The New American Civil War and the New American Nomadism

Michael Vlahos was the first academic to publicly raise the question of whether the United States of America was heading into what he termed a new civil war. I can't recall when he first discussed the question on John Batchelor's radio show, where he has been a regular commenter for several years, but it was at least three or maybe four years ago. In any case, at the time his observations sounded preposterous, at least to me, and I confess to smirking when he told John he was teaching a class at Johns Hopkins University to explore the question.

That was then. The many headlines about civil unrest in the USA during the past year make the prospect of a civil war less preposterous, or at least a more popular subject for discussion. On February 19 Michael appeared on John's show to discuss his latest blog post, Show Trial: Bellows of Civil War - "Strongarm political theater stokes the fires scorching our constitutional order." (Audioboom podcast JBS Show: Part 1 and Part 2 ). The show trial he's referring to, actually two of them, are the impeachment trials of Donald Trump.

I should add that Michael and John are not predicting the outbreak of a civil war, they've been asking whether one could occur in the relatively near term. But they've been asking at such length and in such detail, with references to the actual civil war in the USA, it's obvious they believe there is a clear danger of another American secessionist war in the not too distant future.

Below are the notes at Audioboom on the Batchelor-Vlahos discussion, although I recommend that you also listen to the podcast. Following the notes I'll relate my thoughts on the civil-war question.

(The term 'show trial' relates specifically to the infamous courtroom 'trials' in the Soviet Union, which weren't trials as we understand them in a democracy. The accused had already been found guilty by the prosecutor and appeared in court only for the charges to be read out and the sentence handed down.)  

Michael E Vlahos: @JHUWorldCrisis; Johns Hopkins; in re: Are we in a civil war? Looking for road signs.

The escalation becomes obvious only after violence starts. One indication is the show trial of the president at the beginning of the pandemic; then a second show trial ending with a not guilty verdict in the Senate in February 2021.

A show trial is part of the narrative that, here, the Democrats seek to establish. Blue [Democrat] and red [Republican], global and national, urban and rural.

The Speaker of the House announces a commission to investigate 6 Jan events. Why? The new president [Biden] had said, “Enough about Donald Trump.”

Strategy of persecution/inquisitions of red; now charged with being potentially criminal. In operatic terms, the show trial of February is the basis for creating a criminal case against red, being called an evil, terrorist element [by] blue-controlled media. Leading to an emplacement of an anti-red pogram, institutional stance by the dominant agencies of law enforcement.

Donald Trump was the bridge, is now left behind.

Salon.com: “Now the Republicans are the party of terrorism.” This commission, like the 9/11 Commission, which provided impetus for the War on Terror, and all of that stripped away civil liberties and protection for Americans; the Patriot Act.

Blue’s goal is to put aside the electoral factor that’ll keep them in power, instead create a dispensation from outside politics to criminalize red. Will criminalize the popular dimensions of red. GOP [such as Romney]: You can be rump Republicans, Vichy collaborators. The others will be “terrorists.”

Blue will then be in total control.

HR 1: bill that’ll upend electoral politics by creating a system inherently and forever going to wire outcomes in any election for blue; doing this via shenanigans to allow blue to dominate for the next several generations.

Anyone will be able to vote with no oversight or control. Reminiscent of 1860s [U.S. Civil War era].

https://www.anewcivilwar.com/post/show-trial-bellows-of-civil-war

[END NOTES]

My view is that they didn't have the NSA in Abraham Lincoln's time. They didn't have the WTO either. Nor did they have large pensions for retired American military personnel, if they had pensions at all in those days, as well as other benefits of being enlisted in the military in today's USA.

Which is to say I believe there is no chance there will be another secessionist war in the United States. Any attempt at secession would be nipped in the bud, and without a shot fired.

All it would take is the tactics used by the Democratic Party to portray the Republican Party as the party of terrorists in the wake of the January 6 incursion by Trumpians into Washington's Capitol building -- tactics which relied heavily on a compliant media and a badly informed public audience.

Add to this the machinations of tacticians in the U.S. defense and intelligence fields should any real threat of secession emerge. By the time those characters were finished fooling around with the nation's head, Americans would be too confused and fragmented in their views to get up a serious secession movement, let alone die fighting for it.

This doesn't rule out chatter about secession, but we have seen how well counter-chatter works in today's USA. Five minutes after the chatter starts, the counter-chatterers are busy at their laptops.

There is, however, an appreciable challenge to the United States holding together even without threat of secession. The challenge is rooted in the dissolution of a class of Americans who form the backbone of this country -- people who had always worked hard in the attempt to keep up a middle-income existence. Significant numbers of these Americans, many of them finding they were too broke to retire, were forced into a nomad-like existence by the Great Recession and now they're being joined by refugees from the Great Pandemic.

They're living in tents, motorized trailers, and RVs and working low-paying jobs where they can find them. In the process they have forged a community of people helping others survive the rigors of nomadism in the 21st Century.

