches, anti-gay hate speech, family "values" as practiced by politicians and preachers who spend more time with hookers than their own wives, and all the other sleaze of modern "spin" politics that Karl Rove perfected.
An era has passed.
Update 2009jul18: Cronkite anchored during a brutal, terrible time in the US: assassinations, riots, police murders, militia firing on its own people, corrupt politicians, racist and sexist elites beating down people. Here is one such moment...
Tellingly, his [Cronkite's] most celebrated and significant moment -- Greg Mitchell says "this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million" -- was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn't trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false. In other words, Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do -- directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.
I absolutely love Mary Roach's books. This book is another winner. She turns what could be dry and boring into fun, humourous, intelligent, and insightful reading. You may not walk away with a grand theory, but you do gain lots of interesting facts and a deeper appreciation for the subject matter.
This isn't a book for the religious. She makes that clear in the introduction:
The crumbling walls of Jericho. Jesus walking atop stormy seas with palms upturned. The raising of Lazarus -- depicted in my mother's Bible as a sort of Boris Karloff knockoff, wrapped in mummy's rags and rising stiffly from the waist. I could not believe these things had happened, because another god, the god who wore lab glasses and know how to use a slide rule, wanted to know how, scientifically speaking these things could be possible. Faith did not take, because science kept putting it on the spot. ... Was Lazarus a simple case of premature entombment? I wasn't sayhing these didn't happen. I was just saying I'd feel better with some proof.
Of course, science doesn't dependably deliver trusts. It is as fallible as the men and women who undertake it. Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change that answer should additional data become available. ...
Flawed as it is, science remains the most solid god I've got. And so I decided to turn to it, to see what it had to say on the topic of life after death.