Now, a 2020 film about the nomads has been released in the USA -- Nomadland -- to plaudits from the movie biz and the mainstream media. (See Time Magazine's laudatory February 15 report, "What to Know About Nomadland and the Real-Life Community Behind the Movie."

This new nomadism has been unstructured -- it's still a stretch to call it a 'movement' -- which is one reason the nomad community has been growing for years under the media radar. Another reason it's been ignored for so long by the media is that it's not political. It's just many Americans from different backgrounds and political persuasions coming to the same conclusion about the futility of trying to keep up a traditional middle-class existence while carrying a crushing debt burden, or finding themselves crushed by it with no job, no savings left, and no house.

As American nomadism becomes more structured, you may trust the Democratic and Republican parties and the federal government won't take it lying down. And they will be prodded to action by businesses and banks that depend on Americans trying to keep up their house mortgages. So there will be all kinds of attempts to co-opt nomadism, some of them relatively benign as with commercializing the lifestyle, and some scary.

So where to now for nomadism? The answer depends on many factors, but I think an important one is that the movement converges with others -- the survivalists, the ever-increasing number of Americans fleeing the cities, back-to-nature 'green' advocates, and Americans pushing back against the huge amount of U.S. land that the federal government controls.

But I think at the top of the list is the large number of Americans who are now completely disenchanted with politics. The entire structure of American society in this era is formed by politics, to the point where the sense of community has been supplanted by it. I think many Americans are rebelling against this inhuman state of affairs.

What they've lacked is action paths -- ways to reconnect with each other without politics. The new nomadism offers one such path, and can provide inspiration for other paths. This will be a pioneering effort, but America was settled by pioneers.

About the photographs in this post

The first one is from a Daily Mail report headlined, "A THIRD of Americans walk around in a zombie-like concussion daze because of a lack of sleep and stress, new study of college athletes finds."

Only a third? They need to expand the study.

The second photo is a scene from Nomadland.

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Another gift of Covid as slowly sanity dawns in the medical profession

Hooray for Betsy Morris and the WSJ Life & Arts Section! 

Now, just wait until mainstream medicine discovers people need lots of sunlight without sunblock lotions to maintain health.

And note the only time many young city people spend in the sunlight is when they're staging political protests in parks. Is this flight to the outdoors an unconscious drive for better health?  I'm not sure I'm joking. 

For Better Health During the Pandemic, Is Two Hours Outdoors the New 10,000 Steps?

By Betsy Morris

February 14, 2021

The Wall Street Journal

[Emphasis and notes throughout are mine. BTW you can also listen to this article. See the WSJ page for the link.]

The physical and mental damage inflicted by Covid has doctors, researchers and others racing to tap into nature’s therapeutic effects

Will two hours in the park become the next 10,000 steps?

As people spend more time indoors, a mountain of scientific research says spending time in nature is critical to health and increases longevity. That means being in fresh air, under trees and away from cars and concrete—on a regular basis. And, no, the Peloton doesn’t count.

“There’s an urgent need emerging in science and at the gut level to increase the nature experience. This field is just exploding,” says Gretchen Daily, a professor of environmental science at Stanford University.

The benefits have been clear to scientists for some time, but the pandemic has made the matter more urgent. The physical and emotional toll the virus has taken, especially in urban areas with little green space, has galvanized doctors, researchers and others to tap into nature’s therapeutic effects.

Spending time in the woods—a practice the Japanese call “forest bathing”—is strongly linked to lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones and decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue.

Scientists have repeatedly found that human anticancer natural killer cells significantly increase after walks in a forest. In one such study, published in 2010 in the Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents, the number and activity of killer cells increased in a group of twelve healthy men after two walks, each two hours long, in a one-day trip to a forest park in the Tokyo suburbs. So did anti-cancer proteins, according to the research led by Qing Li, an associate professor at the Nippon Medical School. Cortisol in the blood and adrenaline in the urine significantly decreased. The effects lasted at least seven days, the researchers found.

Time in a forest is linked to decreased inflammation, which has been implicated in chronic disease.  [Note: And, increasingly, Covid]

“People are deciding whether or not this type of coffee bean or that type is better for you, when there is such an obvious health tool at your disposal. You literally just walk outside. People don’t know,” says Jared Hanley, co-founder and CEO of NatureQuant, a startup working on an app for users to track the time they spend in nature much like they count steps.

A study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports in 2019 found the 20,000 participants were significantly more likely to report good health and well-being when they spent 120 minutes or more in nature a week. The good vibe peaked at 200 to 300 minutes a week. Anything less than two hours didn’t make a difference.

There still is a lot researchers don’t know, like how physiologically nature influences health. They are racing to find answers by scanning brains, quizzing people to see how cognition is affected by different environments and planting a full-grown forest in a schoolyard to learn how much and what type of tree canopy is needed to curb air pollution and alleviate asthma. [Note: LOL]

Pediatricians at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, Calif., have been so concerned about the lack of nature in their urban patients’ lives that they write prescriptions for it. Every year, “we ask: Do they have access to outdoors and green spaces? If no, they automatically get a referral to our program,” says Nooshin Razani. One Saturday a month “we invite them to nature outings with us,” she says. In clinical trials, Dr. Razani found that every park visit decreased parents’ stress and increased children’s resilience.

Kaiser Permanente and retailer REI are plugging forest bathing. Engineers are quantifying the health benefits of green space using satellite temperature maps, geographic mapping systems, pollution and census data and even Lidar, the remote sensing technology in self-driving cars.

NatureQuant has devised a tool that scores locations—down to the residential address—from “Nature Deficient” to “Nature Rich” based on surrounding natural elements that correlate with good health.

Many people know intuitively that nature is good for you—but still don’t spend that much time in it. The average adult spent 11 and a half hours a day consuming media in 2019, according to Nielsen. 

Note:  The average time looking at computer screens had increased to 13 hours a day by March 2020]

In 2019, half of 18- to 29-year-olds surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they were online almost constantly. A 2017 survey for the federal wildlife and park agencies found it “increasingly normal to spend little time outside.”

Gretchen Daily, at Stanford, thought it would take “a really immersive experience” in nature to produce a significant benefit. As research, she assigned 45-minute walks to each of two groups. One group walked through the hills, the other down a busy, but still tree-lined thoroughfare. “I was shocked,” she says. On a series of cognitive tests afterward, “there was a massive difference. It’s not like they were in Yosemite or the wilderness,” she says, but the hill walkers performed dramatically better. Bottom line, she says: “A 45-minute walk in nature can make a world of difference to mood, creativity, the ability to use your working memory.”

Natural Capital Project, a global partnership she founded, is about to launch a software tool that maps the return on investment in nature, including the health benefits of green space.

Brent Bucknum, founder of the Hyphae Design Laboratory in Oakland, Calif., along with other scientists is studying the biophysics of vegetation in neighborhoods in Louisville, Ky., to test urban greening the way a new pharmaceutical would be tested. In one case, he is measuring the direct impact on residents’ health—asthma, heart disease, dementia—before and after planting 8,000 trees. Data from satellites and drones isn’t reliable enough to measure it or establish a causal relationship. The research is meticulous and “epically expensive,” he says. He, too, plans to launch a company with his findings.

“It’s great to simplify things for people but we see the problem as a much more complex web of components,” he says. Very small environmental fluctuations from one backyard to another can result in big differences to the health of people who live there. Such rigorous research takes time, though. Now there is more public interest in nature and health than scientists can keep up with, he says, and “I think we should leverage that.”

Write to Betsy Morris at betsy.morris@wsj.com

[END REPORT]

Keep the Masses at each others' throats

 

After months excusing violence, now they're upset about the breach of the Capitol Building

 "There's been a complete collapse of equality before the law."

."... a completely bifurcated system whereby the less law that applies to one group, the more micro-regulations applied to another."

-- Mark Steyn points up the hypocrisy during his talk with Tucker Carlson last night:  

"The U.S. finds itself in a peculiar situation in which it can neither win nor lose its wars".

What is a "just" war in this era of drones and long-range missiles, when one side can fight without taking any risk whatsoever?  In the December 21 issue of the New Yorker, Anand Gopal, as assistant research professor at the University of Arizona, raises many questions and struggles more for perspective than answers in "America's War on Syrian Civilians" (titled "Clean Hands" in the print version). 

An important read that challenges the reader to think hard about a kind of warfighting that can be perfectly legal by the accepted rules of war but also unjust.

One caveat -- The Russian and Syrian armies would label as propaganda Gopal's characterization of the air-bombing of Aleppo. One thing is certain: so much propaganda has been generated by the Natoist/American side about the Syrian War that it will be many years more before independent investigators can establish the truth of what happened in Aleppo. 

But Gopal is looking at a very big picture and so his mention, almost in passing, of Aleppo does not detract from the sincerity and worth of his allover observations. Here, a few excerpts from his writing:

     [...]

What is the purpose of this war? Should it be fought, and, if so, fought differently? These are conversations that neither the military nor human-rights organizations appear interested in having.

[...]

 ... the focus on legality may have lulled us into a comfort with war itself. Human-rights groups have found the U.S. guilty of dozens of war crimes in Afghanistan, but most American killing has been lawful: a housewife wandering too close to a convoy, a farmer gunned down on faulty assumptions, a family made victim to the rule of proportionality.

Americans seem to become exercised about the miseries of combat only when the rules are flagrantly violated; as long as they are not, a war quietly slides into the background—even into a permanent state of being. If the Afghan war continued for another twenty years, it’s doubtful whether it would arouse much domestic opposition, even though the over-all suffering may be as great as a wanton slaughter that ended in a decisive victory. The U.S. cannot carry out such a slaughter without violating the law and provoking widespread opposition, and so the conflict remains at a perpetual low boil. The U.S. finds itself in a peculiar situation in which it can neither win nor lose its wars.

[...]

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Putin's grim economic prognosis for 2021

But he had kind words for President Trump's efforts to restore the US economy and thus, keep the world economy afloat in the Covid Era.  Only time will tell how correct Putin is about 2021.  Also see Sputnik's report today Greenback at Risk? Dollar Loses Crown as World's Payments Currency for First Time Since 2013

Putin Tells G20 World Faces Economic Crisis ["probably" ] Not Seen Since Great Depression

November 21, 2020

Sputnik News International 

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the G20 summit [conducted online because of Covid] on Saturday that the world is facing a major economic crisis this year that can be comparable to the Great Depression.

"The scale of the challenges that humanity faces in 2020 is truly unprecedented. The coronavirus epidemic, global lockdown and freezing of economic activity have triggered a systemic economic crisis that the modern world has probably not known since the Great Depression," Putin said.

The Russian president also praised the contribution of the United States to the world economic recovery.

"US President [Donald Trump] just spoke about the efforts of the United States, indeed, this is a very big contribution to the restoration of the US economy and, therefore, to the restoration of the world economy," Putin said.

Putin added that mass unemployment and poverty remain major issues for the world.

"The main risk, of course, remains … despite some positive signals, the main risk will still remain massive long-term, so-called stagnant mass unemployment. With the subsequent growth of poverty and social disorder," Putin said.

 Devaluation of national currencies during the global COVID-19 pandemic is a major risk, especially for low-income countries, the Russian President added.

"Their fiscal revenues have decreased significantly, and the need to allocate significant funds to fight the pandemic is growing almost every day. A major risk is posed by the devaluation of national currencies and, accordingly, an increase in the cost of servicing public debt - primarily for low-income countries, where two-thirds of loans are in dollars," Putin said.

The Russian President also has urged G20 members to abandon protectionism and sanctions. 

"We must aim to contain protectionism, the practice of imposing sanctions unilaterally and to mend supply chains," he said.

On Measures to Prevent Further Rise of Inequality Amid Pandemic

Putin called on the participants in the G20 summit in Riyadh to take additional steps to prevent the deterioration of the debt crisis in developing countries, as well as an increase in economic and social inequality amid the coronavirus pandemic.

During his address, Putin noted the considerable assistance provided by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to developing countries in these conditions. The president recalled that in April, at their suggestion, the G20 decided to establish a temporary moratorium on debt payments.

"This is, of course, a highly demanded initiative. However, it applies only to the poorest countries and does not include their debts to private lenders, affecting less than 4 percent of the total cost of servicing the debt of developing countries this year. I think additional measures are needed to prevent the worsening of the situation and growth of economic and social inequality," he said.

On Access to COVID-19 Vaccines 

"Russia supports the key project considered by the current summit, which aims to make efficient and safe vaccines accessible for everyone. There is no doubt that immunizing drugs should be common public property. And our country, Russia, of course, is ready to provide the vaccines developed by our scientists to those in need," Putin said.

The president added that competition among pharmaceutical companies is inevitable, but there will be enough work for everyone, as the scale of the pandemic obliges countries to use their potential to provide COVID-19 vaccines to the global population.

On WTO Reform

There is no alternative to the World Trade Organization (WTO) today, but changes are needed in light of contemporary global challenges, Putin said.

"In general, the G20 should continue to search for common approaches to reforming the World Trade Organisation in accordance with contemporary challenges," Putin said.

 he Russian president added that this goal will not be achieved without a stable, efficient and multilateral trading system based on universal norms and principles.

"And there is no alternative to the World Trade Organisation today," Putin added.

[END REPORT]

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The right way to investigate the U.S. Global War on Terror.

Matthew Duss, writing for Foreign Affairs on October 22, lays out his case for establishing a commission to investigate the sins of America over the course of the Global War on Terror and recommend remedial actions so that America never does anything like GWOT ever again. (U.S. Foreign Policy Never Recovered From the War on Terror: "Only a Reckoning With the Disastrous Legacy of 9/11 Can Heal the United States.")

The catch is that to follow what he wants of a GWOT commission is like following a description of Russiagate, which maybe five Americans can understand (I'm not one of the five), or the Tale of Benghazi, which is so confusing that the public (those 5 or 10 still game for solving the mystery) is still trying to figure out what happened that fateful night, and why. 

So many tangled tales have arisen since 9/11 that it's the tangles, not any specific situations, which hallmark not only the long war but also all the major incidents of the early part of this century. Indeed the best description for this era is Red Herring.

A commission of the kind Matthew Duss envisions would only add to the tangle, with the entire enterprise collapsing in a tangle of counter-accusations.

A simpler way to approach the problem would be to look at the genesis of U.S. military actions that eventually got lumped in with GWOT but at the start had virtually nothing to do with it.  Libya and Syria fill the bill. Straighten out the story of those 'wars,' then use that as a lens to study U.S. actions across the spectrum of GWOT.

To get the ball rolling across the mounds of red herring, I recommend Libya, the Obama Administration, and the Muslim Brotherhood (Part 1) and  Libya, the Obama Administration, and the Muslim Brotherhood (Part 2) by Vincent Amoroso for The Best of Africa.  

Note the date of publication -- January 2020.  Yes, this year. The basic story has been known for a long time to interested members of public but it took an awful lot of work and patience to fit the pieces together in a way that wasn't hopelessly confusing to a general reader. Often it would be years before an intelligence agency would cough up a bit of the story, to be fit with other bits.  

Yet when it's all said and done, when all the pieces finally drop, we will be staring not at the United States of America but at a logo.

 

Then it will come clear that to really understand the madness involved in the Global War on Terror, it is the U.S. prosecution of the Cold War that must first be investigated by a American commission.

That, dear reader, will never happen.  

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Houthi Common Sense: "If we are funded by Iran, please, bomb Iran."

Leader of the Ansarallah Movement, Muhammad Ali Al-Houthi

  

Pundita editorial comment: Hear! Hear! 

"Settle your issues with Iran, leave Yemen out": Houthi to Saudi Arabia and US
October 7, 2020
AMN

BEIRUT, LEBANON (10:20 A.M.) – The leader of the Ansarallah Movement, Muhammad Ali Al-Houthi, called on Saudi Arabia and the United States to “settle their accounts” with Iran, instead of targeting the Yemenis.

Houthi said in an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel:

"Saudi Arabia operates in the Arabian Peninsula as an American state that submits to Trump. The American president fixes the price that Saudi Arabia pays. The United States gives directions.

“We are not a terrorist group and fundamentally we do not recognize this term. The United States attaches the sign of terrorists to those who oppose its policies. Even the demonstrators on American streets have been described as terrorists by Trump. I ask myself why is this happening now? What is the red threat that we passed?"

Houthi continued, in response to a question about Western intelligence reports about the increasing use of Iranian missiles and drones by the Houthis:

“Why are Saudi Arabia and the United States fighting a war against us? On the pretext of our support from Iran? If we are funded by Iran, please, bomb Iran, the financing party. No, slaughter the Yemenis!"

This is exactly what we said to the Saudis and the Americans. If you have accounts with the Iranians, then settle them with the Iranians,” he added.

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia has led the Arab coalition, which has been waging intense military operations in Yemen in support of the Yemeni government loyal to President Abd Rubbah Mansour Hadi."

[END REPORT]

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Rosy the Raccoon analyzes 2020 US presidential campaign

Thanks, Sputnik for catching her hard at work.

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Wasting food is a custom in modern China. Changing the custom won't be painless.

From Xi Declares War on Food Waste, and China Races to Tighten Its Belt; The New York Times, published August 21, updated September 17:

[...]

Mr. Xi’s “clean plate” campaign strikes at the heart of dining culture in China. Custom dictates that ordering extra dishes and leaving food behind are ways to demonstrate generosity toward one’s relatives, clients, business partners and important guests.

Such habits have contributed to an estimated 17 million to 18 million tons of food being discarded annually, an amount that could feed 30 million to 50 million people for a year, according to a study by the Chinese Academy of Science and the World Wildlife Fund.

Mr. Xi’s call is as much a warning against the dangers of profligacy as it is a reflection of the generational shift in values that has emerged as living standards rise.

[...]

Many among the country’s younger generation, such as Samantha Pan, a 21-year-old student in Guangzhou, embrace being free from having to worry about saving food for a rainy day, and hold little regard for the state’s moral exhortations.

“This type of initiative is very boring and useless,” Ms. Pan said in a telephone interview. “I am entitled to order as much food as I want. If I just happen to love wasting food, it’s still my freedom.”

[...] 

As we can see from Ms Pan's ringing defense of her freedom to waste food, not all of China is racing to tighten its belt. Yet China is now facing severe food insecurity, as detailed by the updated Times report and one from The Hill, Another famine coming? China struggles to meet basic food demands.

As with so many other kinds of crises that have arisen in this young century, the only viable course of action is for individuals to change their thinking. 

Change or die; that's what the crystal ball is telling me. 

********

  

 

 

Should India stay with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?

 Well, here is my opinion of Beijing:

"Bite by bite, China has been eating away at Indian borderlands." The quote is from an Indian security expert published today in The New York Times report, Shots Fired Along India-China Border for First Time in Years.  Brahma Chellaney is right as far as it goes but the Chinese haven't only been taking bites from the 'borderlands.'  For years they got so little pushback from the China-huggers bought-off Indians in Delhi they moved ever more openly into Ladakh. They went so far that finally Delhi woke up and took action. Then the Chinese got nasty. And here we are today.  

The Chinese have shown their true colors so many times during the past 20 years that any government is a fool to join a security organization with "Shanghai" in the name -- unless it's so desperate for Chinese financial aid it's willing to endure being shanghaied by smiling backstabbers. India doesn't and shouldn't need to endure being stabbed in the back.  

As to whether India should be turning to the United States for help in dealing with the Chinese, well, here is my opinion of Washington:

Substitute "land" for "lady" in the lyrics, and there is America, the British Empire wannabe, to a T.  These days you have to be crazy to join any American 'coalition of the willing' 

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Human response to Covid virus

Farmer in Amazon fighting

 forest fire with sprinkler can

 
Photo : CARL DE SOUZA/AFP

Photo at Sputnik's This week in pictures, August 15-21.  

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I can tell you in one sentence what's wrong with America. But then you'd have to understand the sentence.

What's wrong is that when statistical data interpretation rules societies, disaster results. That's the truth, the whole truth about what's wrong with today's USA; everything else is blither spewed by superficial thinkers.

The fastest way to understand what I've told you is to gather your attention and plow through a lengthy, tortured article by Gwynn Guilford,, who spent six years in China researching their economy and trying to explain it for hedge funds. In her 2018 writing for Quartz, The epic mistake about manufacturing that’s cost Americans millions of jobs, she sets out to explain the thinking that led a majority of economists to misinterpret the statistics they used to interpret the American manufacturing sector. To call what they did a mistake, even an epic one, hardly conveys the disaster that resulted.

Here are a few passages from the writing:

... Manufacturers’ embrace of automation was supposedly a good thing. Sure, some factory workers lost their jobs. But increased productivity boosted living standards, and as manufacturing work vanished, new jobs in construction and other services took its place. This was more of a shift than a loss, explained Bradford DeLong, economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

So when Trump won the presidential election, the true-blue data believers dismissed his victory as the triumph of rhetoric over fact. His supporters had succumbed to a nativist tale with cartoon villains like “cheating China” and a shadowy cabal of Rust Belt-razing “globalists.”

But it turns out that Trump’s story of US manufacturing decline was much closer to being right than the story of technological progress being spun in Washington, New York, and Cambridge.

Thanks to a painstaking analysis by a handful of economists, it’s become clear that the data that underpin the dominant narrative—or more precisely, the way most economists interpreted the data—were way off-base. Foreign competition, not automation, was behind the stunning loss in factory jobs. And that means America’s manufacturing sector is in far worse shape than the media, politicians, and even most academics realize.

Here I'll skip over several paragraphs to get to this part:

In other words, the method statisticians use to account for these advances can make it seem like US firms are producing and selling more computers than they actually are. And when the computers data are aggregated with the other subsectors, the adjustment makes it seem like the whole of American manufacturing is churning out more goods than it actually is.

Misreading the manufacturing statistics

It’s this adjustment that is the crux of economists’ misinterpretation of the health of manufacturing. There’s nothing wrong with accounting for product quality. But most economists and policymakers have failed to take into account how adjusting for quality improvements in a relatively small subsector skews the manufacturing output data.

[...]

Later in the writing Guilford observes:

Two decades of ill-founded policymaking radically restructured the US economy, and reshuffled the social order too. The America that resulted is more unequal and more polarized than it’s been in decades, if not nearly a century.

In effect, US policymakers put diplomacy before industrial development at home, offering the massive American consumer market as a carrot to encourage other countries to open up their economies to multinational investment. Then, thanks to the popular narrative that automation was responsible for job losses in manufacturing, American leaders tended to dismiss the threat of foreign competition to a thriving manufacturing industry and minimize its importance to the overall health of the US economy.

[...] 

Guilford stays away from the larger inference, but the tortured tale she unravels speaks for itself. We -- the American society as a whole, not only economists -- have reached a stage where we are simply overwhelmed by our attempts to interpret the shifting and changing statistics we wring from masses of collected data.  

We are in over our heads. The awful state of American society reflects this.     

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Japanese scream jar

Soundproof jar you can scream into to let off stress.  From a list of 101 products only available in Japan. I also like the soundproof karaoke machine, which lets you sing into a funnel microphone without anyone else hearing you.   

I've only looked at 20 products so far but there are probably more can't-live-without Japanese inventions on the list.   

Product descriptions with pix, year of invention, and price in USD at Investing.com.  

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Has Dr Ron Paul been branded a Russian agent yet?

 

Dr Ron Paul turned 85 years old today. He is a great American, a very loyal American, but by a curious logic just about every loyal American you can name these days who advises against mindless U.S. wars and meddling has been labeled a Russian agent. Such is the state of America's defense/foreign policy establishment and the media, here and abroad, that backs up the establishment.

Protesting the label is no use; there is no defense against the accusation. Whether you know it or not, you're a Russian influence agent even if you aren't on the Kremlin's payroll if you argue against, say, American actions in Syria, which Dr Paul most certainly has done. And God Forbid if you've ever been interviewed by Russia's RT, which Dr Paul has. Any American who speaks to RT or writes an opinion column for them is ipso facto a Russian influence agent. You might not think you work for the Russians but that just goes to show how much they have duped you.  

From Wikipedia's article about Dr Paul (not to be confused with his son, U.S. Senator Rand Paul):

Ronald Ernest Paul (born August 20, 1935) is an American author, physician, retired politician, and presidential candidate who served as the U.S. Representative for Texas's 22nd congressional district from 1976 to 1977 and again from 1979 to 1985, and for Texas's 14th congressional district from 1997 to 2013. On three occasions, he sought the presidency of the United States: as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988 and as a candidate in the Republican primaries of 2008 and 2012. A self-described "constitutionalist", Paul is a critic of the federal government's fiscal policies, especially the existence of the Federal Reserve and the tax policy, as well as the military–industrial complex, the war on drugs, and the war on terror. He has also been a vocal critic of mass surveillance policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the NSA surveillance programs. He was the first chairman of the conservative PAC Citizens for a Sound Economy, a free-market group focused on limited government, and has been characterized as the "intellectual godfather" of the Tea Party movement, a fiscally conservative political movement that is largely against most matters of interventionism. 

Paul served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force from 1963 to 1968, and worked as an obstetrician-gynecologist from the 1960s to the 1980s. [...]

I can't say I agree with every one of his political positions because I'm not familiar with every one of them, but I hope that the above is enough to convey why I admire Dr Paul. 

So, from one Russian dupe to another (since the start of the Russian intervention in Syria I've probably quoted RT more than any other blogger) happy birthday, sir, and I pray for your long life and good health.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/

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Guess what? Our bones think and network. That's not all the news about bones.

“The idea that bone is just a simple organ that’s separated from everything else as a mineralised tissue and doesn’t communicate – that’s changed.”

I stumbled across the following article while researching calcium supplements. The discoveries written about have been around for some time but this is the first I'm learning about them.  All I can say is wow, and thank The Guardian and the reporter, a health journalist and former neuroscientist. And ponder that sometimes a failed experiment leads to a vast leap in knowledge.

Does the key to anti-ageing lie in our bones?
By David Cox
July 4, 2020
The Guardian

Osteocalcin, a hormone produced in the bones, could one day provide treatments for age-related issues such as muscle and memory loss

Gérard Karsenty was a young scientist trying to make a name for himself in the early 1990s when he first stumbled upon a finding that would go on to transform our understanding of bone, and the role it plays in our body.

Karsenty had become interested in osteocalcin, one of the most abundant proteins in bone. He suspected that it played a crucial role in bone remodelling – the process by which our bones continuously remove and create new tissue – which enables us to grow during childhood and adolescence, and also recover from injuries.

Intending to study this, he conducted a genetic knockout experiment, removing the gene responsible for osteocalcin from mice. However to his dismay, his mutant mice did not appear to have any obvious bone defects at all. “For him, it was initially a total failure,” says Mathieu Ferron, a former colleague of Karsenty who now heads a research lab studying bone biology at IRCM in Montreal. “In those days it was super-expensive to do modification in the mouse genome.”

But then Karsenty noticed something unexpected. While their bones had developed normally, the mice appeared to be both noticeably fat and cognitively impaired.

“Mice that don’t have osteocalcin have increased circulating glucose, and they tend to look a bit stupid,” says Ferron. “It may sound silly to say this, but they don’t learn very well, they appear kind of depressed. But it took Karsenty and his team some time to understand how a protein in bone could be affecting these functions. They were initially a bit surprised and terrified as it didn’t really make any sense to them.”

Almost 15 years later, Karsenty would publish the first of a series of landmark papers that would revolutionise our perspective on bone and the skeleton in general. We used to view our skeleton as primarily a mechanical structure whose main role is to serve as a scaffold for the rest of the body. But our bones are very much live organs, which we now believe play a role in regulating a whole range of vital bodily processes ranging from memory to appetite, muscle health, fertility, metabolism and many others.

“The idea that bone is just a simple organ that’s separated from everything else as a mineralised tissue, and that doesn’t communicate – that’s changed,” says Thomas Clemens, professor of orthopaedic surgery at the Johns Hopkins Center for Musculoskeletal Research. “Karsenty has ushered in the idea that bone is involved in communicating with other tissues in the body that wasn’t really understood or investigated before."

We now know that bones communicate by participating in a network of signals to other organs through producing their own hormones, proteins that circulate in the blood. Karsenty’s mice eventually led him to realise that osteocalcin was in fact one such hormone, and understanding its links to regulating so many of these functions could have future implications in terms of public health interventions.

“The idea that bone could produce a hormone affecting metabolism or even your liver initially came as a bit of a shock,” says Ferron. “People did not expect that. But other scientists have since replicated the results, and even discovered new hormones also produced by bones. It’s opened up a completely new field in bone research.”

Reversing age-related decline

As we age, all of us inevitably lose bone. Research shows that humans reach peak bone mass in their 20s; from then onwards, it is a slow decline that can eventually lead to frailty and diseases such as osteoporosis in old age.

Over the past decade, new findings have suggested that this reduction in bone mass may also be linked to the weakening of muscles – referred to in medical terms as sarcopenia – as well as the memory and cognitive problems that many of us experience as we grow older. This appears to be connected to the levels of osteocalcin in the blood, through its role as a “master regulator”, influencing many other hormonal processes in the body.

“Osteocalcin acts in muscle to increase the ability to produce ATP, the fuel that allows us to exercise,” says Karsenty. “In the brain, it regulates the secretion of most neurotransmitters that are needed to have memory. The circulating levels of osteocalcin declines in humans around mid-life, which is roughly the time when these physiological functions, such as memory and the ability to exercise, begin to decline.”

But intriguingly in recent years, Karsenty has conducted a series of experiments in which he has shown that by increasing the levels of osteocalcin in older mice through injections, you can actually reverse many of these age-related ailments.

“Osteocalcin seems to be able to reverse manifestations of ageing in the brain and in muscle,” he says. “What is remarkable is that if you give osteocalcin to old mice, you restore memory and you restore the ability to exercise to the levels seen in a young mouse. That makes it potentially extremely attractive from a medical point of view."

Scientists have also found that for humans, one way of naturally maintaining the levels of this hormone in the blood, even as we age, is through exercise, something that makes intuitive sense, as physical activity has long been known to have anti-ageing properties. Ferron is hoping that these findings can be used to support public health messages regarding the importance of staying active through middle age and later life.

“If you exercise regularly, then it stimulates your bone to make more osteocalcin, and that will have these beneficial effects on muscle and brain,” he says. “From epidemiological studies, we know that people who are very active tend to have less of a cognitive decline with age than sedentary people. With time, maybe people will be more aware of this connection, and think of their bone health as being just as important as other aspects of staying healthy.”

Ongoing research in this area also suggests that exercising more during the teenage years and early adulthood can continue to have a protective effect on bone and other aspects of health much later in life.

“I think this could reinforce the message that it’s important for people to be active during adolescence and early adult years,” Ferron says. “This means they reach a higher peak bone mass, which will protect them from age-related problems linked to osteocalcin decline.”

Utilising bone hormones to develop new drugs

Osteocalcin is not the only bone hormone to have caught the attention of scientists, however. At the Mayo Clinic, Sundeep Khosla has been studying a hormone called DPP4, which is made by cells on the outer layers of bone, called osteoclasts, and appears to play a role in how bone regulates blood sugar.

Khosla is particularly interested in this hormone because the drug denosumab – which is clinically prescribed to osteoporosis patients to try and slow down the rate of bone loss – seems to have a positive effect on DPP4 as well. In a study of osteoporosis patients taking denosumab published earlier this year, he noticed that those also suffering from diabetes experienced an improvement in their symptoms.

“This shows that maybe this drug can treat both osteoporosis and diabetes at the same time,” says Khosla. “We’re now looking to follow up on these observations and test this through a randomised control trial."

However, osteocalcin, with its potential to prevent many aspects of age-related decline, remains the major topic of interest in bone research. Given that so many people ignore public health guidelines regarding exercise – in 2017, the British Heart Foundation reported that around 20 million adults in the UK are insufficiently active – Karsenty is working on a means of artificially increasing the levels of osteocalcin in the blood and has even filed a patent on using it to treat cognitive disorders.

“This is not easy, but what we are hoping to do is to deliver osteocalcin perhaps through developing a molecule which regulates osteocalcin,” he says. “We’re exploring various ways of doing this, but the idea would be eventually to have something which could be used to treat age-related diseases such as sarcopenia and memory decline. This is really going to profit the elderly the most, but anyone with a decline in muscle function, because of a hip fracture or another condition, could also benefit from this treatment.

Ferron says that such a treatment would differ from current medications designed to improve bone health in osteoporosis, as they only work by blocking bone loss. A drug targeting osteocalcin would aim to achieve wider health benefits through stimulating bone gain.

However, there are still plenty of hurdles to overcome. For example, simply injecting a form of osteocalcin is unlikely to be sufficient to achieve a therapeutic benefit in humans.

“Treatments like that tend to be more costly and more difficult as protein injections don’t have a very long half life,” says Ferron. “My lab is developing a stabilised form of osteocalcin so it can stay longer in the body, but the best solution would be to have some sort of small pharmacological molecules that could be put in a pill to target the receptor of osteocalcin to stimulate its activity. So that’s the idea I see for the future.”

But Karsenty’s findings have also led scientists to ponder a somewhat profound question: how did bones develop the ability to produce hormones such as osteocalcin in the first place?

The scientist himself believes that the answer lies deep in our evolutionary past. “I think that evolution has invented osteocalcin as a survival hormone,” he says. “Because to escape predators, you need your bones to be able to signal to your muscles to run, which is mediated by osteocalcin. To survive, you also need to remember where to find food or where a predator was an hour ago, and such memory processes are regulated by osteocalcin. More and more, we think that it evolved as a hormone to help animals escape danger.”

[END REPORT]

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